Abstract
Women continue to be under-represented in senior positions in universities and their relative absence from the top jobs in management and business schools remains a cause for concern. The aim of this study is to extend understanding of this situation by drawing on the feminist psychoanalytical post-structuralist theories of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The theoretical frame proposed engages with debates over language, discourse and the body and allows development of a theory of the disembodied symbolic order explaining women’s continued marginalization and devaluation in academe. This is achieved through analysis of empirical findings of the experiences of women faculty in nine management and business schools in England. The study demonstrates how male norms and woman’s absence from symbolic representations disables their participation in equivalent terms in the institutions studied, and how women often both collude with and resist their own marginalization in academia.
Introduction
Women’s under-representation in education settings across the globe, and especially in the more powerful or influential posts, is well established, (Bailyn, 2003; Morley, 2006; Van den Brink, Benschop & Jensen, 2010). In twenty-seven countries of the European Union, women occupy only 15 per cent of full professorship and/or tenured positions (European Commission, 2006; LERU, 2012). The under-representation of women within the academy extends to editorial board memberships (Metz & Harzing, 2009, 2012) and research funding bodies (European Commission, 2008). These gender differences are also present in business and management schools: they have not diminished over the course of the last decade and may have increased in some cases (see Table 1). For example, only five out of twenty leading business schools around the world (London Business School, UST Hong Kong, HEC Paris, Saïd Business School and Esade) have doubled their number of women faculty between the years 2002 and 2010, and women still comprise only a quarter to a third of all business school appointments. For the majority of institutions, including the top business schools in the USA (e.g. Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale), the percentages of women faculty have either not increased or increased only very slightly. In some cases their numbers have decreased over time (e.g. IMD Switzerland from 11 per cent to 9 per cent, INSEAD and Duke from 17 per cent to 14 per cent and NYU Stern from 19 per cent to 18 per cent). The data presented below do not differentiate between junior and senior faculty, but discrepancies between male and female faculty are even more pronounced in senior management posts in the respective institutions. The gender distribution within business education concerning students (with far fewer women in MBA programmes and virtually no programmes aimed at developing female leaders) is also particularly evident for a majority of the highest ranked schools (Ibeh, Carter, Poff & Hamill, 2008).
Percentage of women faculty in the top 20 business and management schools in FT ranking in the years 2002–2010.
Based on global MBA programmes included in 2010 FT ranking.
N/A, data are not available.
In UK universities, men outnumber women by a margin of four to one in senior academic positions, while women are over-represented in lower teaching grades and temporary research posts (Acker & Dillabough, 2007; Bagilhole, 2002; Morley, 1999). The dramatic increase in numbers of students and university lecturers in higher education, and in management schools in the UK specifically, has hardly altered the nature of gendered work relations in the university (Fletcher, Boden, Kent & Tinson, 2007). Statistics do not show the informal processes of exclusion and devaluation that constitute major impediments to women faculty members’ achievements (Morley, 1999; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012). The question therefore is not the numbers per se, but the demands made by academic life on women if they are to be accepted and succeed. Women’s continuing marginalization has profound implications both on how knowledge is reproduced and on what counts as knowledge. This strikes at the very heart of the academic enterprise (Maranto & Griffin, 2011), posing questions about the gendering of meritocracy (Morley & Lugg, 2009). It may also have a potentially detrimental impact on promoting different role models for future operatives and leaders (Starkey & Tempest, 2005). Yet existing critiques in management and organization studies of gendered ways of thinking (Calás & Smircich, 1991, 1996; Gherardi, 1995; Trethewey, 1999) are rarely applied to research on academic labour, and there are virtually no studies on how women live within the supposedly universal masculine symbolic order of academia. Further, how available discourses and representations may be taken up and responded to by women themselves has not been sufficiently researched until now. Such omissions impede understanding of the persisting inequalities that women experience in university settings.
The paper aims to address this gap by turning to the work of feminist psychoanalysts and post-structuralist philosophers Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva for a theoretical inspiration. Their core ideas, concerned with the sexuated structure of language and the abjection of the real and/or imagined female body in the masculine symbolic order, are employed here in the analysis of women’s negative experiences in nine management and business schools in England. I consider both as central to academic knowledge creation and for exploring women’s under-representation and their subordinate position in academe. This also helps us understand how the structure of the masculine symbolic mobilizes affective responses so that women both reproduce and resist the gendered rules of academia. The article makes theoretical contributions followed by practical recommendations. The psychoanalytic insights drawn from Irigaray and Kristeva’s work are used to develop a theory of the disembodied symbolic order by focusing on extra-discursive aspects of academic labour and the materiality of gender. The study demonstrates how the male norm dominating academic knowledge production is perceived and lived by female faculty in the institutions studied. Specifically, it examines how circulating discourses are re-enacted through affect and the body as inherent aspects of organizational life in academia. Such work has only recently begun to be explored in organization and management literature (see Fotaki, Long & Schwartz, 2012, for review) but there has been virtually no application of these ideas to the study of gender in academic institutions. The article also takes forward an emerging interest in applying Kristeva’s idea of abjection to studying organizations (Höpfl, 2000; Phillips & Rippin, 2010), and Irigaray’s work on woman’s absence from knowledge to thinking about leadership (see Oseen, 1997) and women’s representations in management (Kenny & Bell, 2011; Vachhani, 2012). Its practical implication is to propose a means for bringing about change by ways of altering the symbolic order to allow emergence of new knowledge and ways of representing difference within it.
The remainder is organized as follows. A brief review of gender research in management and organization studies is given first, in order to identify gaps and omissions where Irigaray and Kristeva’s insights may offer powerful contributions. The analytic framework drawing on their ideas is then developed. The sections on methods and analysis of findings in light of the proposed theories follow. In conclusion, the study’s contribution to organization theory and practice is discussed.
Theoretical Context: Gender in Academia
There are many explanations for the ‘persistent and alarming under-representation of women in senior posts, despite the growth of feminism in the academy and the increase in the number of female undergraduate students’ (Morley, 1999, p. 12). The dominant approaches can be broadly divided into (1) sociological works by feminists and sociologists of education concerned with overturning the inequitable division of labour that is a product of patriarchy (Acker & Dillabough, 2007; Fox, 2005; Long, Scott, Paul & McGinnis, 1993; Reskin, 2003) and (2) broad social constructionist analyses concerned with unveiling the unspoken norms and assumptions about gender differences in organization studies literature (Garforth & Kerr, 2009; Powell, Bagilhole & Dainty, 2008; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012).
