Introduction: Framing feminist talk

What does it mean to only talk feminist? How do feminist academics effect change? How are feminist voices sounded, heard, received, silenced, and masked? This book aims to provide a contemporary account of what it might mean to ‘only talk feminist’ in the neoliberal university and draws upon qualitative interviews and conversations with feminist academics in Australia, as well as our own individual and shared experiences, to demonstrate the performative and discursive moves feminist academics make in order to be heard and effect change to the gendered status quo in Australian higher education. This opening chapter introduces the paradox of what it means to be a feminist academic and to speak as a feminist in neoliberal times.