femininities/masculinities and a sense self: thinking gendered academic identities and the...
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Femininities/masculinities and a senseself: thinking gendered academicidentities and the intellectual selfSue Clegg aa Leeds Metropolitan University , Leeds, UKPublished online: 11 Apr 2008.
To cite this article: Sue Clegg (2008) Femininities/masculinities and a sense self: thinkinggendered academic identities and the intellectual self, Gender and Education, 20:3, 209-221, DOI:10.1080/09540250802000389
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Gender and EducationVol. 20, No. 3, May 2008, 209–221
ISSN 0954-0253 print/ISSN 1360-0516 online© 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09540250802000389http://www.informaworld.com
Femininities/masculinities and a sense self: thinking gendered academic identities and the intellectual self
Sue Clegg*
Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UKTaylor and FrancisCGEE_A_300204.sgm10.1080/09540250802000389Gender and Education0954-0253 (print)/1360-0516 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis203000000May [email protected]
This paper draws on the theoretical resources offered by feminist scholarship to enquire intothe discourse of the intellectual and how women do being an academic. My starting points arethreefold: Val Hey’s interrogation of Butler’s work and her emphasis on the importance ofsociality; Carrie Paechter’s exploration of the available personal sets of masculinities andfemininities that modify the ‘person who is me’; and my own attempts to draw on othertraditions in theorising agency and a sense of self. Drawing on these resources I re-read somedata on academic identities to explore the potentialities of academic personhood and thediscourses associated with the idea of the intellectual as a site of gendered personhood. Theposition of woman as intellectual is analysed in terms of Beauvoir’s assertion ‘I am a woman’and the paradox of a universal voice and the female sex.
Keywords: academic identity; anti-intellectualism; Butler; higher education; intellectual;performativity
Introduction
The impetus for this paper comes from an abiding interest in the gender dynamics of highereducation and, in particular, some issues arising out of a piece of empirical work about what itmeans to be an academic (Clegg in press). This work revealed the continued salience of gender,and casts light on how women and men positioned themselves in relationship to being an‘intellectual’. I have continued to reflect on the idea of the intellectual not least because the topictouches on what Val Hey (2004) has described as the ‘perverse pleasures’ of intellectual labourand the ways in which these pleasures are distorted and fragmented in the conditions of contem-porary university life. The topic of the intellectual life has, moreover, come more sharply intofocus through a number of debates abut public intellectuals and a sense of (mostly male) nostal-gia and reactions to the supposed dumbing down of the academy (Furedi 2004). Collini’s (2006),magisterial volume, Absent minds, has turned to the paradoxical English discourse of intellectu-als always being elsewhere, but it is notable that his narrative is one, almost by definition, of thelives of men. So how do women enact being an academic, and pleasurably and painfully claimthe intellectual life for themselves?
These questions have brought me back to debates about performativity and in particular, ValHey’s (2006) interrogation of Butler’s work and her emphasis on the importance of sociality;Carrie Paechter’s (2006) careful exploration of the available personal sets of masculinities andfemininities that modify the ‘person who is me’; and my own attempts to draw on other traditionsin theorising agency and a sense of self (Clegg 2006). I argue that all these resources are signif-icant in understanding the profound sense of self that is historically and materially emergent frompractice in the necessary relations of the body to its environment, and the creative possibilities
*Email: [email protected]
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inherent in performativity. In this paper, therefore, I am using the theoretical resources offered byfeminist scholarship in order to read the discourse of the intellectual, how women do being anacademic, and their relationship to the discourse of the intellectual. I want to suggest that this isfertile ground for exploration as, in both first and second wave feminism, the life of the mind hashad particular symbolic significance. Reclaiming the mind in the face of the mind/body dualismhas held a special significance for women asserting their personhood. I want to further suggestthat with the theoretical resources available to us, we can usefully begin to understand both thepleasures of intellectual work and also redefine that work in opposition to the dominant anti-intellectualism of much current policy, specifically in relation to research performativity andselectivity. Woman ‘as a situation’ in academia offers particular possibilities in understandingand deconstructing the mind/body dualism through theoretical work on embodiment; and ourvisceral presence presents counter-hegemonic possibilities in challenging the still ideologicallydominant masculinity of the academy. These possibilities are both playful and transgressive, andare necessary as a way of countering the ‘charming absurdities’ (see McWilliam 2002, 2004) ofacademic life.
