MAPPING FEMINISM: A BRIEF ESSAY AND COMPARISON OF THE FORMS OF FEMINISMS ON THE ROAD

Résumé

Any academic, who places themselves within the prolific field of interdisciplinary research, faces the drama of having to eventually narrow down their career path to fit into canonical departmental structures. Similarly, the bureaucracies of daily intellectual work have an impact on social movements often creating barriers and jargons that can become unrealistic to the community it seeks to serve. Such is the case of feminism in academia. Dozens of articles testify to the difficult communication that exists between thinking feminism and trying to apply its ideals into the machinery of daily life. In this essay, I will attempt a comparison between different forms of feminisms in a diversity of contexts and cultures. Its main argument is that feminism, understood as a major form whereby people seek to bridge the gap created by gender inequality, escapes the very jargons that define it and by which it has been intensely reassessed, ultimately gaining form in social actions that very often had no contact with feminist intellectual roots.