Asserting the Right to Belong: Feminist Co-Mentoring among Graduate Student Women

This empirical case study aims to identify how graduate student women mentor each other when tutoring writing and, through doing so, assert their right to belong in the academy. Much existing literature on feminist mentoring emphasizes the need for better mentoring for women, whether in work or school environments, in current or future faculty positions (see, e.g., Bona, Rinehart, and Volbrecht; Darwin; Eble and Gaillet; Enos; Fishman and Lunsford; Goeke et al.). Across the literature, there is also attention to the role that peer mentoring or co-mentoring plays in providing support for women in higher education. Jennifer Goeke et al., for instance, have shown the importance of peer mentoring among junior faculty for achieving both scholarly productivity and work/life balance. Lori D. Patton has documented that peer mentoring among African American women provides a range of benefits, including “sharing information with friends, writing and studying together, seeking advice, and simply enjoying conversations with a person they could trust” (529). And in reflecting on their own relationship, Gail M. McGuire and Jo Reger have argued that reciprocal co-mentoring provides encouragement through shared success, allows individuals to pool knowledge and resources, and makes a space for sharing doubts about academia (62–63). While this literature suggests the value of mentoring, particularly feminist co-mentoring, it also indicates a need to understand better the nature of these collaborations. Specifically: what does feminist co-mentoring look like in practice? What interactional and relational work is involved when graduate student women mentor each other? Toward answering these large but central questions, we use the method and theory of applied conversation analysis (CA), which allows us to present and closely analyze a case study based on videotaped interactions of two graduate student women of color who met weekly in a campus writing center over several months. This case was recorded as part of a larger study that involved videotaping writing conferences and interviewing writers and tutors about their ongoing relationships and work together. Though the case study participants never explicitly name