Advisor–advisee feminist relational mentoring: A heartfelt autoethnographic conversation

Abstract

Academia is frequently a hostile place where students, pre‐tenure scholars, women, people of color, disabled, queer, transgender, and nonbinary people face perpetual challenges. “You do not belong here” or “you are not good enough” can feel like a constant refrain. Yet some students find their path and pursue their graduate studies with determination, or even passion, joy, and a sense of satisfaction. A successful mentoring relationship with a faculty member can contribute to that success. This article tells the story of how two very differently positioned women in academia forged a unique mentoring relationship that produced unexpected and positive outcomes. One measure of this relationship's success is the student's transformation from hesitant master's student to confident doctoral student pursuing a self‐designed multidisciplinary doctoral degree. Less tangibly but no less important, the increasingly reciprocal and horizontal nature of this mentoring relationship allowed both parties to take risks in their academic lives and to step into more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the academy. In this article we, a white American tenured faculty advisor and a Saudi‐American Muslim woman PhD advisee, trace some of the key turning points in this advising story through a duo‐autoethnographic (duoethnography: a collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers juxtapose their life histories in order to provide multiple understandings of a social phenomenon) dialogue. We relay how our mentoring relationship allowed each of us to transcend our scripted academic roles and fostered an enabling environment for doctoral study and risky scholarship. We acknowledge that mentoring is not a one‐size‐fits‐all approach, yet we hope that by highlighting some dimensions of our relationship we might inform others seeking a feminist, relational, horizontal, supportive model for academic mentoring.

Femme‐toring: Leveraging critical femininities and femme theory to cultivate alternative approaches to mentoring

“…Femme‐toring breaks away from the masculinist neoliberal logics of men‐toring by deliberately valuing and centering feminine qualities as an interpersonal method of catalyzing broader systemic change. In developing femme‐toring, we bring together and build upon the inter‐disciplinary feminist literature vis‐à‐vis men‐toring (e.g., Dashper, 2019; Falconer Al‐Hindi, 2019; Goerisch et al., 2019; Harris, 2022; Humble et al., 2006; Mokhtar & Foley, 2020; Moss et al., 1999; Oberhauser & Caretta, 2019; Sandager, 2021), while turning to the queer margins to think mentoring anew.…”

“…Specifically, we consider mentorship literature through a femme framework (Hoskin, 2017b, 2021). In doing so, we develop femme‐toring as an alternative lens informed by queer fem(me)inist epistemologies and ethics of care (e.g., Davies & Hoskin, 2021; Goerisch et al., 2019; Hoskin, 2021; Hoskin & Blair, 2022; Humble et al., 2006; Mokhtar & Foley, 2020; Oberhauser & Caretta, 2019). We theorize femme‐toring as modeling softness, vulnerability, collaboration, and yielding and leverage both Systems Theory (Luhmann & Gilgen, 2012) and Foucauldian theory (Foucault, 1978) to propose that it is capable of attending to both interpersonal relations and gendered structures of power.…”

In Their Experience: A Review of Racial and Sexual Minority Experience in Academe and Proposals for Building an Inclusive Criminology

“…Authors note resistance and challenges by students in the classroom, particularly concerning issues of race and privilege (Brooms & Brice, 2017; Chan et al, 2021). Mentorship relationships prove an important and consistent theme in othered academic experience (Chang et al, 2014; Hsieh & Nguyen, 2020; Mokhtar & Foley, 2020; Moua, 2018). These othered scholars document a struggle to define themselves as legitimate and to decolonize their own conceptions of the archetypal academic (Leigh et al, 2021).…”