Lives of the Mind/Body: Alarming Notes on the Tenure and Biological Clocks

By McAlister, Joan Faber

When I entered graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1996,1 had a partner, but no children. When I applied for my first tenure track job at Drake University in 2004, we had three children under the age of four. Looking back, I now think that my experiences moving through graduate school, completing the dissertation while navigating the job market, and progressing toward tenure illustrate how the culture of academia encourages us to live the life of the mind at the expense of the life of the body, and to keep quiet about the competing clocks that govern them. The struggle of academic women to manage the divergent timetines of having a career and having a life is exacerbated by the bodily sacrifices demanded under what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “temporal order” governing the world of the “homo academic us.”1 Focusing on intellectual aspirations and maintaining a respectable pace, we are expected to keep the cycles and expiration dates of our private parts politely out of sight. This is why one popular handbook advises women who want tenure and children to keep visible signs of birthing and mothering off campus to avoid appearing out of step with the “traditional clockwork of male careers” (long predicated on the assumption that wives would handle family matters at home) that still dominates academia (Toth 119). For female academics who desire to give birth, drawing such a rigid line between our professional and personal lives can force us to choose in which basket we should place all of our eggs, and the culture of academia heavily favors choosing the rewards of the disembodied mind over the pleasures of the maternal body. The training we get in graduate school never acknowledges the ticking of the fertility clock; the race to finish and find a job tends to favor young bodies unburdened by dependents; and the tenure deadline marches toward us even if, in addition to compiling a record of scholarship, we are working on the story of our families’ lives. At each stage, calling attention to bodily differences and forcing the issue of competing clocks seems too risky, as it can earn us the infuriating disdain (or worse, pity) of our peers.

For over six years I have been reluctant to introduce my children into my workplace, my classroom, and my scholarly writing. I have been afraid of being seen as a mother, of being pressed into that feminine, nurturing, heterosexual figure with her feet firmly planted in the home-so removed from the tough, professional, feminist/queer/critical scholar I have wanted to be. Maybe it is time for this to change, time to talk about the price we pay for the fantasies of the bodiless (male) mind and the mindless (female) body. Telling tales of our private struggles to mother mindfully might be a small step toward a future when the institutions that house us can accommodate not just our minds but also our bodies, making it possible to synchronize the tenure and biological clocks. So here is mine.

Graduate school was like on-the-job training for me, with long hours and low wages. I was putting in my time at the library, in the classroom, and on the computer keyboard, and I was competing against my fellow trainees in what looked to me like a male-dominated field. The names and accomplishments of female rhetorical scholars- relatively recent additions to the discipline-were absent from introductory courses, or briefly mentioned as we rushed through the final weeks of a semester. Of the five of us who took qualifying exams during my first year of graduate school, I am the only one of the three women who has since joined the men in earning the Ph.D. (and it took me years longer than it did the men). Since I did not have access to statistics on gender and degree completion in rhetorical studies, I was drawing some big conclusions from my small sample. When one of my peers asked me to join her on a panel of female graduate students discussing the problem of mentoring and role models for women in Big Ten universities, I welcomed the opportunity to raise the issue while building my own vita. But when the proposal was circulated, some of our female faculty members strongly objected to it, seeing its authors as puppets of resentful alumni, post-feminists reinstating an untenable notion of universal “female experience,” or ignorant ninnies who had neither studied feminist theory nor made use of the role models who were at hand (the last one may have been closest to the mark). I spent weeks repairing the damage and months dreading the panel presentation, at which we were so terrified that we said almost nothing. The whole fiasco cost me a friendship and the good opinion of at least two faculty members who, nearly ten years later, still refuse to speak or make eye contact with me. It is possible that our timing was just bad, that there were tensions and power struggles within the institution that were beyond our limited view. In any case, I felt sharply disciplined, and I did not want to risk bringing up gender issues in academic space for some time.

