Trayectorias académicas en los estudios sobre géneros y sexualidades: tensiones entre profesionalización, activismo y experiencia biográfica

Resumo

This study analyzes relations between professionalization, activism, and biographic experience within trajectories of three female scholars of gender and sexuality studies, an area with tradition in the political field outside the university. As a hypothesis, we maintain that analyzing these trajectories allows rebuilding both this area’s institutionalization process and its transformations regarding how social sciences are researched and taught, as well as changes among public, private, and intimate spaces that reconfigure biographies of institutional subjects. In a qualitative strategy, in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of researchers to inquire into their university development, academic insertion, and incorporation into and development in the scientific system. Our interest is to take into account the particularities of a generation that entered the academic system in a context of professionalization that rapidly changed the daily work of Argentinean universities. As part of our conclusions, we claim that the interviewees’ incorporation into this knowledge area encourages them to reread their biographies and politicizes their personal narratives through a specific (type) of knowledge. At the same time, teaching work is re-signified in terms of activism for its chances of intervening in students’ biographies and current pedagogical dynamics. Finally, we claim that this activity is a form of resistance against the current devaluation of knowledge transmission and also against the over-valorization of the circulation of knowledge in peer-review international journals