Privileged yet vulnerable: Shared memories of a deeply gendered lockdown

Abstract

The centrality of personal experience plays a pivotal role in feminist scholarship. We draw on the feminist inspired collaborative inquiry research method, memory-work, to bring to the fore our experiences of living and working in lockdown, a Government enforced policy response to the global Covid-19 pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand.Memory-work provided the conduit for us to work collaboratively with our experiences and make sense of the whirlwind we lived through. Our exploration is set against the backdrop of the challenges of the conservatism endemic in the neoliberal pathway taken in NZ and its transmission into the university sector. Through our collective editing of each account generated by the phrase "her murky boundaries of lockdown" two interconnected themes came to the fore in various guises: restricted and vulnerable. Using á collective "she" and "her," we reconstruct and analyze the nuances of our shared experiences revealing layers of gendered vulnerability paradoxically intertwined with privilege at this unprecedented time. We conclude by arguing that lockdown exacerbated already existing divisions reinforcing how female, feminist, and academic remain an uncomfortable fit.

Immigrant academic mothers negotiating ideal worker and mother norms during the COVID-19 pandemic: Duoethnography as a co-mentoring tool for transformative learning

“…While we certainly acknowledge that we speak from privileged and protected positions as faculty who have secure jobs and supportive spouses, we want to recognize that we have a marginalized identity, that of being immigrant women. This marginalized identity influenced how and why we had internalized ideal working and mothering norms and how we attempted to transform our work and family identities through challenging those norms, thus rendering us vulnerable despite our privileges ( Ryan et al, 2021 ). English and Irving (2012) argued that studies on women and transformative learning implicitly imply that oppressive conditions or social factors experienced by women can be a disorienting dilemma that when addressed through critical reflection and discourse can instigate transformative learning.…”

Organizing vulnerability exploring Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability to study organizations

“…While Judith Butler's ideas, especially those discussing gender, have been widely discussed in critical and feminist MOS (Borgerson, 2005;Riach et al, 2016;Tyler, 2019), her conceptualization of vulnerability has only just recently entered the field. Inspired by COVID-19, feminist MOS scholars have debated the vulnerabilities made visible by the pandemic (Clavijo, 2020;Hales & Tyler, 2022;Ryan et al, 2021) and those inherent in academic researching and writing (Henriksen et al, 2022;Meriläinen et al, 2022;Plester et al, 2022). This paper proposes to use Judith Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability for studying management and organizations (Borgerson, 2005).…”

The gendered role of pastoral care within tertiary education institutions: An autoethnographic reflection during COVID-19

“…Evidence of the dual negative burden of emotional labour on women academics was heightened during the first COVID-19 pandemic level four lockdown in early 2020 in Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, this entrenched expectation that women will provide emotional support to students as part of service roles (Angervall, 2018, Ryan et al, 2021 impacts women academics' ability to actively participate in research activities and be research productive, thus reducing the likelihood of career advancement, while simultaneously enlarging their emotional burden through increased welfare provision.…”