(January 2004): This paper was not always rejected. I was able to present it at a postgraduate seminar at the University of New South Wales in November 1995, and at the Sixth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in Adelaide in April 1996. It was received politely on the whole, with only one or two antagonistic voices at UNSW, and none at the Congress on Women. However, these were forums where no criteria of acceptance or rejection were applied and where all offerings of papers were automatically accepted. In the case of the forums listed on the right – two conferences and three academic feminist journals – submissions were ‘peer-reviewed’ and this paper was found to be unacceptable.

The reasons given for this were many and varied, and not all of them related to the paper’s content – as I frequently point out in my commentaries on the readers’ reports, there was very little comprehension of what I was actually arguing. The conference organisers gave organisational reasons without referring to what the paper said at all. The readers’ reports, on the other hand, did grapple with the content (after a fashion), and in doing so exposed the extent to which the framework I was criticising was deeply embedded in the world-taken-for-granted of academic feminism.

Click here for the full paper.

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Offered to:

The UK Women’s Studies Network conference, Stirling, Scotland (1995). Click here for correspondence.

The Australian Women’s Studies Association conference, Perth, Western Australia (1996). Click here for correspondence.

Womens’ Studies International Forum (1996). Click here for correspondence.

Signs (1997). Click here for correspondence.

Australian Feminist Studies (1998). Click here for correspondence.