The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies

I attended the same panel on female bloggers that Alex references and also came away feeling a bit discomfited. While she felt the anxiety in the room, I was more struck with some of the certainty that seemed to characterize parts of the conversation. Since I have been writing quite a bit about girls and young women and the increasingly normative practice (in the United States anyway) of self-branding, the turn in the panel to self-branding stuck with me. The panelists were all experienced bloggers, and all were either graduate students or junior faculty. As Alex says, there ensued a lively conversation, one that invoked a discussion of women and technologies, alternative forms of publication, such as blogging and video production, and whether they “count” for things like tenure—and if not, why not—and, most important, media production as feminist practice.

Interestingly, while parsing out how and in what ways blogging and uploading videos can be critical feminist practice, the conversation turned to self-branding. Some of the panelists mentioned that they also use media production online as a way to “self-brand,” especially since many of them were on the academic job market, and this was seen as a way of establishing an “on-line presence.” However, at times, it was a bit difficult to figure out what some of the panelists believed to be the differences between self-branding and feminist media practice—or even if those differences made a difference. This was the certainty I mentioned; that it seemed perfectly logical to speak of ourselves as “brands,” particularly in relation to the job market.

I’m troubled by the notion that the practices of feminist media production and self-branding seem to be increasingly intertwined.

As Alison Hearn (2008) has argued, self-branding is a practice whereby one constructs a narrative of the self using the logic, language, and strategies of branding—it means to transform the self into a branded commodity within consumer culture. Social media and other online spaces have provided particularly rich sites for self-branding because of the relative flexibility of the Web and its focus on visibility. While much of social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, have self-identified as valuable spaces for both self-expression and business, it seems to be that for many of the users on these sites, self-expression is a business.

Clearly, social media are capacious, and certainly all people who use social media do not do so to self-brand. It is, however, an increasingly normative practice, one that is enabled by social media and one that relies on a particular practice of gendered labor.

The practice of online self-branding for girls and young women, including academics, including feminists, often relies on an intertwined set of dynamics, tapping into user interactivity, global neoliberal capitalism, and postfeminism. As a more specified and local practice, however, the conventions of blogging, uploading videos, and updating information on social network sites fit with the logic of self-branding. That is, posting one’s opinions, thoughts, status updates, and so on are part of media production and thus can be empowering as self-work, but because of the commercial and branded context of online spaces, this kind of media interactivity can also transform into self-branding. The market forces of global neoliberal capitalism and the context of postfeminism, in other words, do not just capitalize on participatory culture and notions of gendered empowerment, but also frame and shape what we’ve come to know as “participation” and “empowerment” in the first place. For me, feminist labor practices involve not only actual media production on social media sites, but also the interrogation of the logic and structures of these sites, as well as how this logic and structure in turn frame and shape our production and participation. Again, this doesn’t mean that all media production is about engaging in self-branding, but it does mean that feminist labor, like all forms of labor, takes place in a specific political economy.

This is an especially slippery terrain for feminists, because so much of feminist struggle has been about giving—and taking—voice, occupying space that has historically been inaccessible, and presenting oneself in confident, empowering terms. I don’t want to confuse self-promotion with self-branding, as I think that promoting our work is vital for feminists in the contemporary context. But I believe that feminists can promote our work while simultaneously challenging the institutional and commercial structures in which our work so often finds a home. It is both of these practices simultaneously—self-presentation as confident and powerful and critiquing normative practices of self-branding—that I see as important feminist labor practices.

If feminist labor is performed within the strictures of the corporate university, we need to be vigilant about considering what this labor looks like and who is practicing it. So, in that spirit, we felt we should ask a few questions about some of the changing conditions of feminist labor as we see it. It will be noticed: We do not have answers to these questions. Our asking them in the first place is part of self-reflexivity, as we engage in feminist practices, including blogging and social media, and ponder what these practices mean in the contemporary environment. By leaving our questions open ended, we hope instead to generate a conversation across our varied positions about the gendered components of academic labor.

