Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1111/gwao.13223

Publication Title

Gender, Work & Organization

Pages

1-16

Abstract

This article contributes to the emergent literature on motherhood in neoliberal higher education by proposing liberatory motherhood as a theoretical framework and praxis to deconstruct and reconstruct motherhood in the neoliberal academy. The author, an early-career immigrant woman scholar of color, uses feminist autoethnography to critically examine the disempowering, disembodying, and departicularizing effects of neoliberal subjectivation on motheracademics, foregrounding her lived experiences of caregiving in her analysis. She approaches academic motherhood through a prismatic lens of a pluralistic feminist rhetorical analysis that emphasizes interrelationality, tracing her experiences of caring and producing otherwise as a way to signal opportunities to reembody motherhood in the academy. She finds mothering and othering to be mutually reinforcing in the academy and argues for rehumanizing care through alternative (re)productivity. She offers liberatory motherhood as an emancipated and emancipatory motherhood that draws from queer, decolonial, and other motherhoods, reflecting on its potential to further scholarship and practices geared toward reformulating academic subjectivities and emancipating the academy from coercions set by the market.

Rights

© 2024 The Author.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "As this study is an autoethnography, the data consists of the author's personal experiences, reflections, and narratives. Therefore, there are no external datasets associated with this study. The data are derived from the author's lived experiences and is available in the form of personal writing, journaling, and reflections. Due to the personal and subjective nature of the data, they are not publicly available. However, excerpts from the data may be shared upon request, in alignment with ethical considerations and the confidentiality of sensitive personal information."

ORCID

0000-0001-8757-1639 (Sicka)

Original Publication Citation

Sicka, B. (2024). Liberatory motherhood: A framework & praxis for caring and scholaring otherwise in the neoliberal academy. Gender, Work & Organization. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13223

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