Giving up as a willful feminist practice

ABSTRACT

What do we, as women, give up? What does it mean to give up as a woman in academia? We explored this question through a study with women doctoral students to reframe giving up as a purposeful, willful act. Sara Ahmed describes willfulness in relation to women who are perceived as resisting norms, shifting away from normative expectations, refusing what is expected. In this work, we push against the prevailing discourses of women in academia as passively encountering problems, facing issues, and making sacrifices. We explore what it means to give up through three women’s archives and objects of willfulness. Willfulness becomes a generative, sweaty concept through which we interrogate and understand practices of giving up by women doctoral students.

KEYWORDS:

• Willfulness
• feminism
• women doctoral students
• qualitative methodology

Acknowledgements

We remain grateful to the inspiring and willful women that participated in our study, the electric current that sparked this scholarship.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Kelly W. Guyotte is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research and co-coordinator of the Qualitative Research Certificate Program at The University of Alabama. Her research interests include issues of (in)equity in educational spaces, qualitative methodologies, artful/visual inquiry, and pedagogy.

Maureen A. Flint is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at The University of Georgia. Her research interests include qualitative methodologies, social and spatial justice, particularly in higher education contexts, as well as artful and multimodal inquiry.

Stephanie Anne Shelton is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at The University of Alabama. Her research interests include a) queer and feminist approaches to interview-, focus group-, and narrative-based studies and b) examining intersections of genders and sexualities in secondary educational spaces.

Notes

1 All participant names are pseudonyms selected by the respective woman.

2 For us, (re)presentation is not presenting again, but always presenting anew (e.g. Gildersleeve and Guyotte 2019). This conception evades masculine claims of what giving up can and should mean, and resists the idea that ‘representations’ can ever be fully captured or wholly representative of the feminist experience. (Re)presentations shift, slip, and become with the feminist subject.