coldhearted scientist وداد

I wondered for years what my chair meant when he would insist I was oppressing the instructors. They were licensed to harass me, but I wasn’t doing anything to them except support them academically in every way I could, as he had asked me to do. Still, I kept hearing that I was oppressing them, and I realized that supporting someone academically didn’t mean the things it does at a good university. Many years later I realized I was inherently oppressive by having Ph.D. level expertise, and he wasn’t speaking only for them, but for himself. I saw it in a flash of insight but it took decades, because this was hardly an attitude I would ascribe to an adult, much less an academic.

I had by this time acquired the habit of accepting abuse and limiting myself more and more so as to become less oppressive. I am still trying to throw this off.

When I was hired, I was told indirectly that the department resented having had to hire in my field, and that the M.A. instructors were angry because had someone not been hired, they imagined, they might be allowed to teach advanced courses or be promoted to professor without the Ph.D. And that the chair was asking me to make it up to the instructors somehow–by allowing mistreatment. I thought it was odd, but I was vulnerable to it, partly because I had already learned that you had to get along.

Now, the idea that you must accept abuse and you must limit yourself is gender policing I should have resisted but thought I had to negotiate with. Because of not articulating the issue clearly enough, I simply felt I had returned to my parents’ house, and felt terrified. But it’s gender policing.

My question now is how to resist, how to dare to exist as someone not in struggle with these people, how to define myself on my own terms in this location and feel safe enough doing so. Perhaps realizing that gender policing is what is happening is one element in play.

Axé.