Resisting ‘overing’: Teaching and researching gender studies in Sweden

“You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you”: The Mood of Contemporary Universities and its Impact on Feminist Scholarship

“…As Cvetkovich argues, the 'public feeling' of depression that shapes contemporary academia 'often keeps people silent, weary, and too numb to really notice the sources of their unhappiness'; it operates 'by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless' (2012, 12-13). Indeed, when the productivist logic of performativity is deeply entrenched in institutional life, it becomes very easily incorporated as part of academics' sense of self, scholarly work, and relations with others (Davies and Petersen 2005;Fahlgren et al 2016;Sifaki 2016). Exhausted and overwhelmed by their workloads, and anxious about how 'behind' they are at work, academics get swept into a compulsion to work more.…”

“…Debating this 'psychosocial and somatic catastrophe' is challenging also for another reason: because WGFS scholars' relationship with their intense workloads is ambivalent, containing pain but also pleasure. The performative university is certainly toxic (Gill 2010), but also very seductive (Fahlgren et al 2016). It purportedly offers WGFS scholars the possibility of circumventing entrenched epistemic inequalities.…”

“…Driven by that commitment, we try to 'play the game' of productivity for emancipatory ends. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to play that game without internalising and reproducing at least some of the game's assumptions or rules (Fahlgren et al 2016;Wånggren et al 2017). We often end up unwittingly normalising an ever-receding horizon of productivity and an ableist academic culture which excludes people unable to maintain those excessive levels of productivity (Mountz et al 2015;Berg and Seeber 2016).…”