Feminist sociologists were the first to identify institutional factors in universities as an extension of social structures of patriarchy and the root cause of women’s unequal treatment in higher education. Their work focused on historical patterns governing academic careers, and their intersections with women’s family and caring obligations (Fox, 2005; ‘Long, Scott, Paul & McGinnis, 1993; Reskin, 2003). For example, Long and co-workers (1993) have demonstrated that about one half of gender differences in academic promotions can be attributed to women producing fewer publications than men. This affects negatively their promotion prospects despite the quality of women’s papers being comparable to those produced by men (Leahy, 2006). A recent study noted an upward shift in publication records for full-time academics in Australian universities (Bentley, 2012), but women remained significantly less likely than men to report international research collaborations, and this continued to have a negative impact on their academic standing. Other authors indicate how ‘feminine’ roles from outside professional life seem to continue to disadvantage women’s careers, and how their careers limit their personal life choices. For instance, marriage was found to have a negative impact on women’s productivity while it had a mildly positive effect for men (Probert, 2005). Women were also more likely to have fewer children and be unmarried when compared to men (Long, Scott, Paul & McGinnis, 1993). Complex considerations affecting women’s position in academia extend beyond marital status and the presence or absence of children (Fox, 2005; Probert, 2005) or the existence of institutional policies aiming to promote gender diversity (Gatrell, 2011). This suggests that gender stereotypes are ideological and prescriptive, and their influence on academic employment processes is unlikely to diminish simply with the passage of time or with accumulating evidence of women’s capabilities (Benschop & Brouns, 2003). Women’s relative absence from senior academic positions is not simply a result of poor policy or erratic implementation, but a deep-seated issue requiring cultural and generational change (Bagilhole, 2002). The complexities and ambiguities of gendered organizations require far more complex and nuanced analyses for challenging such unspoken rules (Bailyn, 2003). Thus, though the contribution of conventional sociological approaches to the study of gender in academia is very significant, their focus on institutional structures tends to leave out issues of how these interact with other vital aspects of organization life, including subjectivity, discourse and affect. Research from various regions including Australia (Winchester, Lorenzo, Browning, & Chesterman, 2006), Sweden (Falkenberg, 2003), Finland (Kantola, 2008), the Netherlands (Van den Brink, Benschop & Jensen, 2010), the UK (Morley, 1999) and North America (Bailyn, 2003; Maranto & Griffin, 2011) demonstrates that improving institutional conditions may not be sufficient to eradicate bias and prevent the discrimination of women in academe.
Post-structuralist feminist re-readings of mainstream organizational theory and practice by Calás & Smircich (1991), Martin and Knopoff (1995) and Mumby and Putnam (1992) or the feminist critiques of gendered definitions of work (Fletcher, 1998) could potentially make substantive contributions, but until now these have been rarely used when theorizing gender in academia. For instance, Trethewey’s (1999) employment of Foucauldian perspective to discuss the often graphic forms of disciplining of female bodies at work could be usefully extended to understanding women’s position in academe. Gherardi’s (1995) research on organizational symbolism, metaphors and archetypes in relation to gender, power and culture could serve as another inspiration. The absence of research on women’s position in academia is inexplicable, especially given the numerous studies showing that organizational culture in universities is ‘solidly masculinized’ (Leathwood & Read, 2009, p. 176). The most recent notable exceptions addressing this issue (see Brewis, 2005, Martin, 1994, and Van den Brink, Benschop & Jensen, 2010, published in Organization; Tyler & Cohen, 2009, and Van den Brink, Benschop & Jensen, 2010, in Organization Studies or Riad, 2007, in Culture and Organization and Maranto & Griffin, 2011, in Human Relations) are still too few and far between to overturn this trend. Last but not least, the virtual neglect of important and highly influential works by women feminist scholars such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous and Haraway, to name but a few (see Harding, Ford & Fotaki, 2013, for a further discussion), emphasizes the problem. Feminist approaches to language and body are useful for exploring gender in academia and for understanding knowledge production.
This study addresses some of these omissions by introducing insights from the oeuvre of only two eminent feminist philosophers, namely, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Their work examines issues of body, language and affect through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. A conceptual integration of some of their rich but diverse texts is offered here, to extend understanding of gender inequalities and asymmetries of power in academia, while acknowledging important differences in their work. The aim of the study is two-fold. One is to use Irigaray’s idea of the unsymbolized woman, and her construction as an abject other and ‘matter’ elaborated by Kristeva, to better understand the position of woman as non-place in academia. Both are considered as central to academic knowledge creation and for exploring women’s under-representation and their subordinate position in academe. For the root of women’s exclusion and silencing in academia, it is argued, lies beyond the explanations that the social constructionist and the sociological feminist approaches offer and must be sought in a combination of the de-intellectualization of women and their abjection, both linked to the female body. The focus then shifts onto how devaluing the material aspects of knowledge production becomes inscribed in women’s psyches and leads to affective responses that may simultaneously resist and support the exclusionary structures governing universities. The second aim therefore is to examine how external events may be reproduced in subjects themselves and become parts of their identities as female academics.
Analytic Framework: The Unsymbolized Woman as the Abject ‘Other’ in Academe
The path-breaking feminist ideas of Luce Irigaray (1985, 1991, 1993) and Julia Kristeva (1982, 1986a, 1986b) are influenced both by psychoanalysis and post-structuralism and are used here to explain, from a novel perspective, women’s continued marginalization in academe. It must be clarified at the outset that there is no intention to attempt a grand synthesis or even a summary of the multifaceted and complex work of these two philosophers: the brief exegesis of some of their ideas offered below can do justice neither to the richness nor important differences in their theorizing. Very broadly speaking, Irigaray focuses on language and sexual difference while Kristeva is more preoccupied with maternal forms of signification, originating in the body as a site for the dissolution of Western dualism. This is not dissimilar to Irigaray’s project that strives to create conditions enabling women’s self-expression through language. However, rather than extending her theorizing to all aspects of the feminine, Kristeva develops her idea of the semiotic preverbal rhythms of the body without which language cannot function. 1 Crucially, both critique masculine language as a means of excluding women from an active subject position as is explained below. Limitations of space necessitate a selective reading of Irigaray and Kristeva’s ideas: I focus on those most pertinent to this study. The proposed analytic frame detailed below specifically draws on: (i) Irigaray’s theorization on the absence and misrepresentation of woman in patriarchal structures and (ii) Kristeva’s criticism of the abjection of the (feminine) body and woman’s exclusion from symbolization.
Luce Irigaray: The absent woman
Luce Irigaray (1985) was one of the first psychoanalyst feminists to denounce the representation of women in relation to, and exclusively through, male discourse. There was, she argued, an absence of adequate linguistic, social, iconic, theoretical, mythical, religious and abstract scientific symbols for woman ‘due to too few figurations, images of representations by which to represent herself’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 71). Irigaray has tried to deconstruct and subvert from within all kinds of male-dominated discourses, by strategically re-reading them. Through her feminist analysis of Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida, she elucidated the equation of the feminine with matter and nature, and exposed woman’s habitual absence from science and philosophy where she ‘is most often hidden as woman and absent in the capacity of subject’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 132).
