Stretching Career Stages

This chapter focuses on how feminists take up academic space via the categorical distinctions of the career course, working to fit into this whilst stretching and unsettling the premises of an academic career. In this chapter we situate our analytic concern with feminist repetitions, thinking about how many aspects of feminist academic work are labouriously repetitive, as insights are glossed over, ignored, and incorporated in the non-feminist university. Feminists encounter the necessity and frustration of repeating themselves, making feminist moves and evidencing feminist arguments over and over again. We situate these repetitions in relation to research that turns methods back towards the university. We then attend to categorical academic career stages themselves, exploring their contested definitions, questioning how precarity and privilege are inscribed, and how career stages are fractured by enduring educational inequalities according to for instance, class, race, and gender. We make the case for our creative and collaborative interruptions, methods which are broadly auto-ethnographic and combine techniques from collective biography and sociological fiction with insights from feminist criticism of the reflexive turn in social science. We argue that interruptions are particularly appropriate for investigating feminist inhabitations of career categories. Throughout we attend to how feminists in the academy repeat themselves, interrupt the non-feminist university, and are themselves interrupted across the career course.