Navigating the Emotional Landscapes of Academia: Queer Encounters

Abstract

In this chapter I hope to consider processes of being (or becoming) on the academic map and the emotional disjunctures across time and place felt in occupying academia, in conducting research and in moving through intersecting spaces of research-researched-researcher. The promise of entering and achieving in higher education is at once seductive (CVs produced, academic stars circulated internationally) and disturbing, felt and encountered across the university environment via administrative, teaching and research concerns. These points of arriving, departing and travelling through institutional space intersect with what I feel about occupying academia. The emotional ‘stickiness’ of these contexts contrasts with the vision of the engaged, inclusive institution that now welcomes all through its door, with this rhetoric of arrival and belonging effacing starting points, varied journeys, different labours and divided recognitions. These, I argue, are emotional matters manifest in teaching and research encounters, where a ‘critical pedagogy’ may be read as a failure, mobilised by the angry, emotional feminist academic, rather than her ‘neutral’ ‘objective’ ‘rational’ unemotional counterpart. In arguing for an emotional presence constituted in and through research, I consider the emotional landscape of class and sexuality in particular, asking what is taken with us as we travel through academia, where feminist research in particular has been critical of the travelling subject (or ‘self’), who tells only their own story. The connections that I chart encompass professional and personal passions and pains, as I inhabit research and teaching space.