Femininities/masculinities and a sense self: thinking gendered academic identities and the intellectual self

Abstract

This paper draws on the theoretical resources offered by feminist scholarship to enquire into the discourse of the intellectual and how women do being an academic. My starting points are threefold: Val Hey’s interrogation of Butler’s work and her emphasis on the importance of sociality; Carrie Paechter’s exploration of the available personal sets of masculinities and femininities that modify the ‘person who is me’; and my own attempts to draw on other traditions in theorising agency and a sense of self. Drawing on these resources I re‐read some data on academic identities to explore the potentialities of academic personhood and the discourses associated with the idea of the intellectual as a site of gendered personhood. The position of woman as intellectual is analysed in terms of Beauvoir’s assertion ‘I am a woman’ and the paradox of a universal voice and the female sex.

Keywords:

• academic identity
• anti‐intellectualism
• Butler
• higher education
• intellectual
• performativity

Notes

1. The two are not co‐extensive.

2. Moi argues that the sex/gender distinction does not operate in the same way in French as it does in English.

3. Parts of this analysis were presented at SRHE but presented in the context of different theoretical problematic.

4. I use Claire as her pseudonym.