Overview

When Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign as governor of New York in August 2021, a commentator on CNN remarked that he had ""not gotten his own memo"" on sexual harassment that he had signed into law two years earlier. Misogyny in English Departments theorizes the results of a qualitative empirical study of the ways women in U.S. college and university English departments experience misogyny, and the effects that misogyny has on their personal and professional lives. It seems that we in English departments, too, have not gotten our own memos. English departments market themselves as spaces of equity and diversity, as dedicated to inclusivity and social justice, as committed to rooting out injustices like misogyny via such means as socially just, feminist, and critical pedagogies. We are some of the very people who teach students to recognize and fight back against social injustices like misogyny, and yet, as the women the author interviews demonstrate in this book, we are no less likely to engage in gender-based discriminatory and abusive practices.

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9781433199578

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Misogyny in English Departments meticulously and empathetically documents women's experiences with misogyny across ranks and positions in English Departments. Many of us will recognize our experiences with misogyny on these pages and in the voices of Robillard's interviewees. The interviewees have generously and courageously shared their stories and mapped the toll that misogyny has taken on their work lives, bodies, and psyches. In an age where universities and departments proclaim diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Robillard calls out misogyny as 'the law enforcement branch of patriarchy' and demonstrates how women are often policed, punished, overworked, undervalued, and dismissed in English Departments. This book makes an important contribution to critiques of gendered labor structures and feminist analyses of sexual harassment and sex discrimination. Robillard and the interviewees' analyses of misogynistic patterns and logics give us frameworks for calling out and fighting those patterns in our English Departments and Writing Programs. Eileen E. Schell, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Faculty Affiliate in Women's and Gender Studies, Syracuse University This book is a ground-breaking contribution to the English discipline, promising to change the very way in which English faculty members understand the work that we do. Casting bright light from the MeToo Movement directly upon academia-Robillard reveals the insidious ways in which some of the most supposedly 'enlightened' spaces, English Departments, often depend upon very disturbing misogynistic cultural practices. She couples meticulous, complex analyses and research with a voice that is simply stunning-always clear, always candid, and always calling the guilty to account. Robillard's must-read book should be prominently displayed on all English Department's faculty lounge coffee tables and discussed repeatedly at our faculty meetings. It should also serve as a crucial model for other academic disciplines that desperately need to do similar sorts of self-reflection. Laura A. Gray-Rosendale, President's Distinguished Teaching Fellow and Professor of English, Northern Arizona University; Author of College Girl: A Memoir; and Editor of Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy

Author Information

Amy E. Robillard is professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric, composition, and life writing. She is the author of We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories and the editor, with Shane Combs, of How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship and, with Ron Fortune, of Authorship Contested: Cultural Challenges to the Authentic, Autonomous Author. Her academic essays have appeared in a number of journals, and her personal essays have appeared on The Rumpus and on Full Grown People.

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