And yet, it remained hard to fully disconnect my efforts to pursue a “life of the mind” (an aspiration impressed upon me by a particularly challenging professor during my first semester) from my anxieties over the life of the body. When a quick plunge over the side of a bridge began to look like a welcome alternative to yet another lengthy and humiliating session of brain surgery at the hands of that same professor (he appeared to be making special efforts to toughen me up by probing my intellectual soft spots), I visited a psychologist in the student health center. I explained the specific challenges of my coursework, my interpersonal struggles with faculty members, and my career goals. She stared me full in the face and bluntly asked, “How old are you?” After my reply, she simply said “Tick. Tick.” I protested, redirecting the conversation back to appropriate professional concerns. “Tick.” She continued to repeat the word, shaking her head and smiling, until I left the session, never to return. I was pissed. But being viewed as a uterus with legs was not as bad as the floating-brain treatment I was getting at the hands of academia-at least I had enough terms and concepts from my pre-grad school feminist activism days to give my anger a satisfying air of righteousness. Nevertheless, indignation aside, the psychologist had a point. Although I was learning how to critique rhetorics of gendered discourse, my new skills did not prevent fears about the “biological clock” from feeling as real as those inspired by the “tenure clock.” I began to experience time pressures from these two directions once I had passed my comprehensive exam, which ended my training and began my race to complete the dissertation and land a tenure track job. I heard the tick of the academic clock in the warning of a committee member the day after I defended my prospectus: “Now, people start counting.” I knew that my best chance for success was to sprint toward my dissertation defense and try to beat my competition to the most desirable tenure track job. But I was also hearing the cry of a misplaced baby in a recurring nightmare where I tore through dresser drawers trying to find the source and make it stop, and I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me what it meant.

Given my relatively late start to graduate school and encountering the maxim that female academics might be forced to choose between kids and tenure, it occurred to me that it might be now or never. I was racing against more than one clock; if I waited until after I had landed a job, I would either have to earn tenure while I was still fertile or risk administrators assuming that I had “chosen the ‘mommy track’ rather than the tenure track” (Harper 242). So, my final lap toward the tenure track prize turned into a grueling marathon.

Even now, I cringe at the time that elapsed between my prospectus and dissertation defenses. Drafting this narrative marks the first time I ever forced myself to do the math and acknowledge how long it took me to finish: six years. Despite three years teaching a lecturer’s full load along with caring for three babies, it seems sluggish. I would like to blame this lengthy detour entirely on my elusive project, my hard-to-please advisor, or my demanding children, but my devotion to all three and my own conscience prevent it. As many scholars of the rhetoric of memorials have pointed out, memory is a tricky business-an observation no less true of the personal than of the national. At this point, I cannot be sure whether my progress on my dissertation slowed because I started having babies or I started having babies because the progress on my dissertation was so slow. In either case, I do remember agonizing at the fork in the road. For a young initiate afraid to ask personal questions, die higher ranks of the Research I university appeared occupied either by successful women with no children, or men, who not only had children, but were re-marrying and having a round of post-tenure babies with younger wives.2 Indicating that I was interested in starting anything other than an academic career seemed a way to mark myself as less than fully committed at a time when I saw younger candidates faltering left and right and several women over thirty-five stuck in the “permanent ABD” lane. I had gotten the strong impression that “the right stuff’ to make it as an academic was located in the frontal lobe of the brain, not in the nether regions of the female body, parts that could somehow slow rather than speed my progress to the finish line. It took me months to hint at the subject of competing clocks with my advisor. Instead of the kindly patriarch, cantankerous genius, or absentedminded (male) professor figures I might have chosen, I had pursued a young female scholar with a razor-sharp intellect and impossibly high standards. Perhaps I was attempting to avoid the “erotic mentoring” Janice Mocker Rushing recounts in her book about women taken under the wings of older men in the academy. I think it is more likely that, having seen the most arrogant male peers struck dumb in her seminars and watching her wield lethal terms like “phallogocentrism.” I was awed by the way this female rhetorician had not paused after making her way into the boys’ club, but was actually threatening to burn the clubhouse down. Wellschooled in the theoretical areas where I was weakest and unwilling to accept shoddy work, she was just the coach I needed, one with a deep reserve of the fierce focus and mental agility that competition sometimes brought out in me. But it was hard to picture a baby drooling on her designer suits, and I feared she would question my dedication and see me as a waste of her time if I mentioned extra-curricular interests, like photography or gardening, let alone reproduction. When I finally told her that I was afraid I could not afford to wait for tenure, she was both serious and sympathetic, saying that there was “no perfect time to have a baby”: it would present challenges at any point in my career. She told me of other women in the field who were raising children and validated my desire to have a life (whatever that might mean to me) outside the academy. Crossing the parking lot after this conversation, I felt intensely relieved and elated, lighter somehow. A successful female scholar had just given me her blessing to conceive, which, for some reason, I really needed. I decided right then that I would be a mother now, rather than later or never. I almost felt pregnant already. Within the month, I was.

