SOURCE: Messer-Davidow, Ellen. “Disciplining Women.” In Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse, pp. 19-48. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Messer-Davidow examines the experiences of women within particular academic fields—utilizing essays from Evelyn Fox Keller, Elaine Showalter, Lillian S. Robinson, and Lise Vogel—and asserts that disciplinary discourse itself negates the feminist point of view.

Disciplines are institutionalized formations for organizing schemes of perception, appreciation, and action, and for inculcating them as tools of cognition and communication.

—Timothy Lenoir, “The Discipline of Nature and the Nature of Disciplines” (1993)

Result: … the subjects … “work by themselves” … with the exception of the “bad subjects” who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right “all by themselves.” … They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the...