Gender and Women’s Studies: Situated Academic Marginalization
Gender and Women’s Studies: Situated Academic Marginalization

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to discuss the situation of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) graduate programs within mainstream academia of Turkey with a critical Feminist Standpoint Theory approach from the aspect of situated academic marginalization. Within the scope of the study, I carried out 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews with GWS academics from two distinct universities with similar historical backgrounds yet quite different specificities, and in the light of these interviews, I analyzed whether GWS, as an academic reciprocity of feminist movement, can be thought as a field with a twofold epistemic superiority with regard to “better accounts of social reality”, as an ‘other’ of academia or not. In this regard, four main factors influencing GWS directly and deeply are found to be, respectively: socio-political situation which the programs were born into, current political conjuncture of the country, current situation of academia and of feminist movement within the country. In addition to these structural factors, self-definitions and self-valuations of the agents of the programs– from students to academics-, and curricula formed in parallel to the mission and vision the agents adopted appear to be significant factors that situate the programs within academia within the scope of subjects and specificities of the subjects.

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