Shedding the Shards of Expectations

Abstract

In my first years of contingency, I began having anxiety-ridden dreams. The most prominent one featured me with shattered mirror skin. As I removed the shards, I felt the pain of each one tearing away. In this article, I consider how my whiteness and my neurodivergency intersect to impact how I feel about my position as a contingent faculty. Within the whiteness of academia, my white skin provides me with solace, but when my neurodivergency or precarious position reveal themselves, my investment in whiteness becomes harmful. These tensions pull at me. As I pull each shard off, my body tries to mold into an academic. In Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.”1 As I reflect on the tensions between whiteness, neurodivergency, and contingency, I find ways to disidentify as a means of survival in an academia that has little room for neurodivergency.