The paper is structured in three parts: firstly, a consideration of the theoretical arguments andrecent debates acknowledging the contribution of Judith Butler; secondly, some reflections onthe discourse of the ‘intellectual’; and finally a return to the questions my empirical work raisedabout women’s sense of themselves as academics and intellectuals. It should be clear from thisintroduction that this work is attempting to pry open some questions in what I consider to beinteresting ways rather than providing firm conclusions. These questions, however, relate tomatters of some urgency in relation to the micro-politics of the academy (Morley 2003). In myconcluding reflections I will, therefore, speculate on the possibilities for action that the idea ofclaiming intellectual agency may contain in countering the current anti-intellectualism of muchuniversity life.
Performativity and beyond
There is no doubting the continued impact of Judith Butler’s work in educational research asnoted in the recent Editorial (David et al. 2006) in the special issue of British Journal of Sociologyof Education. Her contribution comes particularly from her attempts to theorise subjectivitythrough the notion of performativity and the idea that identity is performed and enacted ratherthan prefiguring it. This conceptualisation is powerful as it concentrates attention on action andallows for a creative interrogation of the ways in which people do gender. Butler has extendedFoucault’s intellectual heritage in elaborating on the process of subjectification and the ongoingprocess of the constitution of the self (see also Davies 1997, 2006). While I have critiqued someof the underlying post-structuralist assumptions underpinning the concept of performativity, andthe dissolving of selfhood into the continuous presence of performativity, I nonetheless recognisethat the concept has rich potential for research (Clegg 2006). Indeed, there are some interestingparallels with the older concept of praxis and the argument for primacy of practice found in thework of Margaret Archer (2000) in her interrogation of ‘being human’ and her exploration ofthe conditions of human agency. She insists on the importance of the embodied human being,the primacy of practice – Marx’s ‘continuous practical activity in a material world’ (Archer 2000,122) and as a species being with natural potentials, which create the conditions for the emergenceof the self in its necessary relations with the environment. In this she distinguishes betweenconcepts of the self which are necessarily social, and a sense of the self which is not. For Archer(2000), therefore, the necessary sense of self, grounded in the organism’s continuous and neces-sary relations with the environment, makes possible the proliferation of concepts of self whichare continually enacted in performatvity. These disparate theoretical routes turn us towards the
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ways in which people enact their being. While I would not deny the gulf between resources avail-able through the acceptance of the necessity of a depth ontology (Callincos 2006), and those likeButler (Salih with Butler 2004) who would challenge that move, I find it interesting thatboth traditions have been mobilized in order to sustain a concept of critique, which is asimportant to Butler (Salih with Butler 2004, 331) as it is to Marxists and critical realists.1 As ValHey (2006) cautions, we should not get too hung up about the special qualities of deconstruction:deconstruction is what we do to arguments and texts. In Bodies that matter Butler argues that:
To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it; rather, it is to free itfrom its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand what political interests were secured in andby that metaphysical placing, and thereby to permit the term to occupy and to serve very differentpolitical aims. (Salih with Butler 2004, 330)
– a move that underpins most forms of critique. So in this paper I am being self-consciouslytheoretically promiscuous, raiding where I see commonalities rather than focusing on theoreticalincommensurability at a philosophical level.
This I take to be what Val Hey achieves in her paper when she speaks of how social theoristsfind:
… how often their own cherished analytical rationality is broken up by glimpses into the imaginationof more provocative thinkers. I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much that we self-consciously assemble all the resources for the making of research imaginaries as those vivid ideas(and frequently their authors) come to haunt us. (Hey 2006, 439)
Hey develops the idea of repeated citations, using the example of research that looks atgirling, and at the repetition involved in an apparently fixed identity. Her insights are importantbecause she argues, following Butler, that although such repetition is compulsive it is not unal-terable. The compulsive performativity of academic work is productive of academic identity asa state of being, but is also capable of disruption. In particular, the de-ontologising of gender asfixed in biology allows for the interrogation of the ways in which being an intellectual mightbecome unfixed from particular forms of hegemonic masculinity.
Hey (2006) argues, however, that there are limitations to the de-ontologisation of gender andthe breaking down of the sex equals body/gender equals culture argument. Butler achieves thisin her analysis by demonstrating the ways in which sex itself is governed by culture. Hey (2006)makes the case, however, that although Butler recognises that discourse operates on real embod-ied human beings, she has no way of theorising it. While it is true that discourse works toproduce identity, Butler does not concern herself with necessary and embodied ‘fleshy agentivehuman ethnographic subjects’ (Hey 2006, 448) in her necessary relations with the materialworld, which is the subject of empirical sociology. Hey (2006) uses examples from empiricalresearch to elaborate on the cultural and material limitations of alterability, and she develops ageneral argument about the need to rethink performativity through a closer attention to the soci-ality of identity. She argues that in looking at the operation of perfomativity we need to payattention to the audience for action, and the ‘we’ not just the ‘I’. Her argument also returns Hey(2006) to the problematic of agency, which she argues is under erasure in Butler, but continuesto have salience in theorising the social and the possibilities of becoming implied by the notionof preformativity.
