“You’re International, Not American”: Academic Feminist Autobiographics and the Political Grammar of Nation

Abstract:Over the last fifty years, the field of women’s studies has grown from a few classes created by academic feminist activists into a global intellectual and political movement. Though the field has always been international, historiographies of its institutionalization have largely limited their focus to the Global North, an elision that reinforces unequal power dynamics among countries. This article analyzes the political grammars of nation in two edited collections from the Feminist Press in order to examine how metanarratives about women’s studies have been produced and reinscribed through self-representational writing.