Crises of Legitimacy and Espitemes and the Institutionalisation of Gender Studies in the Academia

Résumé

 “The legitimate renunciation of a certain style of causality perhaps does not give one the right to renounce all etiological demands.” Alice A. Jardine uses this quote from Jacques Derrida as an epigraph with which she starts her third the chapter of her book entitled Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1995). In what follows I shall try to deliver the results of a short research into the reasons why gender studies came to the forefront of the interdisciplinary research known as cultural studies in these recent years. Many researchers have already tried to explain the recent interest into the causes that led to the rise of academic interest in gender studies. Some of them claim that it is a logical conclusion to the spread of capitalism. Others like Jardine in the third chapter of the book mentioned above have related them to scientific progress. I would argue that unless this issue is placed within the context of a series of crises in legitimacy that have marked history since the English Enlightenment starting with the Glorious Revolution, we shall both fail to grasp both the origin of the present interest in gender studies across the world, and the resistance and negotiation which each and every time have marked the invention of new cultural norms and new types of knowledge to regulate gender relations.