“Backwards and in High Heels”: The Invisibility and Underrepresentation of Femme(inist) Administrative Labor in Academia

From Activism to Organizing, From Caring to Care Work

“…I say to you: I refuse.” The racism exhibited in the school's initial denial of tenure signaled that a career there would require a great deal of care work. Instead, Hannah-Jones chose “to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were,” joining the faculty at Howard University, an HBU (“Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement” 2021).…”

“…In addition to the examples we surveyed above, academic care work also includes "student recruitment, departmental social events" (Swanson and Johnston 2003, 65), and, especially where Black working-class academics are concerned, advisement and retention of students who experience "marginalization and alienation in the academy" (Magoqwana, Maqabuka, and Tshoaedi 2019, 8). Academic care work also invokes worker-management relationships in the forms of administrative positions, committee work, and other service obligations (Inayatulla and Robinson 2020), that is, it's work for which people are evaluated and disciplined for underperforming, but not credited for performing well. Much academic care work straddles caring for faculty and caring for students, for example, efforts to ensure suitable accommodations for disabled persons on campuses.…”

About a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade

“…Recent work done by scholars Shereen Inayatulla and Heather Robinson (2019) showcases the need for this kind of fleshy epistemology. Inayatulla and Robinson draw from their own autoethnographies as they seek to render visible the "underrepresented statuses of the communities to which [they] belong and the labor [they] undertake in [their] administrative roles, both of which are rendered invisible because of the ways in which [their] intersectional identities are erased, conflated, demeaned, or hierarchically positioned" (4).…”