Irigaray derided the uncritical discourse of psychoanalysis too (see Whitford, 1991, section II) by attacking the reproduction of the notion of sexual difference as a negative ontological predicament. Standard psychoanalytic theory has, according to Irigaray, deployed this idea to theorize male identity formation while female identity was defined as its corollary, thus reinforcing sexual and political domination over women (Irigaray, 1985) and, arguably, over some men who find themselves outside the heterosexual norm (Irigaray, 1993). Because woman was represented as the opposite ‘other’ of the male and was defined in relation to the same, which was tacitly assumed to be masculine, the male (phallocentric) discourse is considered as universal to all (Irigaray, 1991, 1993). The fact that women have no language of their own therefore has to do with the way the foundations of knowledge are established. Mistakenly cast as essentialist, Irigaray’s reference to female sexuality was meant to draw attention to the absence of woman from language and representation: this, as Irigarary argued, promoted male norms as universal, thus perpetuating the ‘sameness’ of knowledge. Sexual difference and gender, she contends, are impossible without women occupying a subject position and defining themselves in their own terms, and men learning to communicate with other subjects (Irigaray, 1993, p. 63).
Julia Kristeva: The abject (maternal) body
Kristeva also identifies the necessity to produce a different kind of subject through upsetting the patriarchal symbolic and destabilizing the language. Yet, for her, it is the portrayal of woman as mother, particularly evident in the Western tradition, that excludes her from the symbolic; the patriarchal social order is essentially defined by separating the maternal body from subjectivity: ‘the child learns to repel and reject parts of the self that are associated with the feminine, which becomes the abject’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 171). The abjected maternal body is then displaced onto all women (whether they are mothers or not). This precludes women from self-definition in terms other than that of the repressed body which acquires the quality of the object for the male subject to define himself against while it is being simultaneously idolized and rejected:
The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it. (Kristeva, 1982, pp. 1–2)
Kristeva’s account is heavily influenced by Lacan’s post-structuralist re-reading of psychoanalysis in which the differentiation of the subject from the m(other) is achieved by accepting the system of rules and norms known as the Law of the Father. 2 But she departs from Lacan in her explicit focus on the significance of the preverbal stage in the constitution of subjectivity and in so doing she rehabilitates the maternal/feminine from (in)signification. Kristeva’s focus is on the semiotic preverbal aspects of the body, which she considers indispensable for meaning making in the symbolic order: ‘because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic’ (Kristeva, 1986a, p. 93).
To sum up, the relevance of Irigaray’s arguments for understanding women’s position in academia is underscored by the following: (i) woman is absent from socio-symbolic space as she is not defined in her own right but in relation to man; (ii) the history of Western thought is articulated in terms of a male discourse in which woman figures as the irredeemable other as she is equated with nature and man’s unwanted body. Kristeva’s work is valuable because she reiterates Irigaray’s points about woman’s misrepresentation in language by exploring how (iii) woman is exterior to the self because of the discourse of motherhood and the abjection of the maternal body that are conflated with the feminine; (iv) such exteriority of the semiotic/maternal renders language unstable and opens up a possibility for social transformation, as will be discussed later. Taken together these theoretical insights foreground the choice of method and the analysis of stories of women’s difficulties in management and business schools in England described below.
Methodology and Methods
The empirical aim of the study was to account for how experiences and perceptions of what it is to be a woman in academia impact on the interviewees’ sense of professional self and to capture how participants responded to what was going on in their environments. The epistemological location of this study, that is, the psychoanalytical, post-structuralist frame of Irigaray and Kristeva’s work, required a methodology that allowed exploration of subjects’ internalization and re-enactment of the symbolic structures governing their environments. This methodology was provided by Hollway and Jefferson’s (2000) psychosocial approach. In this approach, ‘the real events in the external, social world are desirously and defensively, as well as discursively, appropriated’ by subjects (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, p. 24). The psychosocial approach fits well with the aim of the paper which is to explicate how external events are internalized and reproduced in subjects’ psyches and become parts of their identities as female academics. Working life stories, including incidents of ill-treatment, are reported here, so as to elucidate how such discriminatory practices are experienced subjectively and how women made sense of their ill-treatment, and to finally suggest potential ways of changing the symbolic, along the lines outlined in the opening introductory section.
Epistemological assumptions
The psychosocial approach offered works with an assumption in which person’s relation to external reality is strongly influenced by unique biographical events, which are embedded in socially shared meanings, interactions and specific situations (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, p. 104). The subject’s inner world is revealed in a relational space created through an interaction with another psychosocial subject, in this case the researcher, which has theoretical and practical consequences. First, such an approach eschews the supposed objectivity of the research process because knowledge is constructed through people’s meaning-making activities without distinction between facts and interpretations. This is in line with the psychoanalytic frame offered, where external and internal reality influence our understanding of the world in a mutually reinforcing fashion. Second (and related), researcher subjectivity is profoundly implicated in knowledge co-production: neutrality is therefore not possible. Rather than ‘emerging’ in an unproblematic way from the narratives and stories offered, theory is acknowledged to be the product of the researcher’s subjective interpretations: of Irigaray and Kristeva’s ideas on the one hand, and of their use to explain respondents’ experiences and trajectories in academia on the other hand. Third, being self-reported stories of marginalization and/or devaluation, these are interpretations of experiences, rather than ‘objective’ accounts of the causes of discrimination. Such methodological ‘limitation’ is not a disadvantage because respondents’ experiences and their perceptions of does matter for understanding women’s subordination in academe. Further, even if this is a question of attribution rather than actuality, it is still the outcome of the abjection that the study identifies. Fourth, because of the study’s focus on the subjective interpretation of symbolic structures made by respondents, the qualitative methods employed did not seek to establish objectivity, validity, reliability or generalizability. The emphasis was instead on securing credibility, consistency and transferability in terms of its usefulness for others to move their research forward (Cresswell, 2008). Finally, the stories reported here might not be representative of academia as a whole or even of business and management schools in England, but they reveal little that would be unknown to many female academics and so can be easily recognized as eminently plausible: it is the interpretation of this information, within a feminist psychoanalytical frame, that is new.
Research design
The research strategy derived from the ontology and epistemological assumptions of the chosen methods can be best described as abduction. The logic of abduction, which is also known as retroductive reasoning, comprises deductive (theory-inspired) and inductive (data-inspired) analyses. Abduction is used to generate theory from observations and lived experiences and involves iterative movements between data and theory in which theory is used to understand data but also helps further to develop theory:
However, it is not a mix of both as it does add an aspect of understanding. During the process, the empirical area of application is successively developed, and the theory (the proposing overarching pattern) is also adjusted and refined. (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009, p. 4)
Qualitative research is messy, and an advantage of abduction is that it captures some of the going to-and-fro from theory to empirical material (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009). The abduction rejects the dualism of whether the themes/stories presented here emerged out of the data, or were informed by the theoretical framing, or the chicken-and-egg question as put by one reviewer. In theory-driven analysis the researcher starts with pre-given objectives that originate in empirical observation that existing theory cannot accommodate. This enquiry was started by interrogating why there were so few women professors in the institutions in which we were working, and why women appeared to work so much harder to get the level of recognition many men enjoyed. The puzzle of explaining this author’s own and her colleagues’ predicament through available theorizing on gender in organizations has led to feminist philosophers. In order to understand what was going in women’s experience, the author solicited colleagues’ views about these issues first, before turning to the existing research for answers and then deciding to launch a theory-driven qualitative inquiry with informants she did not know. The theoretical inspiration offered by Kristeva and Irigaray’s work allowed the exploration of these issues. Though theory was not imposed on the stories offered, the author/researcher’s own subjective experiences and the (conscious and unconscious) interpretations of these influenced both the study design and analysis of the empirical material.
