‘The still-moving position’ of the ‘working-class’ feminist academic: dealing with disloyalty, dislocation and discomfort

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship of working-class feminist academics to the Academy. Our paper interrogates tensions between resistance and submission from the perspective of four educationally successful working-class women who have become academics. The paper starts with an overview of the state of the Academy at the beginning of the twenty-first century before addressing the conundrum that, for women from working-class backgrounds, success is often configured as, or feels like, failure. The paper develops and reflects on four central themes: the dilemmas of belonging within higher education, the challenge of continuing class exclusions, the oppressive and exploitative class relations that remain and are rarely recognised or addressed, and finally, the difficulties around sustaining ‘authentic’ and meaningful relationships with the still working-class. We conclude with questions and suggestions about what possibilities exist for those of us who grew up working-class to put into practice Bourdieu’s injunction to be organic intellectuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Working class
• feminist
• academia
• resistance
• organic intellectual
• inequality

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The REF was first introduced in 2014. It replaced the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) last conducted in 2008. REF is the ‘UK system for assessing the quality of research in HE institutions’, although it has regularly been critiqued, see Martin (2011).

2 The TEF was introduced in 2017, described as a ‘national framework’ for ‘assessing excellence in teaching’ in HE institutions. For a critical response see Neary (2016).

3 The term ‘authentic’ is used here as a term to mean accurate, meaningful and encompassing rather than to draw parameters between what ‘is’ and ‘is not’.

4 We are using caring in the broad sense that Lynch does, not in a heteronormative sense, nor simply childcare but more widely to include a lack of attention to self care and a focus on individualism rather than collegiality within academia.

5 See REF (2018) ‘This will include consideration of outputs … by staff who have moved into a different sector, died or retired’ (p. 7).