Suture and Scars: Evidencing the Struggles of Academic Feminism

Our personal experiences as emerging scholars1 shape the contours of this chapter. What began as a conversation many years ago over a cup of coffee has become a deeper reflection, channeling the various opinions and feelings of our graduate cohort,2 and presented here as a first iteration that attempts to make sense of these shared experiences. The validity afforded to drawing from our ‘personal experience’ has itself long informed feminist modes of meaning-making: we have learned to value the personal as political, to find our voice, to enunciate, and also to acknowledge the limitations of our point of view. Because an important part of our training as feminist scholars has been to locate relations of power, this reflection has meant locating ourselves within a complex network of agents, to willfully complicate, rather than reduce the complexities of, the issues with which we are confronted. The feminist struggle is ongoing, and at once internal, structural, and institutional.