The importance of being “modern” and foreign : feminist scholarship and the epistemic status of nations

Feminist scholars have for long analyzed and denounced the hegemony of Western, Anglophone countries in global academic exchanges. They have shown showing that it produces asymmetrical patterns of traveling of theories and of recognition of authors and institutions, which tend to privilege scholarship from countries of the center and limit the visibility and impact of work produced in semi-peripheral or peripheral regions. These debates have persuasively demonstrated that such asymmetries in the epistemic status and influence of nations impose heavy losses and constraints for women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS). However, by focusing primarily on loss and constraint they have neglected a large and significant dimension: the ways in which these hegemonies also produce gains and opportunities for WGFS in (semi-)peripheral contexts. Indeed, one of the strategies that many WGFS scholars from these contexts deploy when attempting to legitimate WGFS in their academic communities is to highlight that WGFS is institutionally recognized in those countries that are considered to produce the best knowledge. This article contributes to a broader and more nuanced ‘understanding of the true complexity of the power relations within [WGFS] in a global era’ (Cerwonka, in “Signs”, 2008, 811) by analyzing precisely those gains and opportunities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary ethnographic study in a semi-peripheral context (Portugal), it examines how feminist scholars invoke the figure(s) of the ‘modern foreign’ as a truth-point and authorizing signature that can strengthen the credibility of their knowledge claims and the persuasiveness of their demands for resources for WGFS. It will also discuss how government and university representatives use WGFS as a symbol of the modernity of a nation/institution. I show that looking both at what gets silenced through global academic hierarchies, and what becomes speakable because of them, raises complicated questions about power and about feminist scholars’ complex entanglements in broader epistemic and political negotiations of the status of nations