Introduction
This chapter tells stories about living with and letting go of academia and motherhood. It presents a form of “narrative inquiry ” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) that articulates the “messiness” and multiple layers of academic practice and affect (Jones, 2011). Specifically, we offer a collective autoethnography of seven researcher-constructed narratives by women academics, university professional staff and ex-academics in three countries. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) describe autoethnography as focusing on “epiphanies” or “remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life … times of existential crisis that forced a person to attend to and analyse lived experience … and events after which life does not seem quite the same” (n.p.). Our collective autoethnographies are more everyday, but no less life-changing. Illustrating the complex and conflicting identities as “academic” and “mother”, we reflect on our contexts and identities as (non)researchers, (non)academics, (non)writers and (non)mothers.
One of the complexities of collective autoethnography is the emergence of multiple subjectivities in the text. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) write: “The ‘I’ can speak as [many]. Yet in living the [research] process, we are one person. We are also one in the writing” (p. 9). The use of multiple first-person accounts here draws attention to the diverse identities and experiences of the authors. We are also thankful for the anonymity this provides as the narratives refer to children, partners, parents, friends and colleagues. This multiplicity demonstrates a critical feminist perspective, which understands subjectivity as constructed in relation to others and the world. For feminist poststructuralist theorists, such as Irigaray and Butler whose work we read in this chapter, subjectivity is gendered, intersects with other markers of identity, and is enmeshed in complex and unequal structures of discourse and power. We are within complex social, cultural, economic and political systems, in which we grapple with the challenges of caring for ourselves and others, and being cared for by others. We breathe the same air.
Breathing in Theory
Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray make uneasy bedfellows, but much is gained by reading them alongside one another. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) has been influential in challenging conceptions of sex, gender and sexuality; Luce Irigaray is best known for This Sex Which Is Not One (1985), a critique of the gendered structures of philosophy, psychoanalysis and economics. Butler challenges the assumed practice within feminism of grounding theory in the “sexed specificity of the female body” (1993, p. 4), something Irigaray is known for. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) argues that gender is not a bodily given but is socially and culturally constituted through the “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts … that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (p. 33). The gendered self is an illusion, a regulatory fiction and a strategy for survival that is reinforced through repetitive relational practices. Butler acknowledges that the “largeness and speculative character of Irigaray’s claims have always put me a bit on edge” but “confesses” that she “can think of no feminist who has read and reread the history of philosophy with the kind of detailed and critical attention she has” (1993, p. 11).
In “The Age of Breath”, Luce Irigaray (2004) writes that breathing corresponds with interiority and autonomy; a woman who is attentive to her breath gives weight to her subjectivity and spirituality: “To cultivate the divine in herself, the woman, in my opinion, has to attend to her own breathing, her own breath, even more than to love” (2004, p. 165). In the collection Breathing with Luce Irigaray (Škof & Holmes, 2013), scholars explore the possibilities of Irigaray’s “age of breath” as an embodied practice of intersubjectivity, or collective awareness of the needs of others. Irigaray’s writing on breath assumes a familiarity with the practices of yoga. In Between East and West, she outlines what yoga has taught her—“the importance of breathing in order to survive, to cure certain ills, and to attain detachment and autonomy” (p. 10). Something she did not find in yoga was “a sexuation of breathing ”, which she has explored “by practicing, by listening (to myself), by reading, by awakening myself” (2002, p. 10). Exploring what it means to be a woman breathing is something Butler might describe as an example of “girling”, a process of perceiving and imposing differences between men and women with the illusion of “naturalness” (1993, p. 177). Read alongside Butler’s criticism, we find value in Irigaray’s work for the ways it enables us to think about the complex “naturalness” of breathing, and how breathing connects our subjectivity and our relationships with others and the world. Butler (1993) advocates finding ways to use the term “woman” tactically “even as one is … used and positioned by it” (p. 29).
There is a link between Butler and Irigaray on breath, as noted in Breathing with Irigaray (2013). Butler writes about breath in relation to poems written by prisoners in Guantanamo:
What I sense in these poems from Guantanamo is the simple, almost primeval, arithmetic of breathing in and out. The origin of life, and the origin of language and the origin of poetry are all there, in the first breath, each breath as if it were our first, the anima, the spirit, what we inspire, what we expire, what separates us from extinction, minute after minute, what keeps us alive as we inhale and exhale the universe. (cited in Škof & Holmes, 2013)
Breath is what keeps us alive. Like Butler’s use of the term “spirit”, Irigaray describes breath as the “vehicle of the soul” (2004, p. 167). We wrote the narratives that follow in response to a prompt to think about “breathing room” through everyday artefacts, which ignited reflection on the collision/union/intersubjectivity of our (non)mother and (non)academic writing and researching selves.
Breath I
It is Friday afternoon. Fridays are the days I set aside for writing, reading, thinking. Activities (I believe) that being in academia should be about, things that make me a person as well as an academic, partly strategy and partly desire. All week has been consumed by teaching and meetings, administration, emails and colleagues complaining for hours on the phone. I use the capitalist metaphor consumed, because that is how I feel, like I am being chewed up by my university. I am head of department so I can’t hang up when colleagues complain. Or am I just too polite? But now it is Friday afternoon and I am writing and thinking. An embodied pleasure.
I write memory notes on post-its, often the boring yellow squares, and sometimes on other post-its shaped like leaves or pink exclamation marks. I stick them to different things: my computer, my calendar, my purse, the book I am reading; creating a materialised stylisation of myself as an academic and a mother, a caring feminine subject. They often have lists on them, they could be for shopping, or revisions for an article, a reminder to ring the hospital, organise a bi...