Feelings of Change: Alternative Feminist Professional Trajectories

Abstract

This chapter engages with narratives emerging within three modalities of response developed by feminist academics in response to the transformations undergone by US higher education in general and the field of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) in particular: 1. collective organizing against contingency; 2. critical evaluations of the challenges faced by WGS departments and programs in regard to contingent faculty employment; 3. individual alternatives of addressing work precarity beyond the realm of academe. The chapter focuses primarily on the latter through the analysis of four interviews and the following four themes that reoccurred throughout them: the timing of the decision to look for a feminist professional future outside academia; the search for a work ethos that bypasses competitiveness, surpassing the isolation of academic knowledge work; dealing with feelings of failure; and finally, reimagining graduate training in women’s and gender studies. In doing so, the chapter discusses the emotional-affective forces that sustain or emerge from these interventions in order to evaluate their feminist transformative potential as well as their position in relation to discursive frameworks of success, failure, fantasy, or pragmatic response.