Writing about Mentorship, and Mentorship through Writing

Abstract

Writing about Mentorship, and Mentorship through Writing Maya von Ziegesar (bio) Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman (eds.)’s Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023 My copy of Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology is thin and pink, floppy almost, with title matter written in modern, lowercase letters. Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, both English professors and themselves a mentor-mentee pair, introduce the book humbly and autobiographically, musing on COVID, the ’80s proto-girlboss film Working Girl, and their own experiences with mentorship and feminist community. For these and other reasons, including an intrusive, gen-Z cynicism about second-wave feminism that try as I might I can’t always suppress, I picked up Feminists Reclaim Mentorship expecting reminiscences about boys’-club academia, open-secret sexual harassers, older women hardened by their own ascents to power, commitments to reimagining old and broken systems, communities of peer mentors, and reiterations of the importance of reciprocity and listening. I was not expecting such a thoughtful, ambivalent, and sharp book; not expecting to be forced to put it down in order to think deeply about the mentors I’ve had, the almost-mentors I wish I’d had, my mother mentors and peer mentors; not expecting to end up less sure than ever about the right way forward or even the meaning of the word. In short, I underestimated this book. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship has teeth. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship is broken into three parts, following a familiar arc. First, mentorship as we have received it: hierarchical and implicitly patriarchal. The authors in this section reflect on the powerful people they used to aspire to be, or their own successes and failings once they had transitioned from mentee to mentor. They ask when mentorship ends, whether mentorship can transcend its inherent asymmetry, how to listen to your mentees and become a better mentor. The middle section is a crisis point for the meaning of mentorship. The authors here talk about mentor ghosts and [End Page 268] mentor imaginaries, a radical break from traditional mentorship, a refuge for those of us never meant to find our home in hierarchical patriarchy. Finally, in the last section, mentorship is reimagined and reconfigured. Mentor-ship becomes a fluid, reciprocal relationship between feminist peers and colleagues, something nonexclusionary and new. In this section, mentor-ship is reformed by some authors and rejected by others. When I finished reading, I was left with a longing for a final turn of the narrative that would never come. The pernicious and deeply ingrained problems of our social world are articulately described and diagnosed, while solutions are offered, tentatively, as experiments in half-imagined, living alternatives. The aching of the first section—recollections of being a graduate student in search of a mentor who would never manifest—continued throughout the book’s arc, culminating in a crushing ambiguity. The final piece, “A Special Place in Hell: Women Helping Women and the Professionalization of Female Mentorship” by Angela Veronica Wong, was especially biting. Wong explores corporate and neoliberal appropriations of “feminist” mentorship, the extreme burden of unpaid mentoring labor on women of color, and the inability of mentorship to fundamentally transform broken systems. Can or should mentorship be reclaimed? I’m not sure. Here was my glimmer of hope: throughout the book, one author would mention a writers’ collective founded by another. Three more would mention the same feminist author, who mentored them through the pages of her book. CUNYs and SUNYs popped up throughout, both as refuges and as symbols of immovable academe. Slowly, around me, I was seeing a community of feminist mentor-mentees, supporting one another and urging the collective forward. The fact that the editors are a mentor-mentee pair, which my aforementioned gen-Z cynicism had urged me to dismiss as cute or gimmicky, emerged through the book as a real, radical force. The editors model feminist community and a restructuring of the mentorship relation through the book itself, a type of prefigurative politics enacted in text. As the reader, I felt invited into this community and invited to reflect on my own experiences. I thought about my all-male logic...