The marketised university and the politics of motherhood

Amsler, Sarah; Motta, Sara C.

Abstract

© 2017, © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In this paper, we offer a critique of neoliberal power from the perspective of the gendered, sexualised, raced and classed politics of motherhood in English universities. By using dialogical auto-ethnographic methods to examine our own past experiences as full-time employed mother–academics, we demonstrate how feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world.

Citation

Amsler, S., & Motta, S. C. (2019). The marketised university and the politics of motherhood. Gender and Education, 31(1), 82-99. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296116

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 31, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Mar 30, 2017
• Publication Date: Jan 2, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 8, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 1, 2018
• Journal: Gender and Education
• Print ISSN: 0954-0253
• Electronic ISSN: 1360-0516
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 82-99
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296116
• Keywords: Motherhood and academia, feminist methodologies and theories, neoliberal subjectification, time–space logics of neoliberalism, resistance, refusal and transgression
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/853265
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296116
• Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Gender and Education on 30 March 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296116
• Contract Date: Sep 8, 2017