Working life interviews
The working life interviews were aimed to elicit narratives, and their content was interpreted with the help of the proposed theories. As was already explained, the epistemological location of the research meant that no attempt was made to identify a ‘representative’ sample, although respondents came from a variety of ethnic, national and educational backgrounds and age groups (32 to 56 years). However, since the focus of the article is on the performative effects of the construction of the category ‘woman’ rather than whether ‘woman’ is or is not a socially constructed category, the very real differences of class, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation which contextualize and separate experiences of individual women or groups of women in academia must be acknowledged. Twenty-three women in nine UK management and business schools took part in the study including: four full professors, seven senior lecturers or senior research fellows, nine lecturers or research fellows and one research associate. In-depth narrative biographic interviews lasting between one and two hours were the primary means of inquiry (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), and were all tape-recorded and transcribed in full. Because of the location in the setting researched, the author had easy access to various groups of interviewees. Interview informants were recruited from nine institutions, including my own, initially through a direct approach to people I knew and then through a process of snowball sampling. The purpose of the study was explained in soliciting their participation. Of twenty-six individuals contacted, two persons refused to participate in the research on the grounds of painful memories and privacy. One person requested for her interview to be withdrawn from the project. The study was conducted intermittently from spring 2007 till summer of 2010. All interviews began with an invitation to respondents to share their personal stories and working life trajectories in academe in the way they chose. Questions were then asked about their position in the organization, their experiences of work in academia including any potential difficulties, and their interpretations of these experiences, but no attempt was made to elicit such information before women offered their own accounts. The interviews were concluded by probing how respondents dealt with emerging problems.
The analysis of interviews
Narrative methodologies of data analysis were used to explore the stories women told about their working lives. Combining unstructured thematic analysis and biographic narrative interviews conformed with the purpose of the study and the psychosocial methods chosen (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). The logic of the psychosocial enquiry dispenses with the mistaken belief of some narrative approaches where ‘participants are “telling it like it is”, that participants know who they are and what makes them tick … and are willing and able to tell this to a stranger interviewer’ (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, pp. 2–3). Three-stage theory-driven interpretative analysis was used to identify dominant key story lines, emergent common themes and dominant overarching theoretical dimensions within each interview and across the interviews (see Table 2).
Consecutive stages in the interview analysis.
Due to a relatively small sample and the nature of narrative interviewing processes, qualitative software programs were not relied upon to identify key words and topics from the raw transcripts. Instead I worked with the whole interview and paid attention to links and contradictions within it (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). This was a subjective interpretation of empirical material as opposed to mechanistic counting how many times certain words were repeated and extracting fragments where such repetitions occurred. In the first stage of the analysis the researcher (author) conducting the interviews read all the transcripts of 43 hours of recording, immersing herself in them so as to identify the major themes, and summarizing key story lines attached to each theme (Cresswell, 2008). In the second stage of the analysis notes were made of recurring issues across the interviews, allowing identification of the emergent common themes. To ensure credibility another researcher (assistant) read all the transcripts in the context of identified key story lines, major and common themes separately, which were then discussed and further elaborated. These included the issues of (i) impeded promotion and the lack of recognition, (ii) objectification of the female body in theory and practice, (iii) working so much harder, (iv) resistance versus adjustment and (v) striving for recognition within the given symbolic norms. The third and final stage conducted by the author on her own led to emergence of three dominant overarching dimensions: (a) misrepresentation and misrecognition in the symbolic order of academe; (b) abjection and absence of the female body in academic theory and practice; and (c) the ways of counteracting and subjecting oneself to the gendered structures of academe. These are derived from the interpretation of the interview material and inspired by theories of Irigaray and Kristeva. The process of how stories led to identification of the common themes and how these then were integrated into three overarching dimensions to create an analytical frame, with the help of the proposed theories, is illustrated below.
Inscribing Gender in the Psyche in Business and Management Schools in England
The presentation of findings is as follows: common themes emerging across interviews forming each theoretical dimension are summarized first, supported by examples of key story lines from individual interviews as appropriate (see Table 2). For reasons of space, only some indicative excerpts from the interviews are presented to illustrate the process by which the theorizing on women’s position in academe was arrived at. Several strategies were applied to protect the informants’ identity, including assigning pseudonyms to respondents’ quotes, concealing particularly personal episodes and combining the responses of a number of interviewees (Hochschild, 1989/2003).
Misrepresentation and misrecognition in the symbolic order of academe
A common theme emerging from respondents’ reports was feeling like an ‘outsider’ in their institutional environments either because of an unfair allocation of work, lack of progression, exclusion from pre-existing networks, or because they often felt unwelcome and undermined, silenced or objectified in such settings. The impeded promotions were the most visible aspects of such discrimination but another, more widespread, subtext of exclusion and/or marginalization extended to less tangible dimensions. The stories of women experiencing various forms of exclusion and ‘othering’, which are presented below, are emblematic of this attitude.
Impeded progression and lack of recognition
Blocked, delayed or opposed promotion and lower pay or even bullying were commonly reported throughout the interviews. The most negative accounts of impeded progression came from women in the middle of their careers: not very junior but not senior enough to enjoy the protection that permanent professorship offers. These women were on the cusp of advancing their career and were demanding recognition which, they said, was in most cases not forthcoming, and they reported that they were often retaliated against if their demands persisted. Informants recounted various stories and incidents of mistreatment as well as overt and subtle bullying in this context. In general, women asking for what they perceived to be their due, including confirmation of probation, support for a promotion, opportunities for involvement in research projects, freedom to develop their own programmes, or even requests for mentoring and appraisals, reported that they were often dismissed and labelled variously as ‘elitist’, ‘difficult’, ‘stroppy’, ‘bolshie’, ‘combative’ and ‘confrontational’. Thus women’s experience is of their claims being delegitimized, with proactive undermining of the claimants’ standing and attempts at expulsion. Their narratives recount how this often occurred both through symbolic means and in the context of women’s embodied identity, as theorized by both Irigaray and Kristeva.
Silencing and exclusion from social and professional networks: Joanna’s story
As a postdoctoral fellow and an attendee at an international critically orientated organizational studies conference, Joanna, a North American woman in her early 30s, describes an established middle-aged male professor ‘demolishing’ a female PhD student’s work at the conference. The incident reported occurred during the doctoral consortium where the role of the professor was to provide developmental feedback. When questioned, the senior male professor explained, to her disbelief, that ‘he was not used to women doing theory’ (Joanna, lecturer, June 2010). In narrating this story, Joanna does not merely support Luce Irigaray’s theorizing about the language of science and philosophy as being written in male language by males. She demonstrates why, in this order of laws claiming to be neutral but bearing the marks of he who produces them (Irigaray, 1991, p. 14), one is expected to enter into it as male. Women (and some junior men) may often feel excluded in conferences, which have been often recognized as arenas for displaying hegemonic masculinities (Bell & King, 2010; Ford & Harding, 2008). The meaning of such incidents is that speaking in academic settings might be associated with a danger of a verbal assault and/or intimidation.
