TALKING FEMINIST INSTITUTIONS
Interviews with leading European scholars
by Eniko Magyari-Vincze

Through this book the author speaks about political relations within and outside the academia. She affirms the authority and responsibility of feminism to deal critically with the power regimes inherent to the discursive and social practices that shape our thinking and acting, both in everyday life, and in scientific production.

This is a book about scholars talking on the academic institutionalisation of feminism. It is meant to prove that feminist institutions as texts are talking about the larger academic and social-political environment. It is a place of dialogue between dialogues, initiated by an Eastern European scholar talking to representatives of (Western) feminist institutions. Eventually, it is a personal way of talking with the "other", while referring to "us", i.e. of considering the need of feminism in the (Romanian) academia in the light of several (institutional and personal) experiences across borders.

The volume consists of a forward on travelling across Western academic feminism and an epilogue on the need for feminist studies in Romania, of introductory and concluding remarks on the interpretation of the interviews, and of the interviews with scholars from The Netherlands and from Great Britain, structured in three chapters.
Chapter one: Feminist Studies - What Difference Does it Make?
Women's Studies as a Politics of Difference (Rosi BRAIDOTTI)
Centering on Gender Equality Worldwide (Barbara EINHORN)
On the Bridge Between Science and Policy Making (Mieke VERLOO)
Organizing Across Disciplinary Boundaries (Carol KEDWARD)
Chapter two: Producing Feminist Knowledge
Gendering Politics (Joyce OUTSHOORN)
The Construction of Scientific Knowledge - A Feminist View (Ineke KLINGE)
The Cross-Cultural Understanding of Reproduction (Maya UNNITHAN)
Empowering Information (Lin McDEWITT-PUGH)
Chapter three: Spaces of Inclusion
New Deconstructivist Projects: Masculinity and Gay Studies (Stefan DUDINK)
Widening Education Towards the Margins (Gerry HOLLOWAY)
Re-Approaching Multiculturalism (Marjolein VERBOOM)

Altogether the interviews talk about an imagined community, which transcends national, disciplinary, sexual, generational, social boundaries and is shaped by debates and internal diversity, and also by shared experiences and a sense of consensus. They confess that feminist institutions are not only places where knowledge is produced, but also ways of making a difference and causing change in every aspect of the unjust (academic, but not only) order. Or, more precisely, they are the medium where the actors create another knowledge about knowledge, or another thinking about scientific thinking, or other subject position for knowledge producers. That knowledge, that way of thinking, and that subject position are centred on the recognition of the social embeddedness of science, including the awareness of the gendered assumptions and consequences of sciencing as an instrument of empowerment and subordination.

The book might be ordered at <eni_personal@yahoo.com>