“Backwards and in High Heels”^*

* Thaves (1982). The full quotation, from a Frank and Ernest cartoon, is “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.”

: The Invisibility and Underrepresentation of Femme(inist) Administrative Labor in Academia

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which embodiments of femme within administrative academic settings intervene in dominant discourses that (incorrectly) frame us as being “in service” of male-identified colleagues, supervisors, and institutionalized heteropatriarchies. We posit femme as an important and complex counternarrative to the heterocentric, cissexist, and masculinist discourses that are ubiquitous within academic administration in both historical and present-day contexts. Additionally, we consider femme as a site of resistance to feminized discourses of nurturance and of (re)productivity. In this collaborative project, we study the labor involved in administering an English Department and a Writing Program at a four-year public college, interrogating, through autoethnographic reflections and analyses, the ways in which this service labor often falls to/gets thrust upon those of us who identify as femme faculty members. Our article illustrates how we resist the imposition of care work and assert our own agency while conducting administrative work on our own, femme, terms. We offer a list of usable interventions to common, predictable, yet sometimes disorienting situations, and although we do not advance these responses as easy conclusions to problematic interactions, we consider how this list might aid femme administrators in managing quotidian, misguided, at times hostile scenarios. Our work calls allies and comrades to identify systemic asymmetries and generate collaborative solutions within a paradigm of affirmation: One that places a commitment to “femme witnessing” at its center.

NOTES

Notes

* Thaves (1982). The full quotation, from a Frank and Ernest cartoon, is “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.”

1 We see these absences in first person accounts of lives lived in Rhetoric and Composition (e.g., George, 1999), of women’s lives in Rhetoric and Composition (e.g., Baillif, Davis, & Mountford, 2010; Flynn & Bourelle, 2018; Goodburn, LeCourt, & Leverenz, 2013), and in discussions of the particular challenges and prejudices experienced by women of color in academia (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemanns, González, & Harris, 2012). The few accounts of queers in Composition and WPA include Alexander and Rhodes (2011), Banks and Alexander (2009), Pauliny (2011), and Rhodes (2018). And finally, Hogan (2010, 2017) incorporates queer frameworks into her readings of academic service and administration.

2 We understand that these terms have specific applications beyond the scope of what we are describing in this article, and outside the discourse of our field.

3 For further discussion of the ways in which Western society treats the time of minoritized people in general, and Black people in particular, please see Brittney Cooper’s TED talk, “The Racial Politics of Time” (https://www.ted.com/talks/brittney_cooper_the_racial_politics_of_time?language=en)

4 Research on microaggressions by Nadal (2014) outlines many dangers and outcomes the microaggressed individual faces when deciding if/how to respond to the microaggressor.