Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability - PhEm Special Issue

Taking up on Donna Haraway’s concept of String Figuring, or SF (2016), this article explores what it means—and, most importantly, what it does—to be a feminist academic in higher education. This eight-handed piece of research cuts deep into the tentacular recesses of gender, respectability, recognition, and more generally the entanglements bringing trouble into higher-ed spaces. Facing such a space is definitely unique to each and every feminist academic; yet, collaborative writing and other string connections can be put into place. As neo-liberal academia ossifies feminist flows, we can reply by feeling alongside the figure of Medusa: turning men to stone, shaking up traditional modes of knowledge making from her proto-feminism to their current feminist praxis. Shiva, Carol, Nikki, and Anna offer two contributions: deploying string figuring as “a proposition for feminist thinking” challenging higher education’s fixity, and enacting string figuring as “a mode of écriture feminine” developed by Hélène Cixous (1976).