Ordinary Moments

Abstract

This autoethnographic piece presents a series of “feminist notes from the academy” collected and fashioned while watching the ordinary moments of life in a contemporary Australian university pass by. The affective and feminist works of Virginia Woolf and Kathleen Stewart locate this article creatively and critically to document the “somethings” that happen day in and day out. The question asked by Virginia Woolf in 1943 in Three Guineas about the terms on which we have joined the academic procession of men are as relevant now as they were then, and each short autoethnographic note aims to bring sharply into view what it is we are against and what it is we stand for as feminists in the academy today. Niggling at the edges of this piece, however, is my positioning as a white-settler-colonial-cis-gendered-feminist woman in the academy, the relevancy of Virginia Woolf’s wondering and writing about the status of women through a different kind of feminist lens, and indeed, the capacity of autoethnography to get down to the roots of this dilemma as it is being played out in the fields of Gender Studies today.