IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/gender/v29y2022i1p28-43.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti‐racist struggles and the postrace academy

Author

Listed:
  • Yasmin Ibrahim

Abstract

This paper is an autoethnographic account of the “racialized activist body” in the White academy and in tandem the bio‐politics and bio‐ethics of its right to be an affective body or to possess its senses against the trauma of anti‐racist struggles in higher education institutions. The paper argues that in the postrace university, the “activist body” birthed through trauma becomes a conduit for the pain of others enacting it as a site for the deposition and transmutation of trauma in the quest for racial and social justice. It employs Bracha Ettinger’s notion of “matrixial borderspace” to examine the interplay of social relations between of the activist body and other traumatized subjects in the provision of care as an activist. Two narratives unfold in the paper fusing the articulations of the main text with the paratext to unleash the tumultuous psyche of the activist and her journey of voicing resistance in her anti‐racist struggles. In the process, the activist body emerges as a “diseased site,” overloaded with the trauma of others, yet numbed in its inability to reconnect with its own corporeality and professional identity in its interface with White governmentality. The paper asserts that anti‐racist struggles reassemble the activist body, tightly welding it with exhaustion which manifests in the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue in the ivory tower.

Suggested Citation

  • Yasmin Ibrahim, 2022. "The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti‐racist struggles and the postrace academy," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(1), pages 28-43, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:gender:v:29:y:2022:i:1:p:28-43
    DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12746
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12746
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/gwao.12746?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Noelle Witherspoon Arnold & Emily R. Crawford & Muhammad Khalifa, 2016. "Psychological Heuristics and Faculty of Color: Racial Battle Fatigue and Tenure/Promotion," The Journal of Higher Education, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 87(6), pages 890-919, November.
    2. Sadhvi Dar & Yasmin Ibrahim, 2019. "The Blackened body and White governmentality: Managing the UK academy and the production of shame," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(9), pages 1241-1254, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nigel Golden & Kadambari Devarajan & Cathleen Balantic & Joseph Drake & Michael T Hallworth & Toni Lyn Morelli, 2021. "Ten simple rules for productive lab meetings," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(5), pages 1-13, May.
    2. Francesca Sobande & Jaleesa Renee Wells, 2023. "The poetic identity work and sisterhood of Black women becoming academics," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(2), pages 469-484, March.
    3. Thereza Raquel Sales de Aguiar & Shamima Haque & Keith A. Bender, 2022. "Athena SWAN gender equality plans and the gendered impact of COVID‐19," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 591-608, March.
    4. Udeni Salmon, 2024. "“It's wicked hard to fight covert racism”: The case of microaggressions in science research organizations," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(3), pages 727-748, May.
    5. Joshua Kalemba, 2023. "The coloniality of labor: Migrant Black African youths' experiences of looking for and finding work in an Australian deindustrializing city," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(2), pages 612-627, March.
    6. Jette Sandager, 2021. "Mentoring as affective governmentality: Shame, (un)happiness, and the (re)production of masculine leadership," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(4), pages 1304-1322, July.
    7. Rebecca A. Krukowski & Loneke T. Blackman Carr & Danielle Arigo, 2022. "Pandemic-Related Tenure Timeline Extensions in Higher Education in the United States: Prevalence and Associated Characteristics," Challenges, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-11, July.
    8. e alexander, 2022. "Feminized anti‐Blackness in the professoriate," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 723-738, May.
    9. Lilith A. Whiley & Ashley Wright & Sarah E. Stutterheim & Gina Grandy, 2023. "“A part of being a woman, really”: Menopause at work as “dirty” femininity," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(3), pages 897-916, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:gender:v:29:y:2022:i:1:p:28-43. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0968-6673 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.