Athena Swan Lake: the sororicidal ballet of academic feminism

Political Theory Seminar Series

Lecture

Dr Lorna Finlayson (King's College Cambridge) issues a warning about current attempts to increase the participation of women in academia - and in philosophy and political theory in particular - and asks how, as feminists, we might do better.

In the last few years, there has been a growing awareness of some of the problems facing women in academia - not least among which is the fact that they are often absent: e.g. among the humanities, philosophy has a particularly low proportion of women professionals - the numbers tailing off steeply the higher you look in terms of rank or seniority or prestige.

From a feminist point of view, a growing awareness of the problem is surely something to be welcomed. And the credit belongs, in substantial part, to a number of fairly eminent academics who have striven to raise the profiles of women and to draw attention to the particular problems they face in academia.

Concerns about prominent initiatives

Dr Lorna Finlayson raises some serious concerns about the form which the most prominent initiatives have taken:

• the approach currently prevalent is overly concentrated within the framework of individual psychology, at the expense of systematic attention to the social causes and interests underlying women's oppression and exclusion
• this approach assumes an uncritically affirmative attitude towards academic disciplines and institutions – giving rise to a ‘double exclusion’ of those women who do not or cannot share this attitude, and who end up rejected first by the patriarchal academic establishment and then again by a variety of 'establishment feminism'
• these features are bound up with an under-examined difficulty facing women in academia, supported by mounting anecdotal evidence: the incongruous hostility of certain women academics towards junior female colleagues and students

The danger that liberation movements end up being absorbed into the very structures and practices they are meant to oppose, or end up mimicking those structures and practices, is sadly familiar. 

About the lecturer

Dr Lorna Finlayson is Junior Research Fellow at King's College London (Political Philosophy). She works on political philosophy and its 'methodology', with a particular interest in theories of ideology.

Registration

Please register by sending an email to: Luara Ferracioli, l.l.ferracioli@uva.nl. 

Published by  AISSR