The other theoretical resource that has been productive in terms of my thinking has beenToril Moi’s (1999) exegesis of Beauvoir. She argues that to write philosophy from the stance of‘I am a woman’ is to recognise that the Other positions women, and does not allow her accessto a universal voice. In proclaiming ‘I am a woman’ Beauvoir arrogates voice to herself which
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has been a fundamental aim of feminism. Moi (1999) argues that there are major parallels herewith an understanding of race. ‘I am a woman’ is not then essentialist, nor does it deny differ-ence. On the contrary, because the body is a situation it allows one to consider how, why andwhen in concrete lived experience relations of class, ethnicity, are co-present and may be moreimportant at both an explanatory level and experientially. Beauvoir’s insistence on speakingfrom her sex rests on the general phenomenological insight that as Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘thebody is our general medium for having a world’ (cited in Moi 1999, 63). Beauvoir’s specialsignificance for the debate about intellectuals is that in taking on the voice of woman to argueher case, she makes an intellectual argument from the place that has been traditionally denied towomen; posing the paradox of woman as universal intellectual.
I want now to turn to the problem that Carrie Paechter (2006) has analysed concerning femi-nine masculinities and masculine femininities since at first glance it might be presumed thatspeaking of woman as an intellectual, particularly in academia, might be a ripe arena fortheorising feminine masculinities. However, Paechter’s (2006) careful terminological analysisconvinces me otherwise. Paechter (2006) takes us back to the ways in which the concepts ofmasculinity and femininity are relational and the ways in which femininity is constructed as anegation of masculinity, in much the same way Beaviour argues in her analysis of the relation-ship to the Other. To reject femininity is to reject the disempowering attributes of ‘normal’femininity. There is no such symmetry in the argument about men rejecting hegemonic mascu-linity, since this does not imply complete loss of the power (albeit power that is limited andmediated through class and racialised hierarchies) that comes to a degree with being male. Thefundamental asymmetry of the terms remains. The idea of female masculinity is thereforehighly problematic. Paechter (2006) argues that we can sensibly talk of being a masculinewoman. Having a gender as in ‘I am a woman’ is something that ‘we all seem to have’ (Paechter2006, 259); although perhaps following Beauvoir it might be more useful to think of having asex.2 Moi (1999) argues that the idea of gender identity is a reification, and while the sex/genderdistinction is powerful for denying the idea of biological sex as destiny, what it does not do isprovide a basis for theorising subjectivity and understanding the body. It is clear, however, thatwhile using the term masculine to modify male or female makes sense, it is not at all clear whatsense using the terms male and female to modify masculinity makes. In the latter instance it isunclear what form of masculinity is being evoked stripped of its empirical mooring in maleness.Why this deconstruction is useful is that it liberates us to think about the various ways in whichwomen might relate to various masculinities and femininities – not as a fixed attribute of selfbut as performatively enacted in different situations. As Paechter notes her enactments in differ-ent circumstances:
… do not make me masculine or feminine; they are part of what it is to be the person who isme, enacting and constructing varying personal femininities in relations to times, places andcircumstances. (Paechter 2006, 263)
This move seems to align more closely with Hey’s (2006) fleshy embodied ethnographicsubjects and the questions empirical research deals with about how women and men do mascu-linity and femininity, do academic etc. and to the distinction between a sense and concepts ofself found in Archer (2000). Identity as man or women, or other, appears to be a case of who onethinks one is and relates to the sense of self rather than the more mobile discursive concepts ofself which vary across situation and context. Moreover, this latter sense is intensely social in theways Hey (2006) suggests and is bound up with how others see us. There are good reasons forus to interrogate both the discursively available positions in a culture, which are emergent intime, and the sense of self which in Archer’s view is ontologically anchored in our relations withthe material world. While the sense of self as a woman or man appears to be highly durable, this
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does not imply a reduction to (biological) sex. What all the theorists I have been dealing withseem to agree on is the need to reject a false ontologising of difference; where they disagree isabout how to deal with agency and what I would defend as proper ontological concerns (Clegg2006). As tools and conceptual clarification relevant to empirical work, however, I find theseideas productive, and I share Hey’s (2006) suggestive notion that ideas come to haunt us ratherthan simply succumbing to our self-conscious rationality. This is more so if one strays across theboundaries of incommensurability, rather than remaining safely inside them.
