Metaphors for women's experiences of early career academia: Buffy, Alice, and Frankenstein's creature

Abstract

Playfulness as an orientation to research can provide a way to re-see the world and spark imagination (Watson, 2015). Playfulness is also an irony (Haraway, 2000), where we hold together things which might be contradictory – like a vampire slayer, a curious girl, and a monster – and see where they meet. Playfulness is a “rhetorical strategy and a political method, one [we] would like to see more honoured in feminism” (Haraway, 2000, p. 291). In this chapter, metaphor is a part of our playfulness, as is our Baradian method of re-turning. Metaphor is a powerful vehicle for defining reality, structuring experience, and understanding intangibles like feelings, experiences, and beliefs; it is a coherent frame for imaginative rationality (Martı́nez, Sauleda & Huber, 2001). Thought processes and conceptual systems are defined and structured through metaphor (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003). Metaphor is particularly useful as an analytical tool in the exploration of complex, abstract, or emotionally challenging human experiences (Billot & King, 2015). We three authors – Amanda, Deborah, and Naomi – in this chapter offer up to the reader our own metaphors of woman-self-in-academe (the academe referring to the intellectual community of academia). We are represented here by the three characters of vampire slayer Buffy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Victor Frankenstein’s creature. The choice to use well-known pop-cultural and literary characters as metaphors for lived experiences of women in the academe taps into readers’ experiences of known cultural models (Mus, 2014), thereby offering layers of relatability and meaning, and offering potential ways for women to do academia differently.