Diasporic researcher: an autoethnographic analysis of gender and race in political science

Violence and Mentoring: Race, Gender, and Sexual Harassment

“…One such incident happened when I was three years into my graduate program when I was sexually harassed by a mentor, which was previously chronicled in Behl (2017), and I declined to report it. 3 I decided not to file a formal complaint-part of me convinced myself it wasn't that bad, and the other part of me justified it because I needed the mentor's support-to pass my qualifying papers, pass the dissertation, complete my PhD, and secure an academic job.…”

“…Unfortunately, my experience with these forms of harassment is not unique but rather, sadly, the norm for many women and women of color in academia (Marshall, Dalyot, and Galloway 2014;Managan 2017). Many scholars have demonstrated how academic institutions create an inhospitable climate for women faculty of color by maintaining dominant, intersecting ideologies, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, classism, ethnocentrism, and rationality (Allen 2012, 18; see also, Narayan 1997; Agathangelou and Ling 2002;Gutierrez y Muhs et al 2012), while others have shown how political science is experienced as a particularly hostile environment for women of color (Anonymous and Anonymous 1999;Sampaio 2006;Brown 2007;Behl 2017;. I, like other marginalized individuals, experienced intersecting forms of oppression: not only was I marginalized based on my race, ethnicity, and gender in political science, I was also othered by my epistemological and methodological choices.…”

Teaching Women/Gender and Politics: Current Trends and Challenges

“…Specifically, she concluded the ways in which political science defines “power” and “the political” serve to obscure state practices that maintain hierarchy. Furthermore, gender and race biases intersect in terms of who is considered a legitimate producer of knowledge in political science in ways that obfuscate the study of hierarchy (Behl 2017; Hawkesworth 2016). In other words, women/gender and politics courses suffer a lack of legitimacy because the field fails to accord the professors most likely to teach these courses (i.e., women) with the same legitimacy and authority of white male professors.…”

Law's Presence, Law's Absence: Reporting Stories of Employment Discrimination in the Academy

“…As universities change faculty positions to have greater teaching loads and less job security, women may be at greater risk for less secure jobs, though the APSA Task Force (2011) noted a dearth of data. Political scientists have written about strategies for advancement for women, and seeing gender in the discipline (Ackerly 2014; Anonymous 2014; Beckwith 2015b; Claypool et al 2017; Daniels 2014; Hero 2015; Kittilson 2015; Mershon and Walsh 2014, 2015; Sinclair-Chapman 2015) and how women experience lives in the discipline, with clear statements of the importance of bodies to belonging (Alexander-Floyd 2015; Behl 2016). The journals Politics & Gender (2014), PS: Political Science and Politics (2015), and Politics, Groups and Identities (Claypool and Mershon 2016; Ford 2016; McClain et al 2016; Mershon and Walsh 2016; Smooth 2016) have all published symposia from Carol Mershon and Denise Walsh's project on advancing women in political science.…”

“…2.I am grateful to those who pressed this point in reference to the news commentator Bill O'Reilly's insults of Congresswoman Maxine Waters in March 2017, which she answered in the Washington Post (Wang 2017). On related points, see Behl (2016). Since the 2016 presidential election, reporting on sexual harassment in both the tech and entertainment industries, occasioned by lawsuits at Fox News (Steel and Chokshi 2017) and the ouster of the chief executive officers of Uber (Isaac 2017) has proliferated (see, e.g., Benner 2017).…”