“(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
Neoliberalism and Ideal Worker Norms
When graduate students forsake their health to take extra responsibilities, we feed into productivity culture—much like the professors who urge us to never turn down an opportunity. This expression of neoliberal values is implicit, sometimes masked as “trying to stay competitive” among the field, but it represents the impact of productivity culture.
We love what we do, but at different times our work in the field comes with reliance on technology, flexibility in our lives, support from those around us, including our departments and faculty, and outside work from spaces beyond our academic institutions to bridge the pay gap between our graduate student salaries and cost of living.
Juggling single mothering and research quite often means we plan and do more with less time, which challenges us to problem solve and improvise in order to create opportunities for ourselves in a space that has not been welcoming to the visibility of the sexual, (re)productive, lactating female body and her familial life. As single-mother graduate students, we work against stigmas of single motherhood in the neoliberal academy to prove ourselves as dedicated, capable, and innovative scholars.
Neoliberal ideologies inform assumptions about what makes an academic. According to Vazquez and Levin (2018), the preferred traits of academic workers are mental flexibility, competitive nature (not just with others but themselves), an entrepreneurial spirit, adaptability to precarious environments, and the ability to remain emotionally detached. These values are communicated implicitly in hiring committees and graduate recruitment, where productivity receives its due reward. However, who is left out when our measure of success is based on productivity? Maintaining these neoliberal assumptions about the ideal graduate student means academic institutions often miss out on the strengths of single mothers! The five of us are in different time zones, but we are all awake by 6 a.m., and the first things on our minds (unless we were also dreaming of them!) are our children, our dissertations, writing projects, and side hustles. As emergent domestic intellectuals (Juffer, 2006), we have our schedules, alarms, and writing spaces sharpened, rehearsed, and repeated hundreds of times over the course of a typical day. By 9 a.m. we have all eaten breakfast, gotten our seven children dressed, checked and responded to urgent emails, got some dissertation writing in, commuted (approximately an hour), dropped our kids off at their schools, and arrived on campus ready to teach.
Ideal worker norms are based on the assumptions that the worker is always available, working, and childless, or has a spouse at home taking care of family obligations (Hochschild, 1989). Single mothers cannot embody the idealized neoliberal worker narrative. Like so many marginalized within the profession, they represent cogs in the machine who cannot/will not turn in unison; whose identities run counter to the ever-present demand for productivity. Because single mothers cannot dedicate themselves solely to work, they are seen as a problem for institutions built from idealized worker norms.
Williams’ (2000) research focuses on the impacts these ideal worker norms have on women who are mothers in the workplace, particularly because these norms ignore the societal expectations placed on mothers and cause work-life imbalance. Her research can certainly be applied to the struggles of single-mother graduate students, who do not have a spouse at home to cover family obligations (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012; Williams, 2000). Given that single-mother graduate students in Rhet-Comp are often teaching multiple sections of required, writing-intensive courses accompanied by substantial grading loads and one-on-one conferences, they are especially overworked, marginalized and vulnerable, as recognized by Nora et al. (2017).
Comments from our colleagues: “How do you do it?!”; “I don’t have kids so I have nothing to hold me back”; “I know you’re busy with your kids and making dinner or whatever”; “I know what it’s like to be a single mother, my husband is out of town for the weekend”; “You can just bring your kid with you to [insert non-kid-friendly academic event here]”
Comments from our faculty and mentors: “The grantor wants to know you can get the research done, but with kids, well, you do the math”; “But what else are you doing [besides teaching, writing, and coursework] to contribute?”; “You’re missing out on networking at the conference”; “You can be a great instructor or a great mother, but you cannot be both at the same time.”
Comments from publishers: “What about single fathers?”
Thoughts to ourselves: “I can’t let anyone know I have kids yet… I didn’t even include it in my grad school application”; “I have more important things to do than go to the holiday party”; “I don’t need your sympathy.”
Comments from other single-mom grad students: “I work better in collaboration”; “I constantly have to choose where my energy is going to go—my kids, my students, my service, or my writing, and usually, my writing comes last.”
Given that higher education is designed based on ideal worker norms, single-mother graduate students find themselves wrongly labelled as “bad subjects,” and are seen as being less committed, less serious, and more invested in their family than their academic work (Vera-Rosas, 2019, p. 71). This is compounded by notions of “intensive mothering,” or the ideology that a good mother is someone entirely devoted to their child(ren) at the expense of everything else in their lives (Hays, 1996). Not only are single mothers marginalized and vulnerable, they also experience pressure in their lives as a result of what it means to be an ideal student and ideal mother; the social and cultural expectations and assumptions around these two roles make them seem incongruent, creating a situation that is not designed for the benefit of single mothers.
Such misperceptions and lack of consideration for single mothers in America’s colleges and universities create a situation where single moms are navigating a higher education system that is not designed for them, much like what Fischer, Rosche, and McCool (2020) describe regarding the female graduate student identity and experience. Given this, it’s not surprising that “Graduate student mothers are at a higher risk of attrition than almost any other group in American universities” (Ellis & Gullion, 2015, p. 153). If graduate-student single mothers are pushed out or continue to be marginalized, higher education loses the voices and perspectives of an entire group of women. These women provide valuable insights and contributions to their fields and disciplines of study, as well as create change in academia to better support people of various identities (Huff, Hampson, & Tagliarina, 2012). The attrition of graduate-student single mothers not only hurts them, it hurts higher education as a whole.