I dread writing the next part of this narrative, but I do not want to excise it either. Our first child was stillborn on April 3, 2000. If there is a kind of writing that can begin to represent the experiences associated with this event, I have not learned it. I can only say that this loss was very public and remains very painful. My tiny son’s death wrenched away identities that had become comfortable for me. Politically, pro-choice discourse describing procedures to empty the “contents of the uterus” seemed as obscene in its euphemism as pro-life slogans were in their hyperbole. Spiritually, I became as violently alienated from the Mother Goddess as I had long been from the Virgin Mary. In the wake of cruel comments and unexpected kindnesses, I became estranged from intimates and intimate with strangers. The entire period surrounding this loss was profoundly disorienting. Baby showers became funereal to me, and I lost friends who were pregnant because I didn’t want to infect them with my tragedy. Later, I lost friends who struggled with infertility and resented the three living children I now have.

These children, a daughter and a pair of twins (girl and boy), clearly fit the “May baby phenomenon” (arriving in that month in 2001 and 2004) that Carmen Armenti noted among untenured academic mothers who know that timing is everything when it comes to childbirth. They were all bom before I completed my dissertation or found permanent employment. They needed a lot of my time, money, energy, and affection. They alternately provoked terror, hope, and rage. They introduced me to the limits of my physical stamina and my capacity for sublime sensual joy as well as the inadequacies of the word “love.” They deeply altered my daily and nightly schedules as well as my body in ways that seemed incompatible with the standardized rhythms of university life. I remember a number of unavoidable incidents that made it clear to me how out of place maternal and infant bodies are in the university setting. When sitters bailed on me or I needed to nurse, I brought a baby to office hours, to a lecture welcoming new teaching assistants, and to a summer conference. These three experiments all failed. After my office hours, the departmental secretaries complained that I should find more reliable day care; at the end of the lecture a senior faculty member pointed at the sleeping bundle in the sling around my neck and said (too loudly), “What the hell is lhatT; and while trying to sneak a baby with a wet diaper through the back door of the conference hotel, I ran into the unfriendly stares of two highly published male scholars (whose sweaty bodies and racquetball attire are, ironically, not out of place at the traveling oral exam/ singles bar that is the convention junket). I learned that I needed to keep my bodily connections with my babies under wraps when I was inside the walls of the academy, a lesson I carried with me when I finally went on the job market.

When I was invited to interview for a tenure track job at Drake University in 2005, I received a schedule that posed a problem. Scanning the planned meetings and presentations, I realized that there would be no time for me to pump breastmilk at all during the day, and my situation made me hesitant to raise the issue. I had infant twins and a three-year-old, and I was undefended and unpublished. I had had a very public “miscarriage” (I despise this term; carried improperly? mistakenly carried?) and the chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology-who gave me an angry “shut- up-and-trust-your-mechanic” speech when I asked him too many questions-had deemed my cervix “incompetent.” My finances were a wreck, as I had spent more than time grieving our first baby; medical and burial costs had been followed by eating out almost every meal and showering myself with the gifts that bestow “personhood” on the fetus and motherhood on its host (Layne 136). I had undergone four surgeries and been placed on bedrest for an entire semester when pregnant with the twins, and I was afraid potential employers would doubt my capacity to succeed in a tenure track position. So I decided to be discreet, asking if 1 might have a time and place to prepare before my “job talk.” The chair readily agreed, but when the time came, I found myself in a conference room with multiple windows and no lock on the glass-paned door. What to do? If I didn’t pump, I could make it through my presentation, but was likely to seep through my suit while meeting with the dean. I pulled the shades, moved to a corner of the room and turned on the pump. When the horrid grinding sound seemed loud enough to be heard in the chair’s office next door, I threw my coat over the motor and hoped for the best. I went to the job talk without reviewing ray notes, and with a breast pump hidden in the laptop compartment of my briefcase. I met the provost with two bottles of warm milk in my bag. Getting the job offer and writing my new chair with the news that 1 had successfully defended my dissertation were sweetly satisfying experiences-but now I was officially on the tenure clock.

