Which Feminism Counts? Co‐Implication and the Transformation of Epistemic Authority

Calls to decolonize feminist theory and praxis have become increasingly visible across scholarly and activist arenas. Yet a persistent contradiction remains: feminist institutions increasingly invoke epistemic plurality, wheras the infrastructures through which feminist knowledge is funded, reviewed, and circulated often privilege legibility within dominant settings shaped by whiteness, secular‐liberal norms, and institutional respectability. Although feminist scholarship has illuminated mechanisms of epistemic marginalization, including citation politics and decolonial exclusion, less attention has been paid to how they interact through shared feminist infrastructures to shape epistemic authority. We address this gap through co‐implication, which explains how differently positioned actors who participate within these infrastructures can transform feminist difference into unequal epistemic authority. Mapping these processes through four interacting feminist logics—redistributive, recognitional, relational, and reparative—we show how gains within one logic may be contained, converted, or undermined through another as feminist claims are evaluated, funded, translated, and legitimized. Co‐implication therefore explains how organizational practices can widen participation while leaving agenda‐setting and epistemic authority concentrated. Thus, the paper shifts attention from where feminist actors are positioned to what happens to feminist knowledge and authority as they move through institutional infrastructures and organizational practices.