Decolonizing Academia: Epistemic Gatekeeping and Revisiting “Womanhood” in Global South Studies

ABSTRACT This article theorizes epistemic gatekeeping as a racialized colonial mechanism through which academic authority regulates the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in Global South feminist and postcolonial scholarship. Focusing on Iran, this study argues that methodological nationalism and methodological nationalist feminism construct “Iranian women” as a singular, Persian‐coded subject, thereby naturalizing internal hierarchies of race, language, and region and rendering ethnoracial minority women epistemically unintelligible. Drawing on decolonial accounts of coloniality and the coloniality of gender, together with work on epistemic injustice and resistance, I conceptualize epistemic gatekeeping along three mutually reinforcing dimensions: knowledge producers (who is authorized to theorize), knowledge frames (what counts as “Iran,” “feminism,” and “womanhood”), and knowledge solicitation (whose voices are invited, heard, and validated as theoretical rather than merely experiential). Empirically, the article employs qualitative interviews with Azerbaijani women activists and writers, alongside autoethnographic reflection, to examine feminist organizing in and around the women‐led cultural center El‐Evi in Tabriz. Their practices of translation, memory writing, literary production, and women's libraries constitute forms of epistemic resistance that refuse both Eurocentric and Persian‐centric regimes of knowledge, unsettling nation‐bound and Persian‐dominant constructions of “Iranian womanhood.” The article thus rethinks “womanhood” in Global South studies as a contested, internally stratified category and argues that decolonizing academia requires not simply adding minoritized women to existing archives, but transforming the epistemic architectures through which theory, subjecthood, and legitimacy are defined in the first place.