First Generation Feminist? Auto-Ethnographic Reflections on Politicisation and Finding a Home within Feminism
Genealogy
Abstract
In spite of the apparent rise in feminism, who gets to know about feminism is still fraught and impartial. How then, do we come to find ‘a home’ in and for feminism when it has been absent from our formative politicisation? How comfortable is that home for working-class academics? In this paper, I reflect on my feminist genealogy—from growing up as a working-class girl in a small Scottish town in an area of deprivation to becoming a first generation feminist academic in a Russell Group University in the UK. This paper builds on the wealth of research exploring the trajectories of working-class women within academia by engaging genealogy research to explore how one develops as a feminist within academia—which can also be a strange place for first generation academics. As an undergraduate coming of age in the ‘post-feminist’ 1990s, access to the language and politics of feminism was beyond my grasp. I came to feminism relatively late in my life and academic career—it was in my doctoral research that I really became engaged academically and as a named political identity. I employ auto-ethnography in this paper and reflect on how our intimate others are always implicated in our own stories. This allows me to highlight how inherited experiences, memories, and embodiments are key. Intergenerational learning can make us implicitly feminist before we learn the formal language of feminism. The stories I choose to tell and ‘memories’ I invoke here are re-crafted and recalled in response to what frustrates me now. That young women are still telling the same stories that I tell here.
Narcofeminism began in 2019 as a rallying principle for women who use drugs to establish links between feminist organising and drug user activism. This article elaborates narcofeminism as a site of feminist resistance to patriarchal orders and modes of rationality. It presents an auto-ethnographic account and examples of drug user activism to explore drug use as a form of resistance to dominant social orders. Woven through this auto-ethnographic account is a discussion of the political imperatives of my experiences as an ‘Othered’ subject. Building on my 2020 piece featured in a flagship book on women, gender and drug policy, it pushes for a recognition of the diverse perspectives of women who use drugs and seeks to bestow more authority to voices with lived experience. It concludes with a discussion of how we might forge empathetic connections between the Feminist Self and Feminist ‘Others’ in our common embodied experiences of marginality, even if separated by context, time and space.
Since 2010 the Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries programme has supported 124 practitioners, recent graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds, at 110 arts organisations across the UK to kick-start their careers. This practice-based review shares four Fellow case studies from the past decade, reflecting on their experiences with the programme and their journeys in the arts since. Reproducing first person accounts gives a visceral and direct insight into the impact policy-driven intervention programmes like the Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries programme can have beyond standard evaluation data.
Through a feminist and critical race analytic, this paper theorizes the disruptions evoked by leaky women—actually doubly leaky women—those whose nipples, peri-menopausal uterus’ and mouths have “leaked” in ways that rupture/stain/expose the white-patriarchal-capitalist enclosure of work, home and the streets and then dared to leak again by suing for justice in court. In a closing coda, I address the race/class policing dynamics between she who leaks and the “respectable” [usually white] women recruited to plaster up the hole and cauterize the leaker.
This book offers a contemporary account of what it means to inhabit academia as a privilege, risk, entitlement or a failure. Drawing on international perspectives from a range of academic disciplines, it asks whether feminist spaces can offer freedom or flight from the corporatized and commercialized neoliberal university. How are feminist voices felt, heard, received, silenced, and masked? What is it to be a feminist academic in the neoliberal university? How are expectations, entitlements and burdens felt in inhabiting feminist positions and what of 'bad feeling' or 'unhappiness' amongst feminists? The volume consider these issues from across the career course, including from 'early career' and senior established scholars, as these diverse categories are themselves entangled in academic structures, sentiments and subjectivities; they are solidified in, for example, entry and promotion schemes as well as funding calls, and they ask us to identify in particular stages of 'being' or 'becoming' academic, while arguably denying the possibility of ever arriving. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of Education, Sociology, and Gender Studies.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction; Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad
Chapter 2. Failure to Launch? Feminist Endeavours as a Partial Academic; Heather Shipley
Chapter 3. Feminist Conference Time: Aiming (Not) to Have Been There; Emily F. Henderson
Chapter 4. Navigating the Emotional Landscapes of Academia: Queer Encounters; Yvette Taylor
