(Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe: Creating Spaces of Motherhood in Patriarchal Contexts

308 Pages·2020·7.26 MB·English

by  Linda Henderson, Alison L. Black, Susanne Garvis

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GENDER AND EDUCATION
(Re)birthing the
Feminine in Academe
Creating Spaces of Motherhood in
Patriarchal Contexts
Edited by
Linda Henderson · Alison L. Black ·
Susanne Garvis
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly
diverse and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research:
gender and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is
developing rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional
social science disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social
geography, and so on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global
Series that plots emerging definitions and debates and monitors criti-
cal complexities of gender and education. This Series has an explicitly
feminist approach and orientation and attends to key theoretical and
methodological debates, ensuring a continued conversation and rele-
vance within the well-established, inter-disciplinary field of gender and
education.
The Series combines renewed and revitalised feminist research methods
and theories with emergent and salient public policy issues. These include
pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’ and ‘lifelong’
education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, students and staff; tra-
jectories and intersectional inequalities including race, class, sexuality, age
and disability; policy and practice across educational landscapes; diver-
sity and difference, including institutional (schools, colleges, universities),
locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions); varied global
activism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public university’; educa-
tional technologies and transitions and the (ir)relevance of (in)formal edu-
cational settings; and emergent educational mainstreams and margins. In
using a critical approach to gender and education, the Series recognises
the importance of probing beyond the boundaries of specific territorial-
legislative domains in order to develop a more international, intersectional
focus. In addressing varied conceptual and methodological questions, the
Series combines an intersectional focus on competing – and sometimes
colliding – strands of educational provisioning and equality and ‘ diversity’,
and provides insightful reflections on the continuing critical shift of
gender and feminism within (and beyond) the academy.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14626
Linda Henderson · Alison L. Black ·
Susanne Garvis
Editors
(Re)birthing
the Feminine
in Academe
Creating Spaces of Motherhood
in Patriarchal Contexts
Editors
Linda Henderson Alison L. Black
Faculty of Education School of Education
Monash University University of the Sunshine Coast
Clayton, VIC, Australia Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia
Susanne Garvis
Department of Education,
Communication & Learning
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Västra Götalands Län, Sweden
ISSN 2524-6445 ISSN 2524-6453 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
ISBN 978-3-030-38210-0 ISBN 978-3-030-38211-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38211-7
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Preface
This book has emerged from conversations about motherhood and how
women are typically positioned within contemporary ‘academe’—a neo-
liberal, masculine and patriarchal machine demanding perpetual perfor-
mance, productivity, competition, efficiency, quantification and sacrifice
of body, mind and soul.
Enacting a feminist politics, the researchers in this book engage
autoethnographic and creative art-based research methodologies to
offer a collection of international and intergenerational narratives which
connect expansively with the concept of motherhood in academia and
advance original insights into how a more responsive higher education
might be conceived and sustained. Across this compendium of research,
contemporary and relational ways of understanding ‘motherhood’ are
used to draw attention to—and disrupt—the current patriarchal struc-
tures defining many women’s lives and work in the academy.
The presented stories serve to shift the focus from typical, traditional
patriarchal lenses to champion feminine and feminist perspectives—
including diverse knowledges, values, cycles, energies, intuitions and
ecologies. Authors use their stories and creative, contemplative, femi-
nist methodologies to speak back to intensified work cultures, damaging
v
vi Preface
workloads and competitive working conditions that threaten personal
and family lives, collegiality, connection, health, well-being and joyful
forms of living.
Authors have gathered around them a trusted circle of writers—
writers who have sought and are seeking to create new and nourish-
ing academic spaces. Each chapter has been written collaboratively by
an author collective. And, within each chapter, authors bear witness to
one another, imbuing in their research/writing together research ele-
ments that are original, authentic, storied, autoethnographic, respon-
sive, personal and aesthetic. These co-created and evocative assemblages
deliberately challenge the norms of research/writing for/in academia.
Collectives are researching/writing them-selves-their-bodies-their-feel-
ings-their-lives-their-longings-their-ancestry-their-histories-their-rela-
tionships and experimenting with research/writing focused on spacious
and relational expressions of being in/outside the academy.
Collectives engage autobiography, collective autoethnography,
multi-vocal scripts, narrative and arts-based inquiry, life-history w riting,
reflection, questioning and journaling. They work with scholarly and
found texts, contemplative and poetic methodologies, n on-dualistic
ontologies, speculative philosophies and material feminisms. Approaches
are serious, playful, involving e-correspond (dance), everyday artefacts,
artwork, conversation, text and visual exchange.
To readers joining this exploration of an expansive motherhood
space, we invite you to listen care-fully. In the spirit of ‘Listening to
country: A journey of the heart of what it means to belong’ by Ros
Moriarty, we invite you to lean into ‘Dadirri’ (www.CreativeSpririts.
info). Dadirri is the practice of ‘deep listening’, ‘an almost spiritual skill
based on respect’ and ‘an inner, quiet, still awareness, and waiting’.
As you read, we invite you to find stillness as you wait and listen. You
will be exposed to lines and ecologies of M-othering; to ways authors
are birthing and bringing forth feminine and/or feminist choices; to
how they are responding to mothering bodies in unloving institutions;
engaging in writing that is softening and healing injured academic lives;
and cultivating new pedagogies in and for higher education. This kind
of writing together has, and is, supporting authors to make sense of
