Reflecting on writing in academia:

the feminist turn

Abstract

 In the intersection of cultural criticism and gender studies, Sylvia Molloy (2002) proposes re-reading the Latin American cultural text by articulating both a reflection on gender and a re-flexion in the sense of detour. This re-flexion would allow us to perform striking (llamativas) readings, in the double sense of scandalous and questioning, able to crack established

interpretations. Based on this idea, I aim to inquire not into the readings, but into the writings we produce from feminist academic literary criticism. To this end, I analyze publications from an Argentine academic journal of gender studies, Zona Franca, published in the dossier “Feminist Traces: Writings, Images, and Archives” (2020). I trace striking discursive operations in the texts that indicate a shift in the way knowledge is written and argue that this is not a whim, but that the use of these striking forms of writing is grounded in the valuable contributions of feminist epistemologies to scientific practice. In the article, I detail how detours in academic writing correspond with the idea of situated knowledges or embodied knowledge, with the need to weave an intellectual feminist genealogy and make women’s authorship visible in academia, with the possibility of a nomadic thought that confronts dualistic and phallocentric visions, and with the critique of linguistic androcentrism.