(In)visible Working Mama Drama: From Excellent to ‘Good Enough’ Academia and (M)Others

Abstract

The neoliberal, precarious, anatomized and audit-centric academy produces an unfair burden on women academics. Academia, like many other organizational forms, demands unwellness. This paper argues that as well as intensifying the struggles of mothering academics like us, the pandemic also rendered us visible, forcing the body subject into view and, in doing so, offering some (albeit small) resistance to the ‘anatomizing urge’ in academia. Following discussions on agentic visibility, we propose the idea of agentic invisibility and a corresponding discussion of its loss during the pandemic. We argue that we could no longer choose to showcase what was excellent or to deliberately conceal what was not. Engaging in agentic visibility and invisibility tactics became very difficult, and this had many downsides, including the loss of liminal spaces and the difficulties in our private lives that were suddenly on display. What we choose to focus on, though, is a more caring future. Through the work of Donald Winnicott, we suggest that the difficult and sometimes painful spaces created by the pandemic forced us to reject excellence and to accept the ‘good enough’ as a way of being that should be respected. In this paper, we contribute to discussions concerning the reformative mode of ordering used by home-working mothers during the pandemic. Though we cannot and will not speak for others, we use our dual roles as mothering academics to illustrate broader problems for others who continue to be marginalized by academia and for those who simply seek a more balanced engagement with academia. We seek an acceptance of the ‘good enough’ for all people, from those in power and from each other.