Running in a Straitjacket: Motherhood and the Academy (Creative Session) (NeMLA)
Philadelphia
Event: NeMLA
Deadline Extended to October 15th! This creative session is for all of the women in the world of academia who are balancing an impossible world of mothering and/or other caregiving while trying to be a professional scholar. My desire for work in this topic comes from my own experience as an educator and mother to three daughters, and recent caregiving of my mother who has had Parkinson’s disease for 13 years. My creative piece “Trash Can Toast: Trying to Multitask in a New World of Care,” published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, will be shared. The “(R)EVOLUTION” hasn’t come far enough in the world of work for female scholars in the Humanities. The radical change one would hope for isn’t all that radical - to have equal opportunity, to live in a world where caregiving is not a female’s polite and dutiful expectation on top of having a full time career. I’m talking about more than a university accommodating maternity leave. I’m talking about the internal battles, the guilt, the hard work, and the burdens that female scholars face daily.
It begs the old question, do we want it all? What does that look like now? We know women are excellent scholars, but is there a cost to the work that remains different from that of a man because of societal standards that never ended?
Participants can read their original poetry, fiction, non-fiction, or other genres.
Hannah Saunders