Abstract
I am deeply honoured to be joining the European Journal of Women’s Studies as co-editor with Dubravka Žarkov. I very much look forward to reading and editing articles that are at the cutting edge of the field, to working with a wonderful team of associate editors, and to learning more about feminist debates in other countries in Europe and beyond. I will also endeavour to maintain Kathy Davis’s legacy of making the journal a place of joyful, constructive and generous learning and to continuously interrogate the meanings of ‘Europe’ and ‘Women’s Studies’. But, and here comes a confession, I have dreaded writing this editorial. A ‘first’ can easily cause anxiety, especially in the context of the many brilliant and agenda-setting editorials that Kathy Davis, my predecessor, has written for this journal. But I think that the main source of anxiety stems from the editorial’s slightly freer format and divergence from standard academic writing. My understanding is that the process of writing an editorial is different, at least with regard to the numbers of citations that are expected, its more personal tone, and its exploratory nature.
As you can glean from the opening of this editorial, it is not that I feel anxious about bringing myself into my writing. On the contrary, my research practice has been informed and shaped by feminist epistemologies and methodologies that have highlighted the insights that can be gained from incorporating the personal into our research. Nor will I miss composing a long list of references at the end of my editorial and making sure it fits this journal’s referencing style. I do, however, feel nervous about the more spontaneous nature of writing an editorial. The reason for this has to do with how I have always imagined editors as keeping close track of developments in the field, both within but also outside of academia. Indeed, in my mind, the ideal editor is fully ‘plugged-in’ and on top of contemporary debates, whether these take place at conferences, in academic journals, the mainstream media, the feminist Twittersphere, or a range of activist spaces.
In writing this, I am aware that the image of the fully plugged-in editor is as much of an ideal type as it is a construct. It is increasingly difficult to keep track of all the different sites, online and offline, in which feminist debate takes place. As readers of this journal will be well aware, these difficulties are even more pronounced in international and transnational contexts, where language barriers and familiarity with specific cultural spheres potentially limit what is available and accessible to us. Yet, my awareness that the fully plugged-in editor is more of a figure than a reality has not lessened my anxiety. As a female academic who has recently had two periods of maternity leave, I feel far removed from the ideal persona of the editor. Over the past four years, I have taken some substantial time off from work and, as a consequence, I have not been able to attend a range of women’s studies events, follow shifts in feminist theorizing closely, or, simply, read as much as I would have liked to.
My anxieties in writing this editorial led me to reflect on the figure of the fully plugged-in editor and, by extension, the fully plugged-in academic. My thinking is informed by my recent research on the working lives of so-called ‘creatives’ and the many parallels that seem to exist between those who work in the cultural and creative industries and those in academia. In both contexts, precarious labour conditions are increasingly prevalent, inequalities continue to exist, and working hours are long. And yet, academics as well as creatives often speak of a passion for their work and indeed reiterate contemporary labour narratives of ‘doing what you love’ (Duffy, 2016). A further parallel between creative and academic labour relates to the always-on persona (Duffy and Hund, 2015). Simply put, being always-on is to be available at all times, to stay connected to existing networks and, to take up the technological metaphor again, to be plugged-in. In this editorial, therefore, I would like to focus on what it means to always be on, and the way in which it seems to have become an expectation as well as a desire. As I will discuss in more detail below, my becoming a co-editor of this journal is itself – at least in part – the result of being always-on, despite being on maternity leave. However, I experienced the zone of always being on as a profoundly ambivalent space. Indeed, I situate at least some of my anxieties about becoming the co-editor of the EJWS and writing this editorial in the demand to always be on. In my reflections below, I will try to make sense of my ambivalence and anxiety as well as reflect on the politics of being always-on. I suggest that being always-on is as much an emotional disposition as a practice, and one that is imbricated with the affective and psychic life of postfeminism and neoliberalism.
