“(Re)Producing (E)Motions: Motherhood, Academic Spaces, and Neoliberal Times”
by Alexandria Hanson, Alejandra I. Ramírez, April M. Cobos, Heather Listhartke, & Skye Roberson | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020
Introduction
This collaborative writing between single mothers in Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp) began as an investigation into the working conditions of grad students in general. We five single mothers (Skye, Heather, Alejandra, Alex, and April) are, or were recently, active graduate students often in the minority for different reasons including being of color, low income, first generation, and other marginalizations. To tell our story, we use polyvocal style to reflect both our academic voice as well as our collective voice. Our writing process includes Zoom meetings, where we talk about the possibilities and limitations to technology in our teaching, collaborating, and parenting. Our kids want to be on screen and see who we are talking to, smile, and say hi! When we are reading or writing, they may be playing Playstation or Leap Frog or watching cartoons. We are in Tennessee, Arizona, New York, Europe, Virginia, and Arkansas. We find solace in our mutual lived experiences, and our minority status in the field and institution, as single mothers, especially given the limited consideration of such experiences in Rhet-Comp scholarship.1
In this article, we argue that neoliberalism has created an academic culture particularly unfriendly to single-mother graduate students in Rhet-Comp. We explore how our day-to-day practices enable us to participate in an institutional system not designed for us, the strategies and tactics we implement to complete our work, and how academic institutions, programs, and organizations can better support single-mother graduate students and others who do not fit the nuclear, heteronormative, familial structure that is most often imagined in developing family-friendly policies and practices.
[1] To date, there is no scholarship that considers the experiences of single-mother graduate students in Rhet-Comp, and very little that considers the experiences of single mothers in the field. The exceptions are Cucciare et al. (2011) and Vieira (2018).