Before the door: storying the material, affective and ethical dimensions of inclusion for women academics

Abstract

Hélène Cixous delicately reminds us that doors perform a material and affective liminality between what is and what might be, and questions the reason and rhyme of doors as ways in and out of spaces which denote passage and movement; and as structures which separate, connect, and demarcate entanglements of being, becoming and belonging on the inside or out. In this paper, we take up Cixous’ thinking around doors to explore literal and metaphorical accounts of the material, embodied and affective liminality of doorways and doors within the context of higher education. Cixous concept of “Écriture feminine” places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades the discourse that regulates phallogocentrism. With this in mind, this paper is a meta-fictional feminist adaptation of Franz Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’ from his novelThe Trial. This approach draws upon our own experiences, as well as qualitative interviews with other academic women across Australia to explore the ways that opening and closing doors speak to issues of agency and transparency, inequality and discrimination, pedagogy and politics in academia, as well as the need for a renewed feminist commitment to connectedness and solidarity in a highly competitive and critical neoliberal work environment.