©2002 NWSA J OURNAL , VOL. 14 NO. 2 (SUMMER) Academic Feminism Against Itself ROBYN WIEGMAN This article focuses on the often-lamented distinction between Women’s Studies as an academic entity and feminism as a social movement. Whereas many feminist scholars urge us to return to social movement to counter the forces of institutionalization, I question the assumption that the political future of Women’s Studies as a field can be guaranteed by repairing the distinction between academic institutionalization and feminism as a world changing social force. Indeed, I worry more about the implications for Women’s Studies of refusing altogether the distinc- tion between the academy and activism than about the difficulty of repairing the distinction between them. Keywords: academic feminism / activism / institutionalization / theory In the early seventies, feminism in the U.S. academy was less an orga- nized entity than a set of practices: an ensemble of courses listed on bulletin boards and often taught for free by faculty and community leaders. Positioned outside and against both disciplines and institutional economies, academic feminism was a renegade knowledge, one whose illegitimacy demonstrated the movement’s central political claim con- cerning women’s oppression and systemic exclusion. 1 Today, it is surely safe to say, much has changed: general education courses across the coun- try routinely take up issues raised by the study of women and gender, while a familiarity with feminist scholarship has become an established part of doctoral competency in many fields. With expanding majors and a national movement aimed at the development of autonomous Ph.D. degrees, once fledgling programs have become departments, and faculty have been hired and tenured with full-time commitments to Women’s Studies as a field. From this perspective, feminism in general, and Women’s Studies in particular, are doing quite well in the academy. And yet, for the last decade there has been an increasing uneasiness among many feminist scholars, sometimes overt despair, over the future of academic femi- nism. This despair has been expressed in casual conversation, among teachers who lamented that the new generation of students found their way to feminism through academics and not politics; among activists who viewed feminism’s incorporation into the university as a betrayal of community; among scholars who found the proliferation of critical theory an abandonment of feminism’s commitment to all women; and among feminists of all kinds who viewed academic professionalization as a depletion of political energy from arenas of greater social concern.