We Only Talk Feminist Here

Book excerpt: This book explores what it means to ‘only talk feminist here’ in the contemporary neoliberal university. How do feminist academics effect change? How are feminist voices sounded, heard, received, silenced, and masked? We Only Talk Feminist Here offers insight into the complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of ‘talking feminist’; of writing as speaking, problematising notions of voice and agency, of speaking into the silences and the ways in which we fight for and flee to feminist spaces, and of talking back. This book presents new possibilities for framing ‘talking feminist’ differently, by exploring what we say, when we say it, how we say it, and what it means when we do any of these things in terms of our multiple and shifting feminist subjectivities. We Only Talk Feminist Here draws upon interviews and conversations with feminist academics in Australia to demonstrate the performative and discursive moves feminist academics make in order to be heard and effect change to the gendered status quo in Australian higher education.