This, I propose, originates in denying the body representation within discourse, which as Irigaray (1985) argues, conceals sexuated difference and evacuates the feminine. The suppression of the body in the symbolic order (Kristeva, 1982, 1986a) makes this philosophy of ‘the sameness’, possible as will be discussed in more detail in the section on abjection. Many other participants reported stories of exclusion extending to social spaces and conferences which were perceived as ‘unwelcoming for a woman where men talk amongst themselves around drinks’ (Grace, senior lecturer, May 2008), where ‘there is a very cliquey male sort of thing going on’, and ‘the jokes would just come thick and fast’ (Claire, research fellow, June 2008). However, conferences are also places of intellectual exchange where knowledge is shared and communicated. Women’s experience of the objectification of female bodies by other academics and the language used there often causes them to abstain from such debates. Hence the effects of exclusionary practices performed in such gatherings, such as the one referred to by Joanna, extend well beyond their spatial and temporal confines:
I don’t think I need to qualify my feelings, but just to let you know that my previous occupation was in [removed to protect respondent’s identity], the fairly ‘masculine’ worker cultures. Even with this background, I have never felt as intimidated, hurt nor excluded… I do not think I will be attending those conferences… (Joanna, Lecturer, June 2010)
Language as a means of excluding the ‘other’: Sophie’s story
A different variation on the same story of exclusion at the conferences through language is offered by Sophie, a respondent in her mid-50s, which is concerned with the issue of the use of language and women’s inability to speak and/or understand what was going on in the ‘cliquish’ male environments:
I find I don’t understand the language that men use sometimes…, I understand it when I read it but not when I hear it…and it is almost like when I went to university, I went from my working-class culture to a middle-class culture and I had to learn a new language that I could read but I couldn’t speak and I have learnt to speak it but I still have the feeling when I am at conferences that there is another language that I still can’t speak and it seems to be the language of male academics. (Sophie, senior lecturer, March 2007)
Sophie’s path to academia as a British working-class mature woman underscores the multiple dimensions of otherness felt by women academics. Exclusion arising from their gender but in relation to other categories of embodied difference such as literal foreignness, ethnicity or age made them feel vulnerable. While women are not the only ones to experience discrimination and marginalization in academe (some men do too), these phenomena are particularly evident for them because of their embodied difference. Irigaray’s argument about women’s subordination in academe as being an effect of their misrepresentation in the masculine hegemonic discourse and their equation with unwanted body the woman stand in for (Irigaray, 1985) elucidates this point well. Kristeva’s theorization on the abjection of the (feminine) body from the symbolic order reiterates the same issue from a different perspective, as is discussed next.
Abjection and absence of the (female) body in academic theory and practice
In many accounts offered, managers and/or senior colleagues were reported to use verbal remarks on the material aspects of women’s identity and their ways of being an academic such as that they were ‘too emotional’, ‘not being able to keep one’s mouth shut’, ‘not fitting in’, or ‘being too collegial’. The interviewees provided me with other examples of how material embodiment and the simultaneous suppression of the body not only causes women to experience distress but also makes them more vulnerable to objectification or even sexual harassment. In order to elaborate ways in which the female body is objectified in academic theory and everyday practice four stories are offered, which are concerned with (i) demeaning representations colonizing academic discourse, (ii) sexual harassment, (iii) the shunned and idealized mother and (iv) the story of the unwanted female body.
Demeaning representations: Joanna’s story
Joanna speaks again for other participants in her recounting of another of her experiences as a junior academic staff at a different international management conference with an explicit anti-establishment edge:
The keynote speaker gave a presentation that featured a video of a naked woman getting into a bath of milk and masturbating. This video went on for about five minutes. Then the speaker discussed how we, as academics, might ‘f**k with capitalism’, that is, ‘impregnate it with freedom’ (which I guess sums up which half of the audience he was aiming to reach…). The rest of the talk was definitely aimed at the ‘in-group’ of [the name of the conference withdrawn to protect respondent’s identity] boys. It was pretty exclusionary, hurtful and offensive, and I won’t be going to this conference again. It was insane stuff, really. (Joanna, lecturer, June 2010)
There is a temptation to consider this a rather extreme case of sexual violence by proxy against women present at the conference, as an aberration rather than the norm. Yet following Irigaray’s reasoning about the dominant representation of woman as the silent matter and the force of nature in history, science and philosophy, such a graphic example of ‘theorizing’ using the woman’s body cannot be so easily rationalized away. As Irigaray explains: ‘In relation to the working of theory, the/a woman fulfils a twofold function – as the mute outside that sustains all systematicity; as a maternal and still silent ground that nourishes all foundations’ (Irigaray, 1985, p. 365). Irigaray explains how such attitudes and behaviours are caused by the fact that women have no language of their own in male normative discourse, which stands for the universal system of signification, representing both women and men (Irigaray, 1991, 1993). Because of such representations (created by men) women’s access to the symbolic order of laws and language is profoundly truncated as they cannot recognize themselves in the language and representations that are defined for them; Sophie could not understand the language spoken by men; Joanna found herself oppressed when listening to men speaking a masculine language and seeing sexist images disguised as academic contributions that demeaned women. Their stories reflect other women’s accounts in this study. Following Kristeva’s theory on woman’s association with the abjected maternal body and the projection of this onto all women (Kristeva, 1982), I will now demonstrate how this predicates and seals her subordinated position in university.
Sexual harassment: Lila’s story
Lila, an Asian in her late 30s, represents the other speakers too as she recounts a case of harassment by a senior colleague:
It was during this period when my application for promotion got turned down … I also started to have problems with my head of the department when I have referred the case to his superior. He was always keen to meet but did really nothing to resolve the issue. One evening I was still in my office and he came to see me … and I was then very distressed about this situation dragging on, then quite unexpectedly he put his arm around me … as if to console me … but you know I felt very uncomfortable, this was getting too physical and there was no need for this at all. I removed his hand and he got really embarrassed, but I am not in for anything like that … (Lila, lecturer, October 2007)
There is nothing really new about sexual exploitation going hand in hand with unequal power. In addition to the objectification that women experience in sexist societies, they also live with the threat of invasion of their bodies, of which rape is the most extreme form (Trethewey, 1999, p. 424). The story of Lila exemplifies Irigaray’s (1985, p. 180) lucid exposition of the realities women often face in the workplace because: ‘A commodity – a woman – is divided into two irreconcilable “bodies”: her natural “body”’ and her socially valued, exchangeable body.’ Yet that women report experiencing this in the setting of supposedly disembodied academic environments is both ironic and perverse. Kristeva (1982) elucidates this further by arguing how the maternal (feminine) body is positioned outside the symbolic order and language, because of the abjection of material functions of the body, which has multiple consequences for women in academia. Some of those are detailed next.
