Bad New Days? A State of Feminist Emergency of/in and
beyond Higher Education
Valerie Hey
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
28 June, 2016
The Evidence Base:
Location, Location, Location
Reading in the literature of the post-post structural ‘sensual turn’ –
feminist and critical theorist engagements in/against/alongside Foucault
– Butler, Skeggs, Berlant, & in/against/alongside Bourdieu – Ranciere,
Pelletier, McNay, Reay
Working out a cultural sociology of higher education (Hey & Leathwood,
2009; Hey, 2011; Hey & Morley, 2011)
Living the ‘Triumph of Emptiness’ (Alvesson, 2013)
Experimenting in auto-ethnography of the now – (Hey, in press, 2013)
Academic Affects & Agency :
Navigating Academic Noir
Different affects make us feel, write, think, and
act in different ways…This matters at the level
of theory. It matters in terms of what we want
writing to do’ (Probyn,2010).
Apocalyptic analytics – Zizek in New Left
Review – the market is ideology
English liberal pragmatics – retreading the
hollowed (out) ground of widening
participation?
Defending the Public University ?
‘Dreaming in code’ Lucas, (2010)
In context of ‘academic capitalism’
& Lucas’s critique of immaterial
labour do feminist words matter?
Excessive production – driven
maniacs (Skeggs, 2008)
reproduction not resistance or
both but then how?
Thus a tongue-in –cheek question
posed in CHEER is Why Bother’?
in the context of ‘Who Cares’?
28 June, 2016
Apocalypse Now? or Rethinking
Academic Attachments
Not attached to :
Apocalyptic analytics of Zizek – or
 The discourse of defence offered by the 'chaps' – some things in the
public university not defensible yet implicated in academy’s perverse
pleasures such as:
'reproductive' or 'will to hyper-performance' of feminist academia thus
where to now?
 Lauren Berlant on ‘sticking with difficulty’ ?
‘Cruel Optimism’ & ‘Depressive
Realism’ (Berlant, 2006, 2010)
Cruel Optimism :
‘To phrase ‘the object of desire’ as a cluster of promises is to allow us to
encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as
confirmation of our irrationality but as explanation for our sense of our
endurance in the object, all attachments are optimistic‘
Depressive Realism :
‘There is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become
post-normative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other
kinds of anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life’
(Interview with Lauren Berlant 2010)
Feminist Attachments – Do Words
Matter?
“I became an academic mainly because of the relation
between words and things” (Probyn, 2010)
“I don’t think writers are sacred but words are. They
deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right
order, you might nudge the world a little or make a
poem that children will speak for you when you are
dead” (Henry, in The Real Thing - Stoppard)
28 June, 2016
The Other with/in – Gender as a structuring
material & cultural relation
‘it can be argued that whenever
women occupy a place in the public
world that is predicated on the
exclusion/inclusion problematic the
central denial of the significance of
the Other that is involved in binary
gendered thought, that place will be a
profoundly uneasy one, inexplicable
and irresolvable unless the
exclusion/inclusion problematic is
more firmly and fully understood’
(Celia Davies, 1996;p672)
Out of the Mouth of Ministers –Misogyny
& the Heterosexual Matrix
 “One of the things that happened over that period was that the entirely
admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that with a
lot of the expansion of education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the first
beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had
previously been excluded from educational opportunities,”... “And if you
put that with what is called 'assortative mating’ — that well-educated
women marry well-educated men — this transformation of opportunities
for women ended up magnifying social divides”
Passionate Feminism & Present
Women
Fighting to be heard
To be seen
To matter
To know and to be curious
Women into higher education –students and scholars
YET
Being in is not the same as being equal
Storming & performing but never norming?
Meeting Isambard ? Undoing or Living
Alongside Austerity
A vocabulary of academic authority:
Severe
Strict
Stern
Grave
Ascetic
Rigorous
Serious
28 June, 2016