Gender and cultural criticism: feminism and gender studies as an arachnology and an indiscipline

[Excerto] I want to start this text by sharing some personal and academic information which I believe is relevant in this context. I teach at a Faculty of Human and Social Sciences in a Portuguese University, where the teaching of Feminism and Gender Studies has an important role to play, both as a critical methodology indispensable amongst other recent critical and hermeneutical approaches to the text (be it strictly literary or otherwise visual, i.e., painting, film, performance, etc)., and as a way to anchor literature and globally art in social reality, inviting thus a “situated” engagement with the object of our study. It is not however “easy” to teach Feminist/Gender Studies in most places in the world (as it is not easy to be a feminist), and certainly in Portugal this is still the case...