‘Door Bitches of Club Feminism’?: Academia and Feminist Competency

Abstract

‘Feminist competency’ is a nascent term that has been identified in three general critiques of contemporary feminism that emerged in the course of research for The Great Feminist Denial (2008), a book on feminist debates in Australia that I co-authored with Monica Dux. The first critique highlights the importance of feminist knowledge, typically generated through the academy, to feminist identification. The second posits a perceived lack of feminist competency as an obstacle to feminist affiliation. The third assessment insists that spokespeople for feminism should be sufficiently competent. Using these responses to feminism as a starting point, combined with a reflection on my own framing as an academic feminist in the public sphere, I make a case for the potential value of ‘feminist competency’ as a means to assess the impact of academic feminism, in Australia and elsewhere.