Misogyny in English Departments

Foreword

Malea Powell

I’m not going to be coy. I love this book, and I admire both Robillard’s research ethics and the incredibly useful theoretical and methodological pathways she walks as her participants’ stories are shared with you here. Because of the many truths that get spoken here, my experience as a reader of this often felt both like an act of solidarity (the margins of my manuscript copy are covered with “Yesss!” and “OMFG”) and like an act of shared mourning.

Like her participants, when I first heard about Robillard’s plan for this project, I started nodding my head in agreement. It’s often seemed ironic and irritating to me that even in the most so-called liberal, progressive, and justice-oriented English/humanities departments, there’s an undercurrent of petty misogyny that works under the radar. Of course, these kinds of entitlement practices are what, as Robillard argues, uphold patriarchal systems within the university and persistently create more pressure for women to comply with those patriarchal norms or face punishment in those spaces. After all, misogyny, like racism, is a system, a social structure, in which the actions of specific “bad” individuals are often blamed while the entire class of individuals (in this case, men and women who “behave” correctly) continue to benefit from the structure/system. And we internalize misogyny, just like we internalize racism.

As you read these stories, I know they will remind you of your own stories, and of so many other stories of other ways that many of our experiences are belittled and erased. Hold all of those stories close and keep them warm. They are only one of our defenses in such an inhumane system, but they are a critical one. More importantly, remember, Robillard isn’t just offering the stories told by her participants as another way to simply “name and blame” the acts of perpetrators and those who benefit from the entitlements of patriarchal oppression. Instead, Robillard asks us, her readers, to act as a community of colleague and scholars. She asks us to listen, to be thoughtful, to take responsibility, and to do things differently moving forward. She treats us as colleagues who might just be able to listen to what we’ve been doing badly and just might be able to put our heads together to do things in a better, more equitable way. In doing this, Robillard actually opens a window to hope, which seems like a radical act during a time when hope is increasingly hard to come by. For Robillard’s work in honoring her participants’ stories, in presenting them to us with such care, for asking us to ←xii | xiii→look our own uglinesses right in the face, and for doing so in a way that charts a path to the possibility of creating spaces that are decidedly more thoughtful and equitable, I am grateful.

Preface

The stories that follow are tales told out of school. They break the rules we’ve all internalized about what we can and cannot tell, about what we should and should not tell, and they bust open the comfortable beliefs many of us continue to carry with us about equity in the academy. But for those of us who have experienced misogyny in our departments, the only thing busting open is the “expectation that you’ll maintain this façade that everything is fine, that no one’s racist, that no one’s sexist, or any of those things,” as one of my interviewees put it. The women I spoke with for this project are no longer conforming to that expectation, as they’ve decided that it’s more important to tell their stories than it is to maintain that façade. The façade has done enough damage.