Gender studies: A 'cheeky knowledge' renormalised?

Abstract

Our contribution investigates the institutionalisation process of gender studies in a Swiss French-speaking university, with a particular focus on its articulation with local social demands. The new academic governance has transformed the debates around such studies in a way that might have been expected to benefit gender studies, whose interdisciplinarity was initially seen as an undeniable advantage. Nevertheless, comparison with the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years in another interdisciplinary field of knowledge, area studies, suggests that the social resistances and new scientific objects offered by women's/ gender studies or area studies tend to be diluted under the joint influence of new social demands, fragmentation and globalisation, paving the way for new (?) academic disciplinary definitions that bring back to normal the 'cheeky knowledge' built by these studies.