Embodied Interactions: Resisting the Erasure of Embodiment in Discourses of Faculty Labor

• In Event: BodyWorks: (Pre)scriptive Embodiment in Diverse Educational Spaces

Abstract

This paper enacts analytic engagements with varied qualitative studies that center on—and resist—the selective erasure of women’s embodiment in discourses of faculty labor.

Contemporary neoliberal-infused demands on faculty bodies to produce more within a tyrannical ‘culture of speed’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016) reflect a pervasive incitement to utility that suffuses our daily work lives—faculty as instruments, as (perpetually faulty) machines, as interchangeable objectified bodies to ‘teach this, grade that’—evaluated on our flexibility (Martin, 1994) efficiency and production of ‘deliverables.’ Yet as Haraway and Harding (among others) have long argued, knowledge is always situated, partial, and embodied (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991; my emphasis), and thus the recurring erasure of gendered, racialized, and classed bodies in considerations of the labor of the university perpetuates the myth of ‘the view from nowhere.’ Ruppert reminds us that people are governed not as individuals but as “members of populations.” The embodied individual is a source of interest in the machinations of governmentality only “insofar as [it] can be identified, categorized, and recognized” as part of a group (p. 218). And Leder’s (1990) theorizing of the absence of the visceral body in daily life underscores that its selective in/visibility is not only the result of corporate machinations but of our individual attention: “when reading a book or lost in thought, my own bodily state may be the farthest thing from my awareness” (1). To live a feminist life (Ahmed, 2017) means troubling normative conventions, including the erasure of the laboring body, in the work of the academy.

Data Sources: This paper analyzes exemplars from several qualitative research projects to consider female faculty’s resistance to the erasure of their embodied labor that include: 1) a colleague’s struggle with post-partum depression in a space that venerates objectivity and castigates vulnerability and the excesses of emotion; 2) the invisibility of the authorial laboring body and thus the extent of the range of faculty labor in academic care work (such as advising and mentoring) or in faculty-created materials such as on-line classroom sites; 3) the affective and embodied labor of archival research that interrupts the championing of cognitive processes (mind) over the visceral body. I draw from Grosz’ (1994) feminist theorizing of “volatile” bodies that refuses the mind/body split and Leder’s (1990) concept of the ‘dys-appearing’ body to foreground bodywork as a feminist act: When does the body become visible within educational discourse? When does the academic body work? How is the body and its work taken for granted? What consequences arise for women when rendering embodiment visible in academic processes?

Significance: Manifestations of power that shape prescriptive body politics in education constantly shift and demand feminist vigilance to their new expressions (Ahmed, 2017). Although research has addressed a range of body politics in education, our current ‘culture of speed’ includes the erasure of faculty bodywork, as laboring bodies, and its increasing cost.

Author

• Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University