This Strike Is A Feminist Strike

Jessica Vernon and Dr Katharine Jenkins

content advice: sexual violence

The 8-day UCU strike over pay and equality, casualisation, workload, and pensions drew to a close on Wednesday 4th December. As staff returned to work, many were reflecting on the extraordinary conversations that took place on picket lines and in teach-outs with the students who showed up in force to support the strike. These conversations were a valuable and all too rare chance to share our thoughts about the kind of university we want to see and the factors holding us back from creating it. For many of us, the picket became a classroom, rich with excitement and possibility.

One such conversation between staff and students took place at a picket-line teach out at the University of Nottingham, on the theme of gender injustice in the university. Here are two speeches from that event. 

Jessica Vernon, MA Student, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham

This strike is a feminist strike. And it’s an anti-racist strike, an anti-disablism strike, and an intersectional strike. 

As well as the gender, BAME, and disability pay gaps, casualisation and precarity disproportionately impact women