it’s really sad to see how feminism has become a joke in academia. using a feminist approach in your work is rarely taken seriously. a feminist lens is perceived either as trivializing of the work at hand, or as an intentional misunderstanding of it, because you are viewed as some kind of bitter, childish feminist that cannot comprehend the works true meaning through the blinders of your whiny man-hating. perhaps this isn’t the case at all universities, but in my experience as a student i have found that a feminist lens is often seen as a cheap or easy way out of more “productive” analysis. the lens of queer theory, a supposedly a more productive angle, is seen as inherently more intellectual and complex. and yet, i find this approach often complicates (or “queers”) things to an unnecessary extent, often to the point that the analysis seemingly renders the work meaningless—whereas feminism is much more useful for actually drawing conclusions.
I attended a seminar two months ago where a "queer history academic" dismissed women's studies as "studying women as a group in a way that associates women with a passive and victim role", whereas queer studies was presented as "analyzing the way gender and male-female relations are constructed and evolved throughout history", so nowadays it's better to do queer studies than women's studies because the latter are outdated, too militant and not intellectual enough...
Last month I did a presentation saying I was studying a female population and as such I would take on a feminist lens... I was then asked by a PhD candidate "are you sure this is the way you want to go? I think you are dismissing the importance of queer studies. You should address issues like non binary and trans identities in your work"
My work focuses on women in Nazi concentration camps...
I'm in western Europe
