Epistemic wars in academia. The case of gender studies

In the last few years, especially with their progressive institutionalization in universities, gender studies have been subject to attacks launched from within academia and the scientific community. The article explores theoretically the building of boundaries within institutional science and the power dynamics connected to this process. The focus of the analysis is on how institutional science produces hierarchies among and within disciplines. Considering the Italian context from a comparative perspective, the article reflects upon some examples of the delegitimation processes that affect gender studies in Italian academia. These processes take place by opposing rationality and ideology and scientificity/objectivity and politicization, reducing their claims and knowledge to an attack on intellectual and academic freedom. These resistances are linked to the fact that gender studies were born outside institutional science and from marginalized subjects, and that they call into question the epistemological basis and the processes of production of legitimate science, shedding light on the power dynamics connected to it and pursuing emancipatory political goals. The paradoxical effect of this process of boundary-making is that academic critiques converge in the scientific delegitimation of gender studies by the anti-gender movement, ending up by delegitimizing academia and the scientific community themselves.