themselves and their experiences as M-others in and beyond academia.
Preface vii
We hope you are affected by these stories, that they offer up to you
an enhanced capacity to understand or empathise, or that they offer you
support, reducing feelings of isolation and offering validation of your
own experiences and meaning-making efforts.
Two core parts serve as feminist frames for this collection of storied
assemblages: Mothering Bodies and Sensations; and, Mothering Relations and
Vulnerabilities. Within each part sit five chapters and a section ‘response’.
The ‘responses’ are a distinguishing feature of the book. For each
part, we have invited a senior figure/elder/matriarch from academia to
respond to the stories/research/writing of the author collectives in that
part. We want to attend to that matriarch’s wisdom, significant knowl-
edge and personal experience about the nature of university life and the
value of creating spaces of motherhood in the academy. We also want to
hear their thoughts about the value of (re)birthing the feminine through
the privileging of personally meaningful methodologies that support
deep and collective listening about personal/professional/institutional
stories of motherhood/sisterhood/mothering and patriarchal contexts.
These wise and thoughtful responses from these experienced academics
show how stories enable conversations to continue, how they connect
us, challenge us and change us. They affirm that there is value in consid-
ering alternatives that are intuitive, authentic, unexpected, soft, creative,
expressive, kind, slow, gentle and relational—approaches that honour,
hold space for, care for, respect and support genuine connection and
relationship. Thank you, Alison and Laurel, for your rich and generous
contributions and insights.
Part I: Mothering Bodies and Sensations
In the first chapter in the first part of Mothering Bodies and Sensations,
authors Agnes Bosanquet, Jayde Cahir, Gail Crimmins, Janet Free,
Karina Luzia, Lilia Mantai and Ann Werner create a collective autoeth-
nography which explores the messiness and fractured identities of (non)
mothers and (non)researchers in and out of academic contexts. Luce
Irigaray’s writing on breath, interiority and autonomy brings together
viii Preface
the reflections. Collectively, the stories in this chapter unveil ways of liv-
ing with and letting go of the demands of academia and the complexi-
ties of caring for selves and others.
Sarah Crinall and Anna Vladimirova in Chapter “Embodied
Motherly Research: Re-birthing Sustenance Through the Common
(Im)material” ask is motherhood sensation? Their chapter consid-
ers how academia might be and become a nurturing, co-mothering
event. While mothering with place, children’s embodying ability to
listen and respond to the world is received. Gifts of ordinary matter
and immatter—the moon, dots, shearwaters, moths, swan’s call and
rhythms of slow—are a connecting thread to the (re)birth of ‘suste-
nance’. Experimental co-writing events, forming in body-place relations
with academic mothering lives at home, are creative, jovial open-
ings that offer academia a glimpse into ‘infinite multiplicit academic
motherhood’.
The third chapter explores Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Helen Johnson,
Sarah Misra and Agli Zazros-Orr’s experiences of mothering bodies in
unloving institutions. Four mothers in academia collaboratively story their
lived encounters, bringing differing identities, circumstances and experi-
ences of collective exhaustion. They creatively and vulnerably write lived
experiences, sharing these with each other, holding and feeling these lived
encounters over time—then, they gift each other with words and imagery,
acts of care-full responding. These become m ulti-vocal biographies of
arts-based poetic and visual inquiry which enable each author to see the
reflections and diffractions in and across each other’s lived stories. These
metaphorically provoke understandings of the pain swept into the unfor-
giving corners of cold, unloving universities. This work is creative resist-
ance: to write from the body gives pearls of pleasure and joy!
Sandy Farquhar and Justine O’Hara-Gregan in the fourth chapter
write about the experience of mother, and how it remains with us: famil-
iar smells, textures and sounds, a nostalgic memory of intimacy, the wel-
come of open arms or perhaps frightening memories of being unsafe.
As a physical and emotional presence, the idea of mother impacts the
authors deeply, setting up the origins of their interactions with the
world and their images of self. The chapter engages in a deep play with
mother as metaphor, integrating understandings of aesthetics, geography
Preface ix
and autobiography. The chapter unfolds a meditation and experimen-
tation with thought and body over a four-month period. It draws on
an idea of data-seeking-self-seeking-mother, working with scholarly
and found texts, as well as yoga and personal journaling, to provide
an account of mother within their academic lives. Sandy and Justine
explore metaphors of mother as earth, warrior, teacher, shapeshifter and
monster which emerge through their various lenses/permutations of
self (as postcolonial, post-feminist, pākehā women-academics-teachers-
mothers-daughters-yoga practitioners) navigating the male-centric
academy. Drawing on non-dualistic ontologies, contemplative meth-
odology, autoethnography and metaphor theory, they explore how
they have shaped and informed their perceptions/understandings and
enactment of mother and mothering within the academy.
In Chapter “(Re)Claiming Our Soulful Intuitive Lives: Initiating
Wildish Energy into the Academy Through Story, Dreaming and
Connecting with Mother Earth”, Linda Henderson, Alison L. Black and
Prasanna Srinivasan ponder the risk of serving the function of academ-
ia’s patriarchal structures. They seek to move beyond exhaustion and
lamenting. Together they engage in acts of containment, asserting their
intuition and attending to their wild, infinite and instinctual natures. In
this chapter, the authors tap into their power as women and engage in
writing/not-writing to support their wild, receptive and embodied ways
of knowing and sensing. They bundle together their stories and dream-
ing and engage in processes of calling, bearing witness and responding
to each other. This freedom in writing becomes a resource for listening,
for ‘doing academia differently’ and for clarifying what is most impor-
tant to them.
Responding to these chapters, and Part I Mothering Bodies and
Sensations, Alison Bartlett is drawn to a miasmic past, remembering
her own sensations, exhaustion, raging, longings and languages. She
describes her feelings as the chapter stories echo through her body,
affecting her for days—bodily, emotionally. Alison connects her under-
standing of these narratives and these politics of writing to a kind of
lament, an ancient form of mourning, of sensations. She reminds us
to feel; to remember that ‘connections with others is what keeps the
world bearable and work sustainable’. She reveals her life experiences of