After the department: The aesthetics of feminist thinking within, against, and beyond the academy

Abstract

At a time when gender studies is under attack, including the author's own department, this article engages the aesthetics of inquiry to map where and how feminist thinking takes place outside institutionally sanctioned spaces. The author situates academic writing and research in relation to more recognizably aesthetic scenes of knowledge creation—including maker culture, horticulture, and artisanal publishing. Thinking alongside feminists across these domains, she emphasizes the creative, intellectual, and routinely unrecognized social labor that underwrites inquiry on and off campus. As a sensory-material practice that is personal and political, feminist inquiry both forms and transforms its conditions of possibility. Where do we find feminist inquiry after a department? Foregrounding her own critical-creative process of thinking through her department's elimination, the author refuses the space-time of moving “back” to the traditional disciplines or toward a post-institutional formation, as long as the university continues to exist in some form. Instead, she locates feminist inquiry's politico-aesthetic practice in dynamic work within, against, and beyond academia. To locate feminist inquiry in and as this contradictory geography is to map the at-times beautiful and often far-too-difficult work of feminist knowledge production and reproduction.