Ways to write an academic life: Queering the academic curriculum vitae

Abstract

The curriculum vitae (CV) is a short account of one’s career and qualifications typically prepared for a position or promotion. In academia, the CV chronicles a representation of the academic self in terms of scholarly activities such as publications, research grants and projects, conference participation and teaching awards. Far from being a neutral record, the CV (re)produces gendered norms and highlights continued gender inequalities in academic careers. This article explores how the CV is made possible (and consequently measured and valued) through material practices as well as via discourses of productivity, employability and success. It does this by embracing Jack Halberstam’s concept of ‘queer failure’ and Karen Barad’s theory of ‘intra-action’ in an experimental auto-ethico-ethnography of the academic CV. Using a diffractive approach, this article also calls into question the separation of the body and the materiality of the CV, our emotional relationship with the CV, as well as gendered academic labour. In theorising the CV through the lens of performativity, attention is reoriented towards the assemblage of relations and intra-actions between academic, writing, the career, the body and representation and reveals them to be complexly located within and through each other.