During a discussion of my first book manuscript with a senior colleague, he informed me that an academic “best-seller” actually sells about 2,000 book copies. I was stunned. All this work and even if I am wildly successful, only 2,000 copies will circulate in the world? My colleague intended, I suppose, to humble me. Even more, it threw me into doubt (how could I have gotten so far and still be so naive?), and I continue to wonder many years later, why do we all work so hard to gain such a small audience? Now that academic journals are online, we can calculate the number of hits or downloads for each article. The results are disheartening for any of us who want our research to have an impact outside our academic discipline or subfield, let alone an impact on political life. Why do we labor over journal articles that will be read by so few people? (Of course, I am aware that the number of readers is a dubious measure for “evidence of impact.” Yet I have seen the sales ranking of books on Amazon.com and the tally of citations netted by a publication appear in promotion files many times as measures of “impact on the field.” Full disclosure: my Amazon sales ranking at the time of this writing is 287,537.)

Instead of quitting right then and there, I fantasized about getting a copy of my book to the RIGHT PERSON (Subcomandante Marcos, Ice-T, and Marion Wright Edelman were contenders), someone with power, someone with an audience, someone who could carry through the political implications of my research to the front lines. Then I would remember the old saw about The Prince being delivered to Lorenzo de' Medici at the same time as a pair of purebred dogs. I also fantasized about writing in another genre (a pornographic novel, a sitcom, a poem, or maybe radio) to reach a wider audience and deliver the same message. Of course, I did not have the talent and all my political science training had beaten the life, if not the purpose, out of my prose. I tempted cynicism, wondering if there was anyone among us writing such radical and threatening material that only academic freedom kept the censors at bay. Academic freedom sometimes feels more like a taunt than a luxury. In reality, I kept plugging away at political science and conjured up innumerable fantasies to propel me through further drafts of my manuscript. How could one's faith that research contributes much toward anything at all become so unstable and yet remain intact?

The answer, I suspect, lies close to the origins of this brief essay, to the question of whether or not feminist research means much politically and to the ways that we criticize ourselves and one another for being too, or too little, activist. One of the things that academics do best, from the moment we enter graduate school right on up through to the end of our careers, is to wring our hands over the question of whether we are too, or too little, activist. Even the naive among us is adept at all the arguments for and against activism, on the one side, and for and against science (what we used to call objectivity), on the other. That is the lesson of our “scope and methods” seminars, whether in political science or in women's studies. Among all the activities that we do as political science faculty—gatekeep and promote the discipline of political science, teach, write, research, administer, review, convene—one mainstay is to trouble the line between research and activism. We are pressed to articulate the political implications of our research by our allies as well as our enemies.

For all that, it is not necessarily our research that is most troubled at the present moment. At the University of Massachusetts, for example, it is not our research but our “service” that is scrutinized and judged as either professional or political during our annual faculty reviews. Good citizenship, like attending PTA meetings or political conventions, does not achieve merit in the area of “service.” Administrative work at the university, research centers, professional associations and journals does count. The “service” in contention takes place in nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, social service, and myriad other places. Is it political or professional? We cannot seem to reach agreement or clarity. But research is readily counted as such by virtue of its publication in academic journals and by university presses. That is to say, it is research by virtue of having an academic audience. For the moment, some of us easily work activism directly into our research by studying social and political movements so that we can participate. Others of us more indirectly seek to shout “women” or “gender” loudly in our research as a way to insist upon attention to inequality and injustice. Only to hear the echo of our insistence: “What about race?! What about class?! What about sexuality?!”

Feminist research, to be sure, speaks to bodies of literature rather than to bodies of women. Feminists writ large, in other words, are not typically the intended audience of feminist research or else that research is unlikely to succeed in professional terms. Graduate students who fail on their comprehensive examinations are told that they have not mastered a body of literature or embedded (in the most contemporary sense of the word) their own claims in the claims of others. When feminist researchers do attempt to speak to bodies of women, we are often chastised by them for using incomprehensible “jargon,” for the arrogance of our claims to knowledge which are exclusive (merely academic) at best and elitist at worst. Just as often, feminist researchers chastise one another for failing to unite their research with political activism, for being caught up in their professions rather than in politics. This is also true more generally of political science and other disciplines as well. Among other things, the Perestroika list-serve is a vehicle for political scientists to chastise themselves and one another for being too, or too little, activist, for being too specialized, irrelevant, and obtuse, and for playing at science. And political scientists in the United States have long wavered between chastising the public for being too apathetic, ignorant of their own interests, or pleading with them to act and to reason. (Think of feminist research that puzzles over the battered woman who returns time and again to her batterer and asks how she might be empowered.)

