On Becoming “Bad Subjects”: Teaching to Transgress in Neoliberal Education

Abstract

This chapter reflects upon the challenges facing feminist early career scholars who “teach to transgress” (hooks 1994) in the context of neoliberalism. As recent academic articles and media accounts highlight, Higher Education has increasingly become a site of isolation and disenchantment for scholars who survive the rigours of doctoral study and find themselves entering a flooded job market. This saturation has produced – and thus far maintains – exploitative conditions which threaten to entrap early career scholars in insecure low-paid and highly demanding positions, many on the ‘front lines’ of the classroom. While the precarity of fractional and part-time contracts affects emerging academics across disciplines, the prospect of years spent patching together employment in Higher Education yields particular tensions for feminist scholars. Through a personal account, this paper explores the fraught experience of practicing feminist politics and critical pedagogy within the structures of neoliberal education in the UK. In particular, it considers what it means to teach students of Gender Studies to identify power, understand structure, locate agency and practice resistance, while remaining subject to – and reproducing – the logics of neoliberalism. Faced with the seeming hypocrisy of (politically) teaching to transgress while (personally) obeying the limits of an exploitative system, this account sheds light on how feminist educators bargain or negotiate with power, balancing professional development with personal, political and psychic costs.