Academics’ dress: gender and aesthetic labour in the Australian university

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores academics’ appearance and gendered performativites in the neoliberal university. Institutions’ demands for academics to form scholarly identities on campus and online reproduce and legitimise traditional workplace discrimination on the bases of gender, race, class, and the body in new ways. Based on data collected as part of a broader feminist research project on gender and academic performativity and identity in the contemporary Australian university, this article draws on narrative inquiry to examine the ways in which academic women undertake a gendered form of aesthetic labour in their professional lives. Double standards imposed upon women in an equity and diversity-laden environment pressure women to adhere to the ‘empowered woman’ trope, but also deferential and subservient to the re-masculinised institution. This article reveals the commodification of aesthetics as well as the pressures, pleasures, and desires placed on appearance, re-orienting future discussions of gendered aesthetic labour towards feminist resistance.