Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics is a path-clearing book that provides a rich, in-depth account of the lived experiences of 39 transgender or trans* academics.
Despite increased visibility of trans* issues within higher education, college environments remain unfriendly, and in some cases, overtly hostile to trans* people. While there is much discussion of gender equity and faculty diversity, these conversations rarely include trans* academics' voices. As a study participant described, trans* voices are often out of place at best-or worse, completely discounted in academe, a betwixt place.
By not fitting into a particular mold, trans* academics experience a variety of adverse events including microaggressions, outright hostility, and exclusion. These adverse experiences create a context wherein trans* academics engage in various forms of additional labor. While not necessarily unique to trans* academics, these various forms of labor provided evidence to support my assertion that trans* academics are or become professionally Other. Given this Other status, trans* academics must form broad coalitions to bring about change within higher education organizations. Additionally, higher education leaders have an opportunity to change organizational contexts to better support trans* academics by radically re-imagining colleges and universities.
This text would be an excellent choice for graduate and undergraduate courses about gender, qualitative research methods courses, and courses about academic careers, and organizational theories.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"In this moving and scholarly account, Erich N. Pitcher invites the reader to listen to our trans* colleagues' accounts of their professional challenges, but, more importantly, asks us to extrapolate from our trans* colleagues' daily challenges of hegemonic norms in the academy and to imagine a university true to its essential organizing principle-higher learning as freedom, enlightened, liberal and radical. Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics gives us a view of our institutions and the academic profession that we should take in with eyes wide open."
-Ana M. Martinez Aleman, Boston College "Academe has long been a place where Otherizing practices disadvantage those who identify outside of proscribed binaries in particularly insidious ways. Pitcher's book seeks to remedy this unacceptable state of affairs by revealing the ways in which organizational cultures, norms, and 'taken for granteds' in the regime of academic life foreclose U.S. trans* academics from opportunities for recognition and advancement, and in turn, their quality of life. Before we can begin dismantling the systems that regulate and promote these disadvantages, we must first name them. Then, the work of dismantling cissexism and transphobia in the academy can begin. Pitcher's work, amplifying the voices of those who have endured these challenges, provides a deeply detailed roadmap, replete with clues to the structural change that will need to happen individually and collectively. His is an urgent and strategic call to transforming the academy that all scholar-activists can-and must-heed."
-Susan B. Marine, Associate Professor, Higher Education, Merrimack College,
and author of Stonewall's Legacy: Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and
Transgender Students in Higher Education
Erich N. Pitcher, PhD, is Associate Director of Research and Communication for Diversity and Cultural Engagement at Oregon State University, and completed their doctoral work in Higher Education at Michigan State University. Erich received the 2017 American Education Research Association-Division J Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Acknowledgements - Introduction: The Transgender Tipping Point - Theoretical Interlude: Embodied Sedimentation - Embodied Sedimentation: Trans* Academics' Gender Identities - Theoretical Interlude: Microfoundations and Inequality Regimes - "A Sense of Paranoia and Hypersensitivity": Articulations of the Microfoundations of Trans* Academics' Experiences - Theoretical Interlude: Institutional Logics Perspective and Neoliberal Governmentality - Within the Academic Market/Workplace - Theoretical Interlude: Thinking Through Thresholds - "A Threshold Across": How Organizational Contexts Shape Trans* Academics' Experiences - Theoretical Interlude: Articulating Resistance - Uncovering Trans* Academics' Resistance and Disruption - Theoretical Interlude: Critical Scholar/Activist Stance - Pulling Across Thresholds: Towards a Coalitional Politics of Liberation and New Vision of Gender in Academic Organizations - Methodological Appendix - Index.