How it all began
A few days before giving birth to my second child, I received an email about the EJWS’s search for a new co-editor. In fact, I was just about to remove my university email account from all of my devices in order to disengage from work for an unspecified period of time. Upon reading the email, however, I was both intrigued and ambivalent. Why had I checked my emails ‘just this one last time’? Did I really want to apply for the co-editorship while on maternity leave? As is evident from my new role as co-editor, I ended up pursuing this opportunity. In this sense, then, the co-editorship of the EJWS is a consequence of my being always-on. Moreover, I could not fully disengage during my leave, and I ended up checking my work email intermittently throughout. I found that it was hard, if not nearly impossible, to disconnect completely from work. For instance, a recent research grant required that I engage in ‘impact activities’ with the wider public and I was conscious that I had to remain approachable on some level, especially to the world outside academia. Similarly, it is now a requirement for academics based in the UK to upload articles within a certain time period after publication so that they qualify for the next research assessment. This meant that I had to keep track of my publications to avoid missing crucial deadlines. I managed to stay on top of certain demands but not of others. Before my leave, for example, I had kept a blog about my recent research project, which I had used to communicate my findings to a wider audience. Upon my return to work, I discovered that the blog had been deleted by my university because it had been inactive for too long. In this particular instance, my fears around unplugging had come true: inactivity led to removal.
Of course, academics are far from the only group of workers who are expected to be on all the time. As I mentioned above, research on the working lives of creatives has shown for some time now that they also find it difficult to disengage from work. Precarious work conditions, for example, mean that these workers never know when the next ‘gig’ will materialize. Being always-on, then, is central to securing an income especially, perhaps, in the growing ‘gig economy’. As an academic with a permanent post, I am clearly more privileged than those who are precariously employed; the instances of being always-on that I have described above, then, are not about securing a livelihood, and it is important to bear these crucial differences in mind. What I am interested in here, however, are the affective intensities of being always-on, such as the strong pull toward checking my emails ‘just this one last time’ and the related fears of missing out. I believe that these intensities are, in part, facilitated by rapid technological change. While on maternity leave, I could check my work email on the playground, on the sofa while feeding the baby, or in the waiting room of a GP’s surgery. The constant availability and potential accessibility make it harder to disengage. And then there is also the relentless feeling that one could or should be pursuing any number of other tasks in order to give off the impression that one is indeed always-on, such as keeping various online appearances updated, be they on Twitter, sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, or one’s university website.
In addition to these technological changes, the desire to advance in one’s career may also explain why workers are always-on, even when they are not being paid for their work. In my case, longer periods of receiving little or no pay did not prevent me from wanting to be in the loop, even if this meant doing unpaid work on top of the heavy burden of already unremunerated reproductive labour. I did not want to miss out on opportunities and, as part of this desire, consistently gave off the impression of being available. However, I do not think that explanations of technological change or career advancement tell the whole story either. In reflecting on my desire to be always-on, I have come to think of it as more than a set of practices that, for example, involve checking one’s work emails or updating online profiles. Instead, I have come to think of it as a disposition and, as such, something that is constitutive of our working subjectivities in the contemporary era.
I believe that ‘neoliberalism’ as both a concept and wider theoretical framework can help us make sense of this disposition of being always-on. In putting forward this argument, I am conscious that many readers may be weary of the term as an over-used and under-theorized label for everything ‘we’ do not like. I have, however, found Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism very useful and want to draw on these in order to make sense of this notion of always being on. Foucauldian approaches regard neoliberalism as a ‘mentality of government’ (Rose, 1992: 145) that calls upon individuals to manage their lives self-responsibly. By adopting a Foucauldian lens, we can read the disposition of always being on as a mode of responsibilization, which ensures that individual workers are productive at all times.
Neoliberalism, as a critical lens, is also useful in the context of this editorial’s focus on work and maternity. As Catherine Rottenberg (2014: 148) has argued in her pathbreaking research on neoliberal feminism and the ways in which mainstream feminism has become more aligned with neoliberal rationality, crafting a felicitous balance between work and family has become a new ideal that is ‘increasingly held out as the normative model for all (but particularly aspiring middle-class) women’. Crucially, as Catherine Rottenberg reminds us, only a tiny minority of privileged women actually face the question of ‘balance’ given that many working mothers work double shifts or two to three jobs just in order to provide for their families. More generally, and this also applies to my working life, the paid work of middle-class women frequently relies on the often racialized and classed labour of women who look after their children and/or their household. The position of having to ‘strike a balance’ is thus one of privilege and one that seems to be related to the entrenchment of neoliberal rationality. One technology of achieving this balance is, I suggest, precisely being always-on.
As an always-on academic, I have been able to pursue my career during periods of leave. Doing a bit of work here and there has allowed me to spend time with my children while not giving up on my ambitions. Indeed, and resonating with Catherine Rottenberg’s argument, being always-on has allowed me to strike a balance between caring and work responsibilities. In fact, always-onness could be perceived as a strategy that has enabled me to invest in my future working self. Being always-on is then not just a disposition that is oriented toward the present (such as staying in the loop), but also one that is looking into the future. By checking emails while on leave, I did not only ensure that I remained approachable but also safeguarded against missing out on future opportunities. This future-orientedness, as well as the notion of ‘investment’ in the self (Brown, 2015; Rottenberg, 2017), further highlights the neoliberal rationality that underpins the disposition of being always-on.