The shunned and idealized mother: Maria’s and Kim’s stories
I was really shocked and surprised when a senior male academic, an old and well-respected man, who was in the panel during my formal PhD appraisal, commented on my research proposal by saying that I was trying to achieve too much, that the methodology was complex, which I thought were fair comments up to a point, so I tried to address them one by one, only to be rebuked and told that I was ‘going to be a mother soon’ (I was in the 7th month in my first pregnancy then, I think) – I could not quite understand what he was driving at??? Would my methodology be all-right if I was not going to be a mother soon or what? And anyway was not the appraisal meant to provide feedback on my work rather than comments on my body and my future family situation? (Maria, lecturer, June 2008)
Maria, a Southern European woman in her mid-30s, speaks for other participants in this study when she articulates what feminists have demonstrated previously, that is, how the material bodiliness of women does not easily fit in the workplace because the female body is seen as unprofessional (Trethewey, 1999), overflowing and leaky (Shildrick, 1997). The pregnant body has for these reasons to be disguised and covered up when at work. Kristeva’s theory of the female (maternal) body as simultaneously abjected and idealized (Kristeva, 1986b
3
) can be used to explain women’s day-to-day working lives as academics. She is idealized and equated with the good (disembodied) maternal care but becomes abjected whenever she is associated with her actual real body. Maria illuminates what it feels like to be a woman cast into the role of the embodied ‘other’ against her own claims to researcher identity. The confusion and disappointment of being regarded as so immanent to her own body as to undermine any intellectual endeavours is evident in her story. Such experiences are exceptionally powerful in academia, which still largely operates under the tacit premise of a strict separation between abstract knowledge and the body that produces it (see also Fotaki, 2010; Swan, 2005). Further, everyday managerial practices often contradict equal opportunities policies in relation to pregnancy and new motherhood (Gatrell, 2011). Women thus learn that the maternal function is incompatible with a streamlined progression to the top, as seen in another respondent’s statement. Kim, a mother of three, has had to let go of various opportunities that were available to her male colleagues and was routinely paid less than them:
People always say, for example, maternity leave will never count against you, but it does, in reality. People don’t talk about it, but it doesn’t mean they don’t think about it. (Kim, professor, June 2008)
Kim and Maria’s stories illustrate how women experience the projections surrounding their reproductive functions (where she is equated with nature and is disadvantaged because of this) that permeate the symbolic order of academe. The symbolic abjection of the maternal/feminine identity argued by Kristeva is what causes women often to hide their physical body in professional settings. Kristeva’s influential theorizations of the strangeness of the female (and maternal) body in the symbolic system of representations, which must be rendered abject (Kristeva, 1982, 1986a, 1986b), so as to prevent the threat of dissolution of such order, explicates how this could result in alienation and marginalization being reproduced by women themselves, expressed as self-abjection. This issue is discussed in more detail below.
The unwanted female body: Jessie’s story
Jessie, a working-class woman in her 40s, exemplifies how women use language similar to that of men when talking about female bodies:
Being a woman, I do not know how that translates into careers then, you know, in terms of how people do or don’t fit in, whether they look good in a suit, these kinds of things, [laughs] which tends to favour men more. (Jessie, senior research fellow, September 2007)
The experience of being a woman in academia is associated with ‘not fitting’ for Jessie, who coincidentally dresses almost exclusively in austere black gender-neutral suits, has very short hair and is very thin. This is a case of self-abjection performed through an act of speech, articulated by a woman whose body is not fitting in a suit that ‘favours men more’. But there is also something else going on here: Jessie has made her body fit with the academic requirements represented in the male dress code. This example supports the overall findings of women possessing a tacit knowledge that the imaginary body dominating knowledge production is a male body, as is argued by Luce Irigaray (1985). The example presented here suggests that the immanence of the body and the material aspects of an unwanted difference that women stand in for in male-dominated settings causes them often to become the de-subjectivized embodied ‘other’ in their own perception as well as enticing them to masquerade as men. 4 A British Asian in her early 40s sums up her own and other women’s position in such environments as follows: ‘I do not think you survive, and I do not think you do it by being a woman’ (Suri, senior lecturer, June 2007). In other words, they absorb and repeat the idea that to succeed or merely survive in male-dominated environments women have to disguise their feminine identity or even their different looks.
To conclude, the key stories and emerging themes presented thus far echo theoretical perspectives of women being marked as visibly different to male researchers and the masculine epistemic subject remaining the invisible and unmarked norm (Harding, 1991, quoted in Garforth & Kerr, 2009; see also Haraway, 1991). These accounts also indicate how women report experiencing objectification and their reduction to a body, which diminishes their standing in the profession and causes many to be acutely aware of their lower status as women. The stories recount the pain experienced by women who are excluded from the masculine domain of the symbolic order as theorized by Irigaray. Further, assuming the position of a woman in academe is associated with being perceived as abject. To avoid this position (of being abjected), women, lacking the requisite linguistic and discursive devices to represent themselves, have often to perform self-abjection and disavow their feminine self. For the alternative, as Kristeva (1982, pp. 1–2) explains, is intolerable: ‘what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’.
Irigaray and Kristeva have provided a body of theory that helps us to articulate the negative implications of being female in a masculine world of academia. However, women’s responses to what was experienced as an unequal and exclusionary environment differed. Below I discuss the implications of those different approaches that often coexist alongside each other.
Counteracting and subjecting oneself to the gendered structures of academe
The experience of overt discrimination and/or marginalization caused many interviewees to doubt themselves, feel depressed, disempowered, ‘emotionally battered’, ‘paralyzed’, ‘very threatened’. While some internalized the effects of bad treatment or even blamed themselves for it, others were bent on achieving success in the restricted space given even if this involved accepting injustice, ‘working harder than men’ and ‘keeping one’s head low’. As one way of defending themselves from attacks on their work and/or to reinstating their threatened sense of self, informants reported going into compulsive spells of writing research papers, while keeping their heads down. As Laura, a Scandinavian in her early 30s, put it:
It was a matter of either having to spend endless hours on writing e-mails and documenting everything that no-one was really prepared to take on board or writing my papers that would get me a job somewhere else. (Laura, lecturer, April 2008)
Such a pragmatic approach was evidence of strategic thinking and a form of resistance. But it also suggests how women remained caught in an interplay between the desire to fight for what felt right and the recognition that it may not be possible after all. It is to stories of how individuals support and oppose the dominant discourses and tacit discriminatory behaviours in academia that I now turn. Examples of how women react to and enact the dominant norms, discourses and representations, which are concerned with self-doubt and fitting in are presented here.
Working so much harder
Women were often found lacking and tried to improve themselves; they often felt compelled to work ever harder to prove their worth, as is evidenced in Sylvia’s story.
The imposter syndrome: Sylvia’s story
I don’t like the notion of it but I think there is something in the notion of the imposter syndrome where we feel maybe insecure in our ability to do a job. I was almost going too far to compensate for the shit organization, even though they didn’t know it was shit because I never told them how crap it was. So I think maybe we do compensate for worrying about being inadequate. (Sylvia, senior lecturer, April 2007)
A woman in her early 40s with previous experience of working in industry, Sylvia did not appear to lack confidence, yet this was how she recounted her experience of working in academia. She talks about herself as ‘imposter’, and interprets her experience of working and of ‘going almost too far’ to compensate for the shortfalls of the organization in order to avoid being perceived as inadequate, alluding to her position as a female academic. But why should she feel inadequate? In the proposed theory, Sylvia’s ‘compensating for the shit organization’ through her own actions originates in the position of a person rendered abject/outside. Because the academic symbolic is heavily masculinized and lacks alternative symbols that women could relate to, she ends up internalizing the bad organization and casting herself as ‘an imposter’, all the while working harder to cover up for the organizational ‘crap’.
