 Abstract | The gap between hope and happening refers to the experiences of four academic women
who work at Milton University (MU), the pseudonym for a regional Australian
university. This thesis is concerned with the ways in which discourses circulating within
MU shape the performances and discursive positionings of the four women - Alice,
Madonna, Veronica and Tamaly (all pseudonyms) - and how, in turn, these women
negotiate these discourses. Data are drawn from the women’s narratives, university
policy documents and selected institutional texts. A feminist poststructuralist lens
interrogates both policies, reflecting different approaches towards gender equity at MU,
and discursive practices, constructing the ‘good academic’ at MU.
Instead of acts of resistance, what is revealed in this workplace is the continuing covert
strategies of marginalization that reproduce women’s positioning on the margins of
mainstream academia, indicating the presence of a kind of ‘phallocentnc smog’ emerging
from a dominant masculine culture. This thesis finds a gap between the transformative
potential of the four women at the micro-social (subjectivity) level and the lack of
transformation at the macro-social (workplace) level. This suggests that the women’s
abilities to resist and transform phallocentric discourses at the personal/private level are
not sustainable at the public level because of the enduring power of normative
institutional discourses or the ‘phallocentric smog’. This thesis signals the need for ongoing
interrogation of the gap between the hope that feminists have (theory) and the
happening for women (practice) in the quest for sustainable equity. |
