Remaking academic garments

Academic garments have, for centuries, privileged white, male, able, cisgender, middle class bodies. The mortar board, floppy PhD hat and cape, the suit and tie, the tweed jacket with elbow patches were all designed with the white male body in mind. The effect of recent neoliberal trends has only reinforced this. In this book chapter, two feminist scholars reflect upon the ways in which they have remade academia into a comfortable garment. Building upon the work of Kelly (A lecturer’s new clothes: an academic life, in textiles. In A. Black and S. Garvis (Eds.), Lived experiences of women in academia: Metaphors, manifesto and memoir (pp. 23–31). Routledge, 2018), they offer a collective autoethnography of the ways they wear academic life and engage in collective activism. They argue that remaking an academic life creates the conditions for radical hope (Lear, Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press, 2006) in the academy for women and members of intersectional groups.