The countdown to the tenure deadline is clearly audible in my workplace; I give annual reports on my progress and regularly attend preparatory meetings. The sound of family time ticking away is more muffled and harder to discern, but measuring our first child’s life in negative weeks has heightened my sensitivity to it. I hear it when 1 return from a conference and am told I have missed some important milestone, first steps, first word, first day of school. I hear it in the nightmares where my children slip out of the house while I click away at my keyboard that end with me frantic to find them before the sun sets and the temperature drops. Time-to write, to take care of kids, to sleep-always seems in desperately short supply.

However, blending my professional and personal struggles in this essay marks my newfound unwillingness to keep quiet about mothering time in and around academic institutions, and it is only one of several signs that I am trying to synchronize the tenure and biological clocks and the tempos of life as a professor and parent. Last spring I designed a new course called “Rhetorics of the American Family,” a critical examination of discourse about competing definitions and representations of marriage and family in popular culture. The course immediately filled, drawing a few men and a host of women with feminist sensibilities and personal anxieties. For the first time ever, my own familial experiences and those of my students no longer seemed too intimate or too irrelevant to discuss in the classroom.

In addition to writing and talking about my children inside the academy, I have also started bringing them to the university rec center in an effort to prevent them from becoming hopelessly bookish (stereotypical academician’s?) kids. The fact that my six year-old can explain the relationship between Jupiter’s gravitational pull and lo’s volcanic eruptions, but can’t dribble a basketball, motivates me to squeeze athletic opportunities for her into my busy schedule. I dread running into a colleague while chasing a naked toddler down the hallway in my swimsuit, but campus facilities seem to be the only ones we have the time to access. Last year, following a lecture on locker-room etiquette, my twoyear-old daughter ran into the building, triumphantly hollering, “Mommy! I’m NOT going to talk about penises at the swimming pool today!” As she proudly beamed up at me, what could I say? “Good job!” I said, “Now you’re talking like a Big Girl.” Her persistence in calling her own fascinating protrusion a “penis” (and her propensity to talk about and try to touch other women’s penises) presents me with two unsatisfying choices that seem familiar: 1) let her continue to act as though she has a penis or 2) take her penis away from her by telling her that only her twin brother has a “real” penis. What’s it going to be: penis or no penis? tenure or kids? So far I’m stalling for a third option, a way to give her something different (which organ?), but I’m running out of time before some classmate or teacher tells her that she doesn’t have, and shouldn’t talk about, The Penis. Four years ago I was slowly walking like a Big Girl, maneuvering over 250 pounds of flesh and enduring patronizing smiles and belly pats. Now, just like my youngest daughter, I am awkwardly trying to talk about what I am not supposed to inside the walls of the academy, refusing to protect the fantasy that the mind can be disembodied, pointing out that scholarly discourse has long been gendered, proclaiming that it is time to give voice to bodily differences and re- negotiate what will count when we measure our productivity. Big Girls indeed.

Notes

1 Bourdieu argued that the pattern of temporal progression through the university system is so central to the preservation of its hierarchy that conforming to the established pace is the surest way for initiates to demonstrate “unconditional respect for the fundamental principles of the established order” (87).

2 As Armenti observes, there are a number of studies indicating that “women academics are more likely than their male colleagues to have fewer children and to remain single and childless” (213). Some of the data evidencing pronounced differences in fertility rates for male and female academics is covered in Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden, and Nicholas H. Wolfinger.

Joan Faber McAlister

Drake University

Joan Faber McAlister is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society at Drake University. She would like to thank Marilyn DeLaure, Heidi Hamilton, Karen Bovenmyer, and the reviewers and editors for this issue of Women’s Studies in Communication for their assistance during the revision process. She would also like to thank her mother. Marilynn Faber, for a lifetime of labor and love.

Copyright Organization for Research on Women and Communication Summer 2008

(c) 2008 Women’s Studies in Communication. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.