(Un)doing the (im)possible: Feminist institutional histories and the archiving of memories at a center for women’s and gender studies in Germany

This article revisits the history of the Center for the Promotion of Women’s Studies at Freie Universität Berlin through a feminist archival lens. The article argues that the institutionalization of the Center for the Promotion of Women’s Studies and its successor institution – the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies – is best understood as a process structured by persistent tensions. Based on oral history interviews and institutional documents, the authors identify a set of tensions such as those between activism and institutionalization; autonomy and institution; women’s and gender studies, and gender-equality policies; service and research orientation; as well as recognition and precarity. These tensions are conceptualized as constitutive of feminist institutionalization itself, shaping the development of the centre and its capacity to function as a site of feminist knowledge production and institutional memory. The analysis shows that while these tensions impose significant constraints, they also create spaces for experimentation, innovation and feminist agency within the university. Analysing the history of the centre through a feminist archival lens reveals three characteristics central to this process. First, the tensions that structured this feminist institutionalization were present from the outset. Second, the period leading to the centre’s reconstitution shows that this institutionalization did not proceed as a linear process of stabilization or cumulative growth. Third, the establishment of the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies marked a stage of consolidation under changing governance conditions. The case study demonstrates that the institutionalization of feminist and gender-oriented academic structures is best understood as a contested, selective and historically situated process. This process is shaped not only by political struggle, organizational constraints and changing higher-education regimes, but also by the archival and evaluative practices through which universities determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, what is remembered and what is allowed to endure.