Gender and Cultural Criticism: Feminism and Gender Studies as an Arachnology and an Indiscipline

By Ana Gabriela Macedo

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. You have to fight for it to feed it in the curricula, you have to be prepared to argue your case when you propose a course, or even a discipline within a course, and it is not easy either to find a willing publisher for a book or a collection on the field.

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