Knowing Feminists: The (Mis)use of (Our)selves

In this chapter we focus on how feminist academics are invited and even compelled to share and narrate their experiences of becoming academic. Specifically, we explore how personal accounts of (mis)recognition, feeling like an imposter, and failure are implicated in feminists taking up space across the career course. We return to feminist methodological debates, and question how experiential ways of knowing—via the self—are become empirical material. This chapter is inspired and contextualised by three examples of telling or storying academic selves, which take place online as well as face-to-face: the #immodestwomen hashtag on academic Twitter, the increasing attention to and confessing of ‘imposter syndrome’, and the production and circulation of ‘CVs of failure’. We suggest that such instances are fractured by career categories and entrenched intersectional inequalities, and moreover, conceptualise each as an example of how becoming-academic is narrated to both claim and contest academic recognition. We situate the three examples of academics sharing their experiences in relation to enduring feminist debates about the epistemological and political significance of experiential knowledge, including the limits of reflexivity, confessional modes of telling, and the commodification of diversity stories. As such this chapter returns to our methodological concern with feminist research that remains ambivalently committed to accounts of our own experiences as empirical material, as we ask how feminists can continue to work with such methods in fragmented, fractured, and interrupted ways.