Broken Record: Gendered Abuse in Academia

by Mary K. Holland (Editor), Carrie Rohman (Editor), Carlyn Ena Ferrari (Editor), Sara Ahmed (Afterword)

Overview

A landmark volume documenting the scope and insidiousness of gendered abuse in academia, revealing the limits of institutional redress, and sharing hard-won strategies for change.

Broken Record brings together narratives of gendered abuse in academia from across disciplines, at every career stage, around the United States and the world. Individually and collectively, contributors describe harrowing experiences of bullying, mobbing, harassment, and assault in a range of institutional spaces, including classrooms, offices, library stacks, conferences, interviews, and out on field research. Their abusers are teachers, mentors, students, colleagues, chairs, administrators, and even representatives of the very offices tasked with protecting them. Beyond using storytelling to expose the ubiquity of abuse, these writers also theorize its causes and proffer strategies for resistance and healing. With an afterword by Sara Ahmed, author of the groundbreaking Complaint!, Broken Record forms its own powerful collective-a chorus of nearly fifty academics with highly varied yet strikingly consistent narratives, united in a clarion call for change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798855801965
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	09/01/2025
Series:	SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Pages:	267
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism and coeditor, with Heather Hewett, of #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Carrie Rohman is Professor of English at Lafayette College. She is the author of Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance and Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. Carlyn Ena Ferrari is Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University. She is the author of Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: "A Fragile Archive"
Mary K. Holland, Carrie Rohman, and Carlyn Ena Ferrari

Part One: Contexts and Systems of Abuse

1. Survival Analysis: Why Do We Vanish, Where Do We Go?
Anonymous

2. This Chapter Not Intentionally Left Blank
Anonymous

3. Unbecoming the Other Me: A Female Academic Trapped in the Male Student Gaze
Aimee Parkison

4. Keeping Women in Their Place: Sexism in Religious Universities
Rachel Noorda

5. The Snake: Surviving Misogyny in Tunisia
Souhir Zekri Masson

6. Tall Poppy in the English Field: How Successful Women Are Mowed Down
Anonymous

7. Misogyny and Abuse in the Academic Library Workplace: Reflections on Fifteen Years in American Academic Libraries
Carolyn Carpan

8. "Tell Me More": When Bleeding on the Page Isn't Enough
Carlyn Ena Ferrari

Part Two: Resistance and Consequences

9. Mad Woman in the Ivory Tower: The Continuous Costs of Speaking Up after Professor/Student Abuse
Sarah Cheshire

10. Muffled Voices: Creating Safe Space in a Toxic Department
Rifat Siddiqui

11. Rocking the Boat: Experiences of "Silencing" from the Global South
Darlene Demandante and Raphaella Elaine Miranda

12. To Make a Fuss: The Chronic Predator in Higher Education
Anonymous

13. Too Woke, Too Radical, Too Unforgiving: Queer Resistance to the Patriarchal Panopticon
Nancy Pathak

14. Shocked: Resisting and Rising above Abuse in Academe
(Karen) Irene Countryman-Roswurm

15. The Specter of Anonymity and the Shadow Labor of Complaint
Alison E. Vogelaar

Part Three: Theorizing and Enacting Change as Individuals and Collectives

16. All My Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk: The Politics of Solidarity in Black Academia
Nicole Carr

17. In Defense of Remembering
Shannon Walsh

18. How Black Men Can Help Eradicate Gendered Abuse on University Campuses
Kudzaiishe Peter Vanyoro

19. Tracking Sexual Predators across Academic Institutions: Benefits and Limits of Informal Complaints and Recommendations for Change
Anonymous

20. The LIEG's Complaint Collective: Reclaiming Academic Voices
Lidia M. V. Possas and M. Emilia Barbosa

21. Disrupting the Past as Prologue: Recognizing and Responding to Strategies and Tactics of Gendered Oppression
Christina Gallup, Anne Hinderliter, Njoki M. Kamau, Arshia Khan, Lu Smith, and Elizabethada Wright

22. Feminist Secretaries: Silence, Authenticity, and Resistance in the Academy
Francine Banner, Pamela Aronson, Kathleen Darcy, Maureen Linker, Jean-Carlos Lopez, and Lisa A. Martin

23. It Is Better to Speak: A Complaint Collective
Lori Wright, Neisha Ginae Wiley, Elizabeth VanWassenhove, Brandelyn Tosolt, Rae Loftis, and Meg L. Hensley

Afterword: "Heard as a Broken Record"
Sara Ahmed

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Sharing our stories of complaint matters even when, or perhaps because, we have shared these stories many times before … The message is hopeful and hard. Yes: there is still so much work to do. Yes: we have to keep saying it because they keep doing it. Yes: the need to repeat ourselves can be tiring, frustrating. That is why we need to say it more and for more to say it." — Sara Ahmed, from the afterword

"As the editors hope and intend, this volume functions as a complaint collective. In their specificity and range, the essays cast light on many corners of academe, elucidating patterns of harassment and the blocking of efforts to prevent or redress harm. Although the essays document diabolically successful campaigns to isolate women academics and demonstrate the fragile bonds that hold whistleblowers together, the volume also provides the context necessary to understand the pervasiveness and nuances of harassment, as well as the processes that leave those who complain open to doubt and discrediting." — Leigh Gilmore, author of The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women

From the Publisher