Drawing on Judith Butler's early work on gender as performance and her later work on the ethically accountable subject, this study examines the production of gendered moral subjects under neoliberal governance in contemporary academia. The analysis of 40 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with postdoc researchers and assistant, associate and full professors in a Belgian university reveals how in academics’ narratives of their ethical relations of (non‐)accountability towards multiple stakeholders, gendered subjects are performed along the heterosexual matrix reproducing the gender binary. The conjunction of gendered and ethical demands imposed through relations of accountability further opens up distinctively gendered possibilities of consent and resistance under neoliberal governance. We advance the extant literature on gender in academia which largely focuses on women's symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. By locating power in the gendered relations of accountability towards multiple others, it re‐conceptualizes gender as an ontological struggle in the constitution of the self as moral along gendered norms. The study rejoins recent scholarship that calls for the recognition and elaboration of a relational ethics by showing how such ethics enables the emergence of open and responsive subjectivities in relations of accountability.

This paper responds to the emergent calls for recovering the role of contentious politics in prefigurative communities to more effectively transform capitalist institutions. Theoretically drawing on the work of Judith Butler, our paper points to the importance of addressing the institutional frames that demarcate who will be (mis)recognized in the public space and which are at the core of politics. Our analysis of the Coop case, shows how prefigurative and contentious politics are not incompatible, but can rather strengthen each other in a virtuous circle. When articulated to redefine existing institutional frames, they can reduce precarity. Through this articulation an assembly is constituted where a redefined subject can emerge outside the precarizing frames of neoliberalism. At the same time, our analysis suggests that Coop’s political practices do not completely redefine the individualized, calculative neoliberal subject. Project workers embraced the assembly only to the extent that it helped them reduce their self-responsibility and advance their professional and life projects. Overall, these insights advance the literature on grassroots organizations by showing the importance of contentious politics in attempting to redefine the institutional frames, as opposed to solely relying on prefigurative politics outside institutions. Yet they simultaneously confirm the difficulty to redefine the precarious neoliberal subject through collective emancipatory projects.

It is often said that desperate times call for desperate measures. Yet, in the contemporary pandemic crisis, desperate organizational measures seem all but present. Instead, for most of us it is ‘business as usual’ while we are at the same time required to take care of our kids. The situation makes us highly uncomfortable and overwhelms many of us with feelings of stress — when trying to keep on going with the flow — or feelings of guilt — when just not being able to juggle all the different things. In this short piece, I draw on a personal vignette to first theorize how the pandemic crisis leverages the constitution of a masculine subjectivity and, so doing, further increases the ontological struggle in the constitution of a female subjectivity under neoliberal governance. In a second instance, I turn to an email sent by my PhD supervisor to illustrate how a relational ethics, recognizing the openness and generosity in the relation, and collective performativity can lower the ethical burden we face. I conclude by arguing that such an alternative script and the subjectivity fostered through it is urgently needed, not only today in pandemic times, but also in times beyond.