Chapter 5. China with ‘Foreign Talent’ Characteristics: A ‘Guerrilla’ Autoethnography of Performing ‘Foreign
Talentness’ in a Chinese University; Lauren Ila Misiaszek
Chapter 6. Writing Yourself In? The Price of Playing the (Feminist) Game in the Neoliberal University; Sarah Burton
Chapter 7. Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories; Laura Lovin
Chapter 8. Feel the Fear and Killjoy Anyway: Being a Challenging Feminist Presence in Precarious Academia; Órla
Meadhbh
Chapter 9. Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling; Maddie Breeze
Chapter 10. Gender, Time, and ‘Waiting’ in Everyday Academic Life'; Barbara Read and Lisa Bradley
Chapter 11. A Long Goodbye to the ‘Good Girl’: An auto-ethnographic account; Pat Thomson
Chapter 12. On the Thresholds of Legitimacy: A Collaborative Exploration of Being and Becoming Academic; Susanne
Gannon, Karin MacKay, Sarah Powell and Clare Power
Chapter 13. Crying on Campus; Daphna Hacker
Chapter 14. When Love Becomes Self-Abuse: Gendered Perspectives on Unpaid Labor in Academia Francesca Coin
Chapter 15. Teaching gender in a postfeminist management classroom; Nick Rumens
Chapter 16. Digital Scholars: A Feeling for the Academic Game; Cristina Costa
What is misogyny? And (why) is it still occurring? This book explores the logic of misogyny, conceived in terms of the hostilities women face because they are living in a man’s world, or one that has been until recently. It shows how misogyny may persist in cultures in which its existence is routinely denied-including the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, which are often alleged to be post-patriarchal. Not so, Down Girl argues. Misogyny has rather taken particular forms following the advent of legal equality, obligating women to be moral “givers,” and validating a sense of entitlement among her privileged male counterparts. Many of rape culture’s manifestations are canvassed-from the ubiquitous entreaty “Smile, sweetheart!” to Donald Trump’s boasts of grabbing women by the “pussy,” which came to light during his successful 2016 presidential campaign; from the Isla Vista killings in California to the police officer in Oklahoma who preyed on African American women with criminal records, sexually assaulting them in the knowledge they would have little legal recourse; from the conservative anti-abortion movement to online mobbings of women in public life, deterring the participation therein of all but the most privileged and well-protected. It is argued on this basis that misogyny often takes the form of taking from her what she is (falsely) held to owe him, and preventing her from competing for positions of masculine-coded power and authority. And he, in turn, may be held to owe her little.
Categorical career stages offer an institutional framework through which mobilities can be claimed and contested by feminists in academia. Inhabiting career stages uncritically can serve to reproduce neoliberal academic structures that feminists may seek to resist. Collaboration across career stages is a significant empirical case for understanding how feminists occupy academic space. We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other, analysing the authors’ cross-career collaborations and mentoring relationship in a Scottish University. We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and disrupt the neoliberal temporal logics of competitively achieving individuals on upward career trajectories, where academic arrival can feel permanently deferred. As such we argue for more pluralised and fragmented understandings of ‘career stages’, which as fixed categories work to position academics as either precarious or privileged, and for a messier imaginary of academic work and careers.
Jeannie Wright, author of the 2001 literature review on therapeutic writing, and Claire Williamson, Programme Leader for Metanoia Institute’s MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, dialogue on the questions: How creative does writing have to be in order to be therapeutic? How positivist does research have to be to be counted as research? In answering these questions a partial review of the past and current literature is revealed and suggestions made for moving forward in the field of creative writing for therapeutic purposes.
Underrepresented students are often constructed through deficit discourses and blamed for ‘lowering the bar’ in higher education (Burke, P. J. 2012. The Right to Higher Education: Beyond Widening Participation. Abingdon: Routledge). If a student struggles, then that may be seen as proof of personal deficiencies – proof of her illegitimacy – and not of a system that is built to exclude her. This article explores notions of legitimacy within the university experiences of the daughters of single mothers who are first generation students through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with and reflective writings from 26 undergraduate students in the United Kingdom. The theoretical and conceptual frameworks upon which this study is built include feminist theory, intersectionality theory, and the concept of social exclusion. The findings have implications for pedagogical practices in higher education. Changes should be made to create more equal learning environments not only for this underrepresented group, but also for other student groups who feel illegitimate in higher education.