A cynic might say that it is our careerism and professionalism that deadens our manuscripts. We sell out to get tenure. But I suspect it is the fantasy of power, of making a contribution and having an impact that chastens us, not the dream of a cushy job with tenure or the snobby (if a little shabby) elitism cultivated by the tenured. This perennial critique of ourselves and one another for being too, or too little, activist is what gives us faith that the discipline will get better, its faculty more diverse, that we will discover the right method, the right theory, and come up with the right analytical vocabularies, to make the world a better place. Then we will have power. Why else would feminist researchers get out of bed in the morning? Like my own, I suspect the faith that our labors will make the world a better place is both unstable and intact in others as well. In our earnest desire to make a contribution to something as grandiose as global justice, feminist political scientists must relegate power to our fantasy lives because we are so keenly aware that we have so little. That awareness is gained, often along with heavy doses of frustration and resentment, in both our political activity and in our professional work. Those of us who organize, sit through endless meetings, protest, and militate against injustice in our off-hours have the experience of powerlessness, but that does not stop us. And few of us would confuse headlining at a political science convention with political power. To bemoan too, or too little, activism or to frown over a lack of objectivity is to displace critical reflection upon what we are already doing, the action that we are undertaking in gender research.

Rather like repeating the repressive hypothesis, maybe chastising ourselves and one another for being too, or too little, activist is inexorably linked to the success and progress of our disciplines. If we want to transform a discipline, then, rather than assure its success and progress by chastising ourselves for what we do not do (like contribute to activism by publishing research), we could resist the temptation and ask instead, what does our discipline do? What does gender research do? Instead of asking what we should do, we could ask what is it that we are already doing? Posing the question this way is our best shot at finding an answer that does not simply recover what we are always already doing, but one that could reveal new possibilities.

If power is to be more than a fantasy, we must follow through on at least two generations of feminist insight into how and where power is put into effect in our intimate lives, in work, social and cultural formations, the state, in our claims to knowledge, and yes, in political relations. That is to say, we might stop dreaming about the awesome and fantastic kind of power that achieves things like global justice and refocus upon the more protean and disciplinary kinds of power that establish and sustain relations of difference even in our own research. That is the kind of power that sets the condition of possibility for occupying, counting, aggregating, troubling, transforming, and analyzing “gender” (all without a policy or a law in place to sustain it). Feminist research chases down power in macrostructures, microstructures, individual psychology, original positions, policy, and language games. Occasionally we scrutinize power in our own efforts to make sense of things.

For example, what is it that “gender” allows us to be, do, think, hear, and say that “sex” would not admit? Everywhere around us—in the media, conversation, as well as the classroom—it is starting to sound impolite and kind of old-fashioned to say “sex” in sentences where “gender” might fit. Just yesterday, it may have been politically incorrect to say sex when one could say gender, but today it just dates the speaker. Even the political right has stopped guffawing at the sound of gender to some extent and jumped into the language game begun by second-wave feminism. There is no longer much of an outside to gender discourse, and that in itself is one of the most remarkable (and possibly dangerous) instances of the kind of power that gender research puts into effect. Women's Studies programs and departments are starting to change their names to Gender Studies. So where does that leave feminist research? Where does that push sex and sexuality? Are we caught up in a language game, a discourse, one in which we are making the rules, but one in which we are also obligated to play by the rules?

In my ideal world of gender research, the sometimes blithe substitution of “gender” for “sex” is replaced by ears closely attuned to the political effects of what is displaced and produced by the adoption of feminism's neologism. As is well known, “gender” was a grammatical term recently (although my students do not seem to understand just how recently) adapted by feminism to name what were referred to as “secondary sex characteristics” and the non-necessary or politically transformable inequalities pinned upon sex difference. “Gender” gave name to our surprise at just how fungible sex really is and gave voice to our certainty that sex difference need not consign women to inequality with men. Gender is upheld by political (social, cultural, state, economic, intimate) relations more so than by nature. The parenthetical levels of analysis just stated are now all more or less equally entitled to the mantle “political.” That gentle stretching of disciplinary boundaries has not yet achieved the kind of transformation of disciplinary boundaries that many feminists once hoped for but, still we believe, is one that should be.

The story of my own shock (and my naïveté) at the discovery of how small my intended audience would be is still one in my arsenal of stock stories that I share with talented undergraduates asking about graduate school, whose motivations are political rather than scholastic. Although scholastic work may well be important, it is not important to very many people. Knowledge and power do not walk hand in hand, no matter how educated, smart, or talented we are, no matter how clever the argument or how profound the evidence. What vaults a book like The Bell Curve (1996) onto the best-seller list? The short answer must be power, and so it is that knowledge is never innocent of power and never in control of power, even the kind gleaned by gender research. As Jane Flax wrote over a decade ago, “It is simply not necessarily the case (especially in politics) that appeals to truth move people to action, much less to justice” (1992, 458). I am not saying that if what we want is power, we should go out and get it. And I am not saying that we should abandon the ambition to make a contribution to justice. Meanwhile, inquiry into where gender sits within, and how it helps to produce, the boundaries between politics and knowledge is a subject for further study. Instead of giving up on power, we should stop criticizing ourselves for being too, or too little, activist and get on to examine the ways that we discipline ourselves and gender research.