Queering the glass ceiling: alpha females, cyborgs, and the non-tenure track in science

ABSTRACT This inquiry into the nature of feminist solidarity in the academic sciences is guided by the intra-activity of gendered bodies in teaching-intensive faculty positions. It uses diffractive methodology to examine how response-able research practice can account for enactment of social discourse through agential cuts. Over the course of a two-year ethnography in a university with high research activity, gender performativity in the contested space of feminized teaching and masculine science was analysed. This article aims to make visible how researcher subjectivities entangle with data collection. Results show how specific agential cuts – alpha female, silencing, less-than-person, squashing passion, and staying to get tenure – illuminate a unique diffractive pattern. The pattern troubles structural notions of feminist solidarity, as ethnographic participants marginalized by institutional hierarchies survive by queering it. Furthermore, the inquiry gestures towards a humble, local, and tentative contribution to post-human theorizing on ‘queering the glass ceiling’.