Intellectuals
One such haunting has come to surround the whole idea of intellectuals and intellectual labour.This was provoked by my rather startling discovery of how willing the individuals I spoke withas part of a project on academic identities were to take on the term in relation to themselves, theirwork and their identity. This came as somewhat as a surprise, since my data came from that partof the university sector in UK least likely to be lauded publicly for its intellectual virtues belong-ing as it did not to the elite but to that group of universities that had championed widening partic-ipation and hailing from a Polytechnic past. Of course I have no warrant for generalisation, theremay be peculiar local circumstances that explain my findings, but they set the hare running interms of my thinking about the prevalent discourses of the intellectual. My surprise might havebeen somewhat tempered had I been more introspectively acute and paid heed to my own life-long compulsions and pleasure in intellectual labour (Hey 2004). So before returning to my dataI want to attempt a deconstructive reading of some of the debates about intellectuals and, inparticular, reflect on the terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘woman’ (Eagleton 2005).
The significance of the life of the mind for women has been important for both first andsecond wave feminism. This is not surprising given the discursive resilience of mind/body dual-ism within the western philosophical canon; a dualism in which women became assigned to theswamp of the body while the masculine purity of the mind was lauded. This dualism was layeredover with class and racial fears and its operation policed with increasing rigour in the nineteenthcentury. To take an example in 1873, at the height of the pressure for co-education at Harvard,Edward H. Clarke argued in his book Sex in education or a fair chance that given women’sfragility and the competition between brain and uterus he was forced to conclude, as Ehrenreichand English put it: ‘with startling but unassailable logic, that higher education would causewomen’s uteruses to atrophy!’ (Ehrenreich and English 1979, 115). Women’s long struggle togain fair access to higher education might at one level appear to have succeeded at least in termsof undergraduate access although not at senior levels in the professoriate. I want to suggest,however, that the underlying tension around the idea of women’s universal voice remains. Theopposition between fully hetero-sexed being for women and the development of creative, asser-tive, intellectual capacities is a continuing trope, from the de-sexed notion of the bluestocking tothe remarkable resurgence of fears about women’s fertility among women who delay reproduc-tion in order to establish their careers. Women exercising too much brain power remain worri-some and they risk compromising their fertility and heterosexual appeal. Paechter (2006, 262)can still draw on this dualism to exemplify her case for masculine attributes, her combative styleof argument contrasted with more feminine ones, precisely because the mind/body dualism hasretained its force in positioning women.
The intellectual life is still understood, largely, in masculine terms. Virginia Woolf in A roomof one’s own satirises these views of women, and quotes one Cambridge Fellow responsible forexamining women from Girton and Newnham Colleges that: ‘The best woman was intellectuallythe inferior of the worst man’ (Woolf 1945, 55). She speculates on the likely fate of Shakespeare’s‘sister’ Judith’s fate in her reflections on lost women writers. Women’s invisibility in the canon,
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be it literary, artistic or scientific requires constant recuperative work. Indeed, in our own fieldand lifetimes citation practices still continue to erase women’s achievements (Delamont 2001).The idea of the intellectual is associated with having a public, and in this sense extends beyondthe university. Universities are neither a sufficient condition for, nor co-extensive with, the ideaof the intellectual who depends on a broader public to be recognised as such (Collini 2006). Thisexternal, public definition itself creates a discursive bias towards masculinity. In Collini’s(2006) review, for example, while Virginia Woolf and Beatrice Webb get passing reference, it isclear that posing the question of intellectuals not only opens up the always elsewhere of ‘Englishintellectuals’, but by implication, the similarly contradictory anomaly of the intellectual woman.In a recent poll (Herman 2005) to produce a list of global public intellectuals involving over 20,000voters, not a single woman appeared in the top 10 and only 3 in the top 20.
The issue is complex not least because of the anti-intellectualism to be found in the academy.Butler situates this as part of an anxiety about whether we have an effect; and in particular, thenecessity of dealing with difficult texts (qua intellectual labour) seeming to negate the likelihoodof an easy identification of any effects:
Those intellectuals who speak in a rarefied way are being scapegoated, are being purged, are beingdenounced precisely because they represent a certain anxiety about everyone’s effect – that is, whateffect are any of us having, and what effect can we have? (Salih with Butler 2004, 329)
This anxiety is as recognisable in feminist writing as elsewhere, and perhaps even more so,because all emancipatory projects imagine a transformation of current conditions and theorise itspossibilities (London Feminist Salon Collective 2004; Clegg 2006). The resources of critique, touse Callincos’s (2006) evocative phrase, necessarily involves theoretical labour since, whetherconsidered from a Marxist or post-structuralist perspective, the world is not a transparent text.