This is the case of societal discourses entering her psyche and being reproduced by it: thus the way Sylvia talks about herself in relation to the organization is performative of that very abjection, at the same time as it is caused by it, 5 having to do with the language’s capacity to create reality. Thus if the only language available for women to talk about themselves is negative about their own embodied self, then they are bound to express a negative, abject-self: in the masculine symbolic order self-abjection may be enacted by women themselves. The ways women often see and think of themselves suggests an alienation from language and the body that is inscribed in the psyche and reproduced in their everyday practices, as we saw in Jessie’s and Sylvia’s stories. Since female university lecturers and professors are not ‘only’ women but also academics, they will be inscribed with the discourses of (masculine) academia and from that subject position will look at themselves as ‘not fitting in’ and/or ‘imposters’. Put differently, not only are women seen and treated as de-subjectivized ‘others’ and as lesser men in academia, as Irigaray and Kristeva have theorized, but they reflect upon themselves in ways that internalize such treatments as they experience themselves in that way from their position as academics. Following Kristeva (1986a), I also propose that whenever Sylvia identifies with the abjected feminine bodiliness she feels like an ‘imposter’ who has to work so much harder to avoid being found out. For if women identify with their body they will be left outside the dominant male symbolic order of academia, and, if they do not, they will contribute to their own estrangement as women.
To sum up, the argument is that women both talk about themselves as being abjected, and turn back on themselves negative discourses encoded in the symbolic order in a variety of ways that include body work and complex affective responses. Jessie’s story recounted above indicates how this self-abjection leads to the disciplining of the body. Sylvia, an articulate former business person, blushes when talking of herself as an imposter but also expresses her anger about having to work so hard to make up for organizational pitfalls. Maria’s face shows consternation and distress as she recalls her experience of being treated as a future mother who won’t be able to do ‘serious’ research. They all suggest how the dominant discourses inhabit women’s psyches and are expressed through a variety of affective responses, including self-abjection. However, as the interviewees invariably displayed love and commitment for their work, affective identification with the roles that are assigned and available for women in the symbolic order was often expressed through contradictory and complex ways, as is discussed below.
Resistance and adjustment
This section elucidates how women simultaneously resist and subject themselves to the gendered structures of academe. Their ways of counteracting the dominant discourses involved constant negotiation and judgements about which battles one had to fight and which to let go, as the following stories attest. For the choice, as explained above, often is between having to abide by the rules of the exclusionary symbolic or being marginalized.
Ticking all the boxes: Ann’s story
I think this is probably true for all women working, not just for women in academia. In my experience you are expected to be lower paid and have lower status for a similar level of achievement. I am not saying that it is right. All I am saying is that it is probably the way it is. When I was in a feminized profession with very few men, it was still the men who got promoted more quickly. The men tend to get promoted more quickly not because they are more able, and I think that’s true in the university as well. You don’t get the equal level of pay or recognition for the same level of achievement and the difference is by gender. It will take you longer and it will not be about ticking one box well but about ticking all the boxes. (Ann, senior lecturer, April 2007)
Accepting a situation she does not agree with is part of reality for Ann, a woman in her early 40s with previous experience in the hospitality sector, as for many other women in this study. While refusing the premise of unequal treatment of women she also takes it as a given, when she admits that in order to get recognition rather than ‘ticking one box well’, which might have been sufficient for her male colleagues, she would have to ‘tick all the boxes’. But the issue is not simply about a mere acceptance or an adjustment to the rules such as ‘ticking all the boxes’ but about adopting the norms of the gendered symbolic while the absence of recognition remains ‘a thorn in the side’ (Sophie, senior lecturer, March, 2007) for many. It is therefore important and instructive to examine the ways women were able ‘to make it’ in their respective organizations.
Striving for recognition within the given symbolic norms
Women employed various methods as they strove to overcome their marginality and ‘foreign’ status in academe by embracing the professional identity on offer. Their stories are perhaps less dramatic than the cases of women experiencing discrimination, but they make for depressing reading too. The ways in which women are able to progress their careers illustrate this process well. Only a few of the twenty-three women interviewed had ‘made it’ to a full professorship (tenured jobs) and some others were eventually promoted to more senior positions. Of those few female professors, some ascribed their success to being able to draw on substantial support from a partner who had taken over domestic and family duties (Josephine, professor, June 2008) or had no family obligations at all (Julie, professor, June 2008). Julie admits to working fifteen hours a day and having to forego ‘having a husband and children although I am not happy about it’. In other accounts, collusion with oppressive structures coexists along with actions aiming to overcome the system, as shown in the following story.
Positioning women against diversity and equality: Jill’s story
The successes of a few women, referred to above, were often used as arguments against efforts to improve the lot of the many, often unintentionally, via initiatives of equality and diversity as stressed by Jill, a mother of three in her early 40s:
They invite this woman who is a pro-vice chancellor and I think they think ‘Well she did it why can’t you do it?’ I think it’s a bit like the American dream: ‘I have got here, why can’t you?’ So I do wonder sometimes if women who have been promoted to quite high levels do really understand the problems of women, not all problems anyway. (Jill, lecturer, October 2008)
Jill’s story reminds us that for every woman at the top of the academic ladder there are many others who have been left behind. Many of them were cast outside by means of a forced exit, by disciplining, securing compliance or self-exclusion, while more than half of respondents in the study have considered moving to another institution. It should not be forgotten either that the successes of women who had made it to the top involved more work for less pay and having to play by the unwritten rules of gendered academe, thus contributing to their own marginalization as women.
Discussion and Implications
There is no dearth of studies giving evidence about gender inequalities and gender bias both in terms of women’s careers in research and in terms of gender issues in the design and execution of research itself (European Commission 2006, 2008; LERU, 2012). Yet the ways in which the dominant social discourses and representations, of women as silenced bodies, become part of their own identity as female academics has not been sufficiently theorized. I have drawn here on the ideas of Luce Irigaray concerning the absence of woman in the masculine symbolic order of knowledge production, and the negation of woman’s embodied presence as incompatible with the academic endeavour inspired by Julia Kristeva, to address this gap. The explanatory framework proposed allowed me to unearth the unconscious foundations of women’s subordination that sustain the status quo in three inter-related ways. First, by pointing out how the male norm and woman’s absence from the body of knowledge disables her participation in equivalent terms; second, by demonstrating that unless women adopt a masculine subject position they are exiled to the margins of academe with their perspectives and contributions actively devalued; and third, by showing how the gendered symbolic of academe leads to women both colluding with and opposing their own marginalization. The relations between overarching theoretical dimensions discussed above can also help identify the means by which such necessary change may be brought in. Each of these aspects has implications for theory and practice of gender in academia.
