Abstract
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
Highlights
We are four academics who came together after a “walking with string” workshop run by one of us to pursue a shared interest in analysing perturbing positions – a notion which has multiple inflections
Our experimental exploration of perturbing positions makes a contribution to PhEmaterialist understandings of what it can mean for us, as female academics at various stages of our careers, to work in and be part of the neoliberal university
The call for papers asked for a consideration of “How do the principles of feminism posthumanism and new materialism recalibrate and reimagine what matters for educational research, pedagogical and political practice?” In responding to this urgent question, we turn to Donna Haraway (2016) and string figuring (SF), among other new materialist and posthuman thinkers, as a means to do two things: one, to pursue thinking-in-movement with regard to our perturbing position/alities as higher education academics; and two, to offer apositional instantiation of SF writing-as-four-together which brings an ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) into play
Summary
You might position us in a traditional sense. One of us recently passed her public defence (Norwegian: disputas), thereby passing into the status of “Doctor”, someone who has acquired the normative position/ing of “proper” academic, someone whose knowledge has been judged, approved of, accredited. Feeling-Medusa as our kin is an invitation to break the ideas of the perfect dutiful female academic – dressed in high-heeled shoes, never wearing a pair of jeans at work, the smiling woman with the tidy hair and ever-ready smile who is often positioned (oh so unconsciously, but how effectively!) as note-maker, minute-taker or coffee-maker, as doer and organiser and carer, for and of the “real” (male) academics. She, this dutiful daughter of the academy, is the woman who strives hard but whose voice goes unheard or is deliberately ignored. Is this flying happening with pulling of that string? The hope? Why hope? A Medusaen imaginary of our hopeful/hoped for positions to emerge
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