Despite all the above, one factor that stands out in relation to women thinking about theintellectual life is pleasure: Virginia Woolf’s room and independent income of her own;Beauvoir’s autobiographical writing which can be read as a testament to the pleasures ofthought; and even under the conditions of contemporary academic life, which we continuallycritique, the perverse pleasures Hey identifies and the frisson of recognition ‘in coming out’ asan intellectual (Hey 2004, 36). The pleasures Hey (2004) describes are perverse preciselybecause they are inter-locked with the repetitive citation of research performance and an illicitpleasure in competition; in knowing who is ‘in’ or ‘out’, and in being ‘in’ oneself. She speaks ofthe pleasure in getting her Chair, and celebratory new clothes buying, citing Joyce who dared to‘go blonde’ on receiving hers:
This account reveals both the power and regulatory force of the masculine norm as well as thecalculated exercise of female power to ameliorate it. Again it is understood how the binary marks offemininity and masculinity are mapped onto mind/body distinction (Hey 2004, 39)
Hey’s (2004) intervention is made in the context of a feminist practice, but my own datasuggest that the positive pleasures of female (and male) intellectual identities might be more wide-spread (Clegg 2007). Intellectual pleasure did not appear confined to specific roles but offered aform of sustenance and way of being which crossed teaching, research and administrative/mana-gerial functions, as well as crossing the public/private divide. The strong sense of ‘being’ an intel-lectual suggests that the term, with its parallels with Said’s (2004) idea of the role of scholar andteacher, continues to have resonance despite the deprecations of the English. In the micro-politicsof the academy it is redemptive as a way of holding onto certain values and, for women, as away of claiming voice, a form of performativity and subjectification that can be claimed as awoman, and which appears to be deeply implicated in the narratives of the self who is ‘I’.
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Reading the self as intellectual
In this section I want to present an analysis of one woman who describes herself as an academicmanager and presents herself as an intellectual. For her there is no break in the subject work ofbeing an academic manager and doing this in a way that continues to sustain the longer trajectoryof the self as an intellectual woman.3
I have presented a fuller analysis of the study from which these data were taken elsewherebased on interrogating the data for themes and exploring the range of possible identities (Clegg2007). For the purposes of this paper, I want to present an idiographic analysis which involvescareful attention to meaning for the individual and a detailed reading of the transcript as a wholein isolation from the rest of the data. This enables an exploration of the subjective meaning ofthe thing, in this case academic identity, for that individual. This analysis from within thephenomenological tradition allows for the exploration of discourse but also of embodied catego-ries of selfhood, sociality and so on, which were recurrent themes in the first part of this paper.In dwelling on aspects of the lifeworld that have been identified in the phenomenological tradi-tion (Ashworth 1999, 2003), I hope to show how such an analysis can usefully shed light on theissues associated with the idea of woman as universal voice, and also as a way of reflecting onthe debates about identity. The categories of the lifeworld have been elaborated by Ashworth(2003) who distinguishes:
● Selfhood: What does the situation mean for social identity; the person’s sense of agency,and their feeling of her own presence and voice in the situation?
● Sociality: How does the situation affect relations with others?● Embodiment: How does the situation relate to feelings about their own body, including
gender and emotions?● Temporality: How is the sense of time, duration, biography affected?● Spatiality: How is their picture of the geography of the places they need to go to and act
within affected by the situation?● Project: How does the situation relate to their ability to carry out the activities they are
committed to and which they regard as central to their life?● Discourse: What sort of terms – educational, social, commercial, ethical etc – are
employed to describe the situation? (Ashworth 2003, 265)
In my analysis I have fore-grounded selfhood, project and discourse as these appeared as thedominate categories and partly for reasons of space. Although embodiment, temporality andsociality come through strongly in the ways ‘Claire’4 describes her journey, her uncompromisingsense of self as a woman, and her insistence on a counter-hegemonic significance of sociality inthe academy.
I have chosen Claire because although some of the other women in the study described thesignificance being an intellectual had for them, she presents an interesting case of someonewhose discipline, mathematics, is still associated with forms of masculine mastery, and alsobecause she has chosen to take a managerial route without giving up on her identity as an intel-lectual. Given the extensive literature on managerialism this is an interesting juxtaposition. Herrole is as deputy dean in a large faculty in a post-92 UK university, she no longer teaches orengages in subject research. The exploration of the lifeworld which follows does not foreclosethe meaning of this position, rather my aim is to allow for a close interrogation of her sense ofself. She describes her position as giving her a particular place from which she is both critical ofways of being in the academy, and a consciousness of the potential of newer subject positionsespecially for women. Claire has professorial status, attained prior to taking up her current role,which is significant to her as a form of recognition and part of her personal project. She has
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worked in higher education for a number of years moving from a subject leadership role to asenior ‘academic’ (her emphasis) management role. She specifically rejects the idea of theacademic being defined solely in terms of subject expertise. Rather, she characterises it, and herown approach, as involving intellectual rigour. She describes her project as an academicmanager as involving essentially the same types of academic analysis that she previouslybrought to teaching, research and the organisation of her subject.