1.FEMINIST VISIBILITY/EMPOWERMENT/IMAGE: Feminism often seeks the gaining and maintaining of voice and visibility, empowering women to inhabit the agency, authority, credibility, and space from which to speak and be heard. We ask: What are the ends of this “to-be-looked-at-ness”? Where is our hard-found personal power best directed? Feminism helps us to understand self-empowerment as a part of larger processes that move in three directions: toward building community (enabling other’s voices and connecting varied forms of expression); speaking critique that is grounded in personal experience (the feminist adage of “the personal is political” is even more heightened in the neoliberal university); and making change accordingly. In academia, our voice enables each of us to speak our profound feminist-inflected textual and institutional analyses in ever expanding and varied forms. But this is a building dialogue that cannot be understood within the confines of isolated production. Meanwhile, our institutional power allows us to struggle for such words to continue to be created and then appropriately valued. Our personal empowerment also allows us to advocate for and mentor students and colleagues, as well as to transform ideas, curricula, and departments. How might we use feminist values of visibility to ensure that these usually unseen and undervalued acts of service, disproportionately performed by female academics, are better valued? It is a difficult time to get a job, a hard time to keep a job, and these are tough times to be noticed. How can we be seen and known without understanding ourselves as products or in isolation? How can we share our best work while connecting it to the work of others and to larger political goals?

Finally, is our academic labor, which takes the forms of deep thinking, complex writing, and sustained and building critique, best suited for the quick tactics of branding? Speaking as professors who hire young scholars regularly, we support the idea that scholarship comes in different forms (including filmmaking and other sorts of media production). We struggle, as feminists often do, to include alternative forms of scholarship as “real” work. That said, we have never looked at whether or not a candidate has developed a particularly good self-brand when doing the serious work of hiring. However, if a person’s blog or website were a considered part of their academic project, or if the job asked for proficiency in these technologies, then these practices should be included as alternative forms of scholarship. One of the reasons we are feminist academics is because we want to believe in and work toward a workplace where self-presentation is primarily rooted in the quality of one’s work and not in the surface of one’s interests.

2.ON-LINE PRESENCE AND/AS FEMINIST LABOR: What is the role of feminist labor in the process of branding oneself, or building an “online presence”? Labor, especially immaterial or unpaid labor, has been a dominant theme in critical media studies, as David Hesmondhalgh (2010) has pointed out. In an era characterized by digital media, user-generated content, and the cultural industries, participants in these practices are often involved in unpaid work or free labor. Hesmondhalgh rightly questions whether all labor necessarily needs to have a negative connotation, as a kind of work that is, by definition, alienating and isolating. To that end, he cautions scholars on how we might invoke terms like “free” or unpaid” labor.

What are some of the differences in “labor” as it is performed by women in the context of self-branding? Young feminist scholars at the panel discussed entering the academic “labor market,” and they talked about the need to build a self-brand in order to be competitive in this market. How should we think about feminist labor in the neoliberal university, and how does this labor differ from earlier forms of academic individual labor? How do we parse out the different sorts of academic labor and how labor is connected to academic individualism? That is, in many ways, academics are particularly suited to individualist practices because of the kind of work we do, which does not mean that self-branding is inevitable. One way to engage in feminist labor is to continually challenge the individualism of social media and consciously use these flexible sites as rich contexts for community and dialogue.

How would it be useful to think about postfeminism as a backdrop for the academy? Angela McRobbie describes postfeminism as among other things, a context in which cultural discourses endow (particular) girls and young women with economic capacity, that girls and young women “now find themselves charged with the requirement that they perform as economically active female citizens” (McRobbie, 2008, p. 15). While McRobbie is examining post-feminism in a broader cultural context, we think it is worth thinking about as a context that shapes academic feminist labor. That is, many feminists (including us) critique postfeminism, but that doesn’t mean postfeminist ideologies and practices do not at times permeate academic labor. The postfeminist ideals of visibility, self-empowerment, “mattering” in culture, and so on are often the ideals that female academics strive for in an environment that still frequently positions female academics as efficient service workers and “good citizens” rather than as researchers.