‘Migrant academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist solidarity unsettled and intersectional politics interrogated’

Abstract

Authors share joint copyright with the JIWS, © 2023. Feminist sisterhood has been heavily criticized by Black feminists and others as installing a false sense of equality among women and being overly ambitious in disrupting the models and boundaries of the neo-liberal university. This paper draws on the autobiographical account of a White-other, female European migrant academic in the United Kingdom to consider how intersectional disadvantage and privilege shapes feminist sisterhood with profound implications for academic identities, careers, and belonging in the internationalized university and the wider socio-political British context. I draw on my professional trajectory to demonstrate how othering and violence in the form of verbal abuse, microaggressions, misrecognitions, and xenophobic and racist performances of professional authority and superiority operate as dividing mechanisms among feminists within the context of institutional inequalities, color and class prejudice, and global hierarchies of North/South and East/West. I argue that the conditionality of Whiteness, coupled with the gendering, racialization, ethnicization and citizenship rights of European minorities within the pre/post Brexit context affect female migrant academics’ sense of legitimacy, belonging, and solidarity. Moreover, unraveling hegemonic feminist subjectivities and the boundaries that are erected against female migrants can expose the racialized aggression and lack of feminist solidarity in neo-liberal British academia.