As academic feminism has critiqued the often-violent inscriptions of institutionality it has
also produced a narrative of its role in the university fraught with difficulties of its own.
The understanding of difference - as an object to be agreed upon and as the foundation for a
diversity model of inclusion - that has emerged as the defining feature of this narrative has
also come to serve as the suture point between feminism and the university a site of presumed
resistance to institutionality. Engaging in a close reading of the literature on the current
state of academic feminism as well as a variety of bureaucratic organizational and scholarly
texts on the US university Danielle Bouchard draws from contemporary political philosophy
postcolonial and women of color feminisms and poststructuralist social theory in order to
examine feminism's relationship to what has become one of the central missions of the US
university: the management of difference. Proposing that the possibility of imagining
alternative university formations rests on a difference that cannot be fully accounted for Dr.
Bouchard understands feminism as a community of disagreement a formation that resists
political resolution and interpretive closure.