As a technology to achieve a balance between work and family, or a form of investment into the future working self, being always-on comes at a cost. By drawing on Catherine Rottenberg’s work, I have already alluded to the exclusionary dynamics which underpin the ideal of the high-achieving working mother with children. Being always-on as a way to balance work and family demands is also a thoroughly individualist solution to wider issues, such as the amount of work that academics are expected to carry out (see also Gill, 2010). As Mari Castaneda and Kirsten Isgro (2013: 3) have argued in their work on mothers in academia, ‘a forty-hour work week is simply not enough to produce excellent scholarship, engage in master teaching, and cultivate service’. The always-on female academic, who remains engaged while on maternity leave, does not do so because she is told; in fact, in official discourse, she is often actively discouraged from working. Arguably, academics continue to work during periods of leave because they fear that they may otherwise not get the job done. Being always-on is one way of ensuring that one stays on top of things, even if it is not necessarily about doing the actual work, but about keeping an ever-growing to-do list to manage the forthcoming return to work.
Crucially, however, I also think that there is an emotional cost to being always-on. As I have tried to argue, being always-on is a disposition and as such requires us to hone the right affective orientations. For example, I did not always mind doing a bit of work while on leave because I like what I do. Many aspects of my work, such as being a co-editor of this journal, bring a lot of pleasure and fulfilment. But issues of joy, fulfilment and pleasure in work take us to the murkier territory of work in late capitalism where, at least in the field of creative work, ‘discourses of passion have been used to rationalise un- or under-compensated labour’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015: 4). This is not to argue that passion for work is always an indication of capitalist exploitation; indeed, there are many accounts of work in late capitalism that take pleasure in work seriously, while simultaneously highlighting exploitative dynamics. By foregrounding joy and passion here, I am interested in exploring the affective register that underpins being always-on. I am struck that anger is missing from my account, especially because this resonates with a wider postfeminist culture that, as Rosalind Gill (2017: 610) has recently argued, ‘increasingly “favours” happiness and “positive mental attitude”, systematically outlawing other emotional states, including anger, and insecurity’. Thinking of postfeminism as a ‘distinctive kind of gendered neoliberalism’ (Gill, 2017: 611), Rosalind Gill has shown that postfeminism is ‘increasingly dependent upon a psychological register that is built around cultivating the “right” kinds of dispositions for surviving in neoliberal society’ (2017: 606). Cultivating a positive mental attitude, in this case one that foregrounds the pleasures in work – which can so easily lead to doing a bit extra work and to being always-on – requires emotional work. In forging the disposition of being always-on, other feelings such as exhaustion and anger may be disavowed in order to ensure a more positive tone.
In reading always-onness as a disposition that is imbricated with neoliberal and postfeminist culture, I have attempted to make sense of my experiences in ways similar to analysing research participants’ accounts. Of course, it is unsurprising that, as a feminist academic, I am subject to the same dynamics that I have described elsewhere in my research on creative workers. And while my reading has foregrounded the normative dimensions of always-onness, I also see lines of flight which, in my case, consist exactly in the ability to critically unpack my behaviour and emotional dispositions. The concepts of neoliberalism and postfeminism enable me to give a name to otherwise rather murky feelings of unease and ambivalence and have made me aware that not only passion, but also anger, are present in being always-on.
This analysis has also, crucially, allowed me to distance myself – at least to a certain degree – from the expectation of being the always-on feminist academic and editor. Indeed, I am still writing this editorial as somebody who has taken extended periods off work, despite my occasional on- and offline appearances. And while this time off work initially filled me with dread for fear of not qualifying as a journal editor, I now conclude the writing of this editorial feeling not only less anxious but also conspicuously more daring. Perhaps, then, my reflections in this editorial can also tell us something about resistance to neoliberal rationality. Holding on to feelings of ambivalence and anger may work as a strategy to prevent neoliberal rationality from colonizing ever more spaces, particularly psychic spaces. Feelings of anger may not entirely replace anxiety, but they may act as a counterbalance to the overly positive affective register associated with female, neoliberal subjectivity and alert us to the increasingly unrealistic demands placed on academics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine Rottenberg, Dubravka Žarkov and Rosalind Gill for their invaluably insightful and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this editorial.