Bringing up gender: academic abjection?

The principal questions raised in this article are: what does it mean to bring up the topic of gender in a space where it is not known, and how can this moment of bringing up gender – or not bringing it up – be conceptualised? The article departs from the thoughts and questions that were provoked by an interview conducted with a Gender Studies student as part of a wider study; the personal experiences of the author and the theoretical interrogation of the issue of bringing up gender are also addressed as ‘data’. The approach that I develop builds on and troubles other Social Scientists’ uses of Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980), and constructs a notion of qualitative analysis that uses Kristeva’s conceptualisation of metaphor to relate theory to data. I attempt a use of the theory that accords with the textual representation of abjection in Powers of Horror. During the article, the notion of ‘bringing up gender’ evolves from a question of not knowing how to bring up gender, to not knowing how to bring up the never-knowable that is gender in the context of academic abjection. The aim of the article is to destabilise reflection on how gender ‘knowledge’ is – and can be – brought into relevance.