Cartographies of Knowledge and Power

In this article Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty attempt to establish a series of cartographic rules to develop a syllabi in WGS and LGBTT / queer studies that help us to define how knowledge is produced in the academy, especially in relation to how power is reconfigured in the universities. Likewise, it discusses how professors and academics are teaching transnational feminism. One of the concerns of these authors is that in many of these programs they talk about local feminism, and they don't establish points of contact to broaden the discussion and involve what happens in other countries and other types of feminism. At the same time, we are dealing with how the state exercises control over academic knowledge and the people who impart and receive that knowledge. On the other hand, it is important to pay attention to the speeches that we are elaborating in these programs, the "story" that we are telling, because these speeches work as maps to establish the rules of this knowledge that we want to spread and protect. At the same time we are also building and mobilizing histories and geographies of power. In this way they ask us in what way the curricular stories are also curricular maps. Finally, they propose to make the syllabi a tool to promote the transnational feminism and see this as the new frontier, a space to rethink power and knowledge.

With respect to my research, it seems to me that I can connect this reading with the knowledge that was cultivated in convents through writing and reading. From the XVII century the convents became colleges for the daughters of the nobility and the aristocracy. However, this knowledge was initially controlled by the priests, who monitored what the nuns could and could not read, as well as their writing. In the cloister within their activities the nuns had to practice different types of writings such as letters, diaries, poems and plays, in order to occupy their time. However, the nuns saw through scripture upon request and these practices a way to tell their own story and teach "theology" to other nuns, which was forbidden.

M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, eds, Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, 2010. 23-45