On a theoretical plane, the paper made distinct three contributions. The first arises from employing psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity to uncover a layer of symbolically coded societal fantasies concerning women’s (maternal) body and materiality at work. Examples of an abjected misfitting body, the disembodied ‘other’, better-than-a-man imposter along with the sexualized object were offered to explain women’s subordinate position in academia. By offering stories of women experiencing the day-to-day world of academia, illuminated through the theories of Irigaray and Kristeva, the proposed frame stresses the crucial role of language in the process of symbolization. The historical silencing of women’s voices and experiences by patriarchal discourses and the representation of women by male-authored discourse as the embodied ‘other’, impedes the articulation of a different perspective. The reproduction of those norms pervading everyday academic practices by means of language and representations can explain the durability of gendered norms in universities. The exile of the body from the symbolic and the knowledge production process, which Kristeva termed the semiotic chora (Kristeva, 1986a), is crucial to the formation of the symbolic order in academia. Although such issues are present in other professions, they are particularly evident in academe due to the focus and insistence on the idea of knowledge as discursively constituted and the separation of the mind from the body that produces this knowledge.
The second contribution of the study concerns the introduction of the idea of inter-psychic and affective reproduction of social structures through the body, which can help us understand how norms in academe operate to reinforce existing power relations. The interpretations offered here take further the nascent psychosocial approaches in organization studies of how social structures are internalized and become part of the self (see Fotaki, Long and Schwartz, 2012; Kenny, 2010, 2012). This assertion and the fact that women’s subordination is a product of power relations and not a biological fact has practical implications: the issue of gender in the university is perhaps one of ongoing struggle, that will never be finally resolved, but the framework presented here offers a way to redress the balance in this struggle by reconsidering the social and psychic together.
The third and related contribution is that it links the stories of women feeling silenced and being treated as immanent to their bodies with how these stories become inscribed in their accounts of themselves and ultimately in their psyches where they work on women and are then reiterated and reproduced. Women’s perception of themselves as inadequate, impeded in their career prospects by their status as (potential) mothers and their mis-fitting in (a male suit), which is often underscored by real incidents of overt sexism and objectification seen in respondents’ stories, demonstrates how symbolic significations and linguistic representations frame the ways they speak and experience themselves. So, all these negative discourses about ‘the woman’ mean that when we look at ourselves as academics we adopt a ‘masculine’ subject position ineluctably, that of the academic who looks at herself as a woman and sees that self as immanent to her body, struggling to speak and be heard. What women say about their experiences is imbricated in their psyches because they can only experience themselves through available discourses of exclusion, marginalization and devaluation. Without connecting to the materiality of their bodies women cannot but experience themselves in that way from their subject position as academics. Yet, as they often find themselves in the position of the abject outsider in academe, they face a double bind: they can either choose to abide by the rules of this order or be left outside (see also Fotaki, 2010). Collusion with oppressive structures therefore coexists along with actions aiming to overcome the system.
The final novelty of the study is a set of practical recommendations highlighting the possibility for change arising from within the affective and material subjection to this order. The insights of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva not only provide rich theoretical resources for the understanding of women’s position in academia but also open up the possibilities of overcoming their subordination. Both emphasize how the process of exclusion of women (through their absence from the symbolic, the maternal abject, and their mis-recognition in it) is continual, reiterated over time and therefore involves a continuous process of exclusion that is never final. 6 It is sustained through normative frameworks which are re-inscribed in subjects’ psyches, but which are not immutable and are constantly reproduced and can therefore be disrupted by introducing different discourses. Irigaray argues for cultivating conditions under which the emergent feminine/sexual difference could come into being and be defined not in relation to masculine identity but in its own terms. Kristeva offers the idea of the maternal body located at ‘the threshold of culture and nature’ (Kristeva, 1986b, p. 182) as an alternative to the sameness of the masculine symbolic order. Put differently, the exile of the body from knowledge production indicates its instability.
These insights have important implications for academic practice as they can be used to further destabilize the already unstable symbolic. Taken together, their thinking suggests ways for a reconfiguration of the symbolic by focusing on the embodied subjectivity. It opens up the possibility of changing the language from within, not least because the subjects, in accepting these gendered categories, express their desire to mark their (different) presence in the symbolic without having to leap out of it. The practical ways of overcoming woman’s exclusion in academia therefore is to reject dominant representations and seek their re-articulation through bodily affect, because woman is first and foremost a speaking subject who cannot function outside the symbolic (language), as Irigaray and Kristeva have shown. Researching the materiality of embodied academic practices and spaces in which knowledge is created and reproduced (see Tyler & Cohen, 2009, for examples) is also important. The requisite action must start with refusing the woman’s role as the eternal other in the imaginary/symbolic system established through centuries of patriarchal thought. This implies a necessity to re-territorialize discursive institutional environments, by bringing women’s own representations into the symbolic order of academe without creating new categories of excluded others. By highlighting that speaking through the restricted trope of the masculine logos puts women in a position of an ‘invisible’, ‘voiceless’ or ‘silenced’ other or often as self-abjected women, these positions can be rejected as they are made explicit. By refusing such representations, the possibility for producing a radically different type of knowledge in the university opens up.
Closing Remarks
Pressing for institutional conditions to preclude discrimination in academic institutions, although very important, will not on its own eradicate the barriers women in academia face. The persisting problem is that conceptions of knowledge that are accepted and articulated in the academy to this day have been shaped by hegemonic male-dominated cultures. Discursive practices, representations and language are embedded in material power relations and require revolutionary transformation for change to be realized. This paper has argued for the necessity of incorporating a different voice in the symbolic order of academe as both Irigaray and Kristeva have suggested, rather than for a mere increase in the presence of female bodies in senior jobs. To paraphrase Donna Haraway (1991, p. 150), the struggle therefore is over ‘production, reproduction and imagination’ in the knowledge constitution process in order to unsettle and undo the sexual iconography upon which gender in academe is based. Universities are important sites where knowledge is defined and reproduced, and it is also here that the contestation of meanings and significations of the symbolic order comprising knowledge systems is manifest. By drawing attention to the ways of symbolizing sexuated difference where social discourses are intertwined with psychic images of the self, the study offers a novel way for appreciating inequality of power in the intensely competitive, highly subjective and inward-looking valuation system of academe. It also opens up a new space, in which both women and men will be able to re-define their own representations. In other words, because new ways of thinking and speaking are developed in the academy, it is academics’ role and responsibility to make changes in the symbolic. New symbols (of knowledge), if created, should then enable rather than restrict various avenues and possibilities for being and expressing ourselves inside and outside academia.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my female colleagues whose generosity and openness made this research possible. The article has benefited enormously from advice given to me at various stages by numerous people and in particular from attentive readings by Paul Adler, Dorota Bourne, Jackie Ford, Yiannis Gabriel, Sarah Gilmore, Nancy Harding and Kate Kenny, for which I would like to thank them very much. I would also like to thank Abigail Blake for assistance in the analysis of transcripts. The very supportive comments by three anonymous reviewers and the Senior Editor, Professor Graham Sewell, helped me to develop and improve the paper. Any remaining errors are mine alone.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.