Selfhood
The idea of the intellectual is absolutely central to Claire’s approach across contexts:
So for me professional practice has to be informed by an academic and intellectual perspective, andI would say that still applies to me now as an academic manager. I can’t just do things, I’ve got todo those things which are informed by that intellectual procedure.
The ‘I’ve got to’ suggests a compulsory urge, something inescapable in her sense of being,which she describes across all stages of her career. This temporal transcendence suggests a ‘being’in time rather than the particular temporalities associated with a management role whose differ-ential tempi and pressures have been described elsewhere (Clegg 2003; Adam 1995). She employsthe categories of intellectual skills and capacities to typify her approach throughout the interview,in contrast to her perception of how others understand the academic as concerning expertise:
So there is a sense from outside that if you’re an academic people want to know what’s your subject,and it’s about you being an expert in that area. And I don’t think that’s the only valid definition ofbeing an academic, and it’s not one that I would apply to myself. But if you are an academic youhave to value quite highly critical thinking, critique, all those intellectual skills, if you like, as beinga way in which change on the ground for people’s improvement can be realised.
This contrast is illuminating because she uncouples an intellectual approach from that ofmere expertise, discipline area, or research. She suggests this approach is the grounding of herlifeworld and sense of self which is broader than just the role; ‘being’ an intellectual is describedas much ‘part of what’s me as being a Mum’ and defines her sense of being a woman in quitefundamental ways. She describes a splitting in relationship to public/private, and being good at‘switching off’, but this switching is in relationship to the role not the continuity of self as intel-lectual across fields. Being an intellectual for her involves a form of analysis and way of thinkingand approaching problems that crosses boundaries, and applies to her mode of being in the worldirrespective of whether the job involves activities outside of the more conventionally ‘academic’.Her sense of the intellectual is deeply embodied and relates equally to subject positions – moth-erhood, manager, being a School Governor – not normally aligned with this form of critical anal-ysis. In relationship to her Governor role, she describes how they like having a ‘Professor’ anddescribes her contribution as resting on ‘intellectual critique’. Her attachment to being anacademic is profound and grounds her understanding about what being an academic managerinvolves: ‘I would never have wanted to be an academic manager without also being seen to bean academic, a serious academic’. The description of ‘manager intellectual’, therefore, seemedto me to capture her way of being an academic; a way of thinking, not a realm of expertise orrestricted to role.
Project
Over Claire’s career there had been shifts in the contexts within which she was acting. Theseallowed her to refocus and develop different projects, as well as refuse other paths. Moving from
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the compulsory school sector into higher education had provided a way for her to pursue herdiscipline-related intellectual interests at a point where staying in schools would have put her ona general education management trajectory. However, she brought with her a strong sense of herdiscipline’s difficulty (mathematics) and the particular intellectual problems students experi-enced which she argued crossed the sectors. She describes having to push her approach to thepedagogy: ‘And it’s interesting because it’s taken, I would say, twelve years for that to becomeofficially recognised as an issue in the universities despite, you know, pushing it, pushing it’.
This sense of having to push her personal project is closely tied to her characterisation ofuniversities as being insufficiently intellectual spaces:
… on the whole I find that universities are in some respects insufficiently intellectual places, so Iwould argue that there’s a lot of what goes on in universities that is uncritical from an intellectualperspective, and it’s just sort of, you know, how we’ve done things for years and years. … Whatpeople are encouraging [in students] can be very uncritical and almost anti-intellectual at times.
Her personal project, therefore, is pitted against deep-seated disciplinary traditions and waysof thinking. She describes, for example, how things have been repackaged in higher educationin terms of the new language of learning outcomes but without really rethinking what it meansto describe a degree programme, or why a seminar in a discipline is the way it is. Although sherejects the traditional project of subject expertise, she seems equally to reject what might bedescribed as the ‘academic development’ project and subject position (McWilliam 2002) coun-tering both with her critical intellectual project. She relates this in part to her understanding oftraditional academic identity as being tied to expertise, so that to challenge a particular moduleis experienced as a challenge to the person’s research area and thus experienced personally. Inthis sense she sees academics as highly individualised and isolated, and she explicitly links thisback to gender contrasting the more sociable feminized spaces of the school to the closed spacesof the university.
While some aspects of her project are made difficult by dominant definitions, she conecptu-alises her role as having have allowed her opportunities to innovate and pursue the arguments,and this she attributes to some of the specific characteristics of the institution. Describing howthe academic has become attached to a much narrower definition of research she argues:
I think it’s very particular at [names insistution] compared with some other institutions; you’re notseen, I think, as a proper academic in some institutions unless you have got a good research profile
Her perception is of the institutional specificity of university cultures. In particular, shevalorizes the space of a newer university against the more research obsessed traditional elite.She describes her own as one which is able to support her in working towards her project. Forexample, she felt professorial recognition would have been more difficult in the more traditionalparts of the sector:
Now I think I’ve been quite lucky because I don’t think I would ever have got a Chair in the olduniversity sector. But because… has criteria which also recognise contribution in other ways, andI’ve done a lot of professional work actually in… education, both nationally and internationally, soI could, I could succeed here, and that has actually been surprisingly an important thing. It mattersto me, (a) that I have the title, but (b) that I’ve got it not because I’m an out-and-out researcher,because that’s making a statement really, and at the time, don’t think that’s true now, but at the timeI was, nationally there’s a group of… professors, and I was the only person who had got that titlenot primarily through being a… you know devoting all my life to research. And that felt importantin terms of my membership of the academy, if you like, that you didn’t have to be traditional to havethose labels, if that makes sense. And I think it’s quite interesting for women, because I’ve had thisconversation with other women about the tension between generalised, generally and specialists,
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and… how do you do that? How do you become a more senior academic, if you like, or have thatbe part be an accepted part of the academy without being a specialist?
What is presented here is a lengthy analysis of the ways in which selfhood, project, and theparticular characteristics of the institution relate and in ways she feels have enabled her toachieve recognition in light of her own, not the traditional, academic project. She genders herproject by suggesting that more women take on this mode of being in the academy than men. Inthis sense her project is closely tied to a particular form of embodiment as a woman, and reflect-ing on what it means to be a woman in academy. She depicts her own stance in contrast to thetraditional individualism of the academy, and stresses sociality and striving to achieve relation-ships through her personal project of supporting staff in their practice. Thus, as a woman she seesherself as able to struggle against and to a certain extent re-write the academic project. Her plea-sure in the professorial title is significant and is related to how she sees the creative possibilitiesof being an intellectual, including the utility of the title for her roles in the community, as beingabout more than focusing narrowly on research.
Discourse
As is clear from the above the framing of the whole interview takes place in the context of thediscourse of expertise understood in particular ways as being about the exclusive focus on partic-ular areas of research. This is presented as the dominant discourse in older universities and isalso discursively positioned in relationship to masculinity. The discourse of expert is presentedas deeply ingrained and powerful affecting the whole structure of identity in academia such that:
I mean I think one of the things that academics suffer is that if you are seen to be an academic andyou are seen to be an expert, that provokes a scenario where you can’t be seen to not know certainthings, and I think that has provoked a culture where people tend to be more isolated as academics,and what it means to be professional in your relationships with others is not as open as and de-personalised, if you like, as it ought to. You can’t express ignorance if you’re supposed to be anexpert in this, or you can’t if you disagree… with somebody, it’s often too tied up for them with theirpersonal knowledge and self-esteem and position as an expert, and so people have to be able to sepa-rate those two things out, and I’m not sure that actually in higher education people are very good atdoing that.
Her own personhood and self-identity are thus defined against this dominant masculinediscourse and much of the interview represents a critique of the limitations of the ‘expert’. Thisclearly relates to sociality as she frames the social relations of the academy in terms of the waysthe demands of expertise isolate practitioners. Her own project in terms of sociality is, therefore,to try to open more areas for the collegial debate not restricted by what she sees as the negativeeffects of the need to protect expertise. This discursive framing draws on notions of gender andof hierarchy since different higher education spaces are characterised as being more or lesswilling to recognise different forms of practice. The traditional university sector is projected asbeing dominated by an allegiance to forms of prestige narrowly associated with ‘expertise’demonstrated largely through research.
In the interview all aspects of Claire’s lifeworld support her description of her identity as anacademic thinker who is rigorously intellectual in her approach, not only in relationship to thedifferent roles she had played in academia, but also in the capacities she bring to external serviceand to motherhood. Her approach to being an academic manager is based on a rejection of thedominant, socially isolating discourse of expertise as the sole basis of academic legitimacy,which she sees as inhibiting a critical intellectual approach to the practices of the universityitself. While she describes the struggles she continues to face in terms of realising her project she
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nonetheless conceptualises the institution as one which supports her approach and has providedrecognition for the sort of work she is engaged in. Academic management is experienced asbeing an integrated, distinctively academic and intellectual identity, rather than one whichpresents itself as something separate from, or different to, other academic ways of being.
Reflections
The challenge of reading Claire’s story is precisely that it stands alongside other gloomier prog-nostications in the literature on performativity, audit and managerialism (Clegg and McAuley2005) suggesting that the inscription of these practices stands in a complex and incompleterelationship to the personal project and its pleasures (Hey 2004). While agency cannot in anysimple sense be read off from a phenomenological analysis of the text of an interview, engagingwith the messiness of the embodied subject does point to the need to re-engage with the prob-lematic of agency (Hey 2006). The analysis does not imply that Claire in some way escapes thepressures inherent in performativity, however, it does suggest that what Ball (2003) describes asthe operation of autonomous ethical codes particular to a profession have not been entirelyerased. The discourse of the intellectual self remains available as a way of asserting a particularform of selfhood within the academy (Clegg 2007) and, moreover, does not seem to be tied to asimple notion of expertise or research but, as in Claire’s case, can sustain a sense of self in whatmight seem from the outside as the hostile social environment of university management. I have,therefore, revisited the site of intellectual being as particularly fruitful in thinking about (our)possible agency and as touching on the sorts of anti-intellectualism Butler diagnoses. This is notto argue for a dualism action/contemplation but precisely in order to hold the two in a productivetension. Nor would I want to claim the university as a privileged site for intellectuals. Gramsci’stheorising of organic intellectuals gives one good reason to be sceptical of the privileging of anysuch claims and, as Mary Evans (2004) has reminded us, some of the most invigorating ideas toenter the academy over the last century have come from outside its walls. I would like to suggest,however, that ‘unnatural’ place in which many women find themselves in the academy can be aproductive place from which to analyse its contradictions. Feminists have been particularlyperspicacious in analysing the micro-politics of academic power (Morley 2003). Indeed, becausethe academy is premised on the CV and individual competitiveness it gives rise to particular sortsof performative hyper-masculinities, often thinly disguised in egalitarian rhetoric. Analysinghow female academics, including women mangers, negotiate this complex gendering is a power-ful site for interrogating academic identities and how these are mobilised in negotiating poweras Eveline’s (2005) subtle analysis of the position of a prominent female Vice Chancellor demon-strates. Women’s not ‘belonging’ may make it easier to recuperate some of the critical potentialof the pleasures of the intellect. This has a darker side of course in the hyper-perfomativity Hey(2004) notes, and in the ways feminists and other women drive themselves to excel in theresearch game. However, it important to recognise that despite national policy and internationaltrends the spaces of the university are not smooth and undifferentiated. Even within a universityDepartmental and other cultures may provide differential possibilities for the formation of partic-ular sorts of academic identity, resistance and re-inscription; and attention to the differing tempo-ralities of the lifeworld remains an under-theorised resource for thinking about identity andperformativity (Adam 2003).
I have suggested elsewhere that not all contradictions are capable of intellectual resolution(Clegg 2006). What Butler and other post-structuralists share with Marxism is a commitment tothe importance of critique, and a recognition that unmasking is not the same as undoing. Bothpositions imply a political moment for their effectiveness and a move to action; a new enactment,while simultaneously demonstrating through deconstruction, the conditions of existence and
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interests underlying various propositions. Critique is a necessary, but not sufficient, moment inaction to ameliorate or remedy the (negative) effects of the status quo. To argue from the stanceof the intellectual self at this moment, however, strikes me as having a particular resonance. Theanti-intellectualism and utilitarianism of the modern academy means that a defence of intellectualspaces is not to hark back to the ‘good old days’ but re-imagine the new, and to re-imagine it inways that are inclusive of women and of other excluded groups. Beauvoir’s challenge of speak-ing in the universal voice remains. This move might seem to run absolutely counter to theconcern with difference expressed within post-structuralism. Yet, the plurality of being,suggested by Paechter’s (2006) person who is me instantiated in multiple feminities in differenttime and places, is not incommensurable with the idea that to speak as a woman, from the bodyas a situation, pries open the limits of a false universalism which pretends to speak for all fromplaces of class, racialised and gendered privilege. The reason empirical as well as theoreticalwork is important is that it gives insight into Hey’s (2006) messy, fleshy, agentive subjects whosecontinuous sense of self in the world, necessitated by their relationship to their environment,creates the basis for the enactment of particular selves and also the resources of resistance. Whatinterests me is not just how identity is performed and enacted but how it can be done differently,whether at the seemingly trivial level of blond hair (although women behaving badly in academia– much to my constant pleasure – do still seem to have the power to shock), or at the level ofresisting some of the more pernicious forms of citation that now bedevil not just academic butmany other forms of competitive social life.
Notes1. The two are not co-extensive.2. Moi argues that the sex/gender distinction does not operate in the same way in French as it does in
English.3. Parts of this analysis were presented at SRHE but presented in the context of different theoretical
problematic.4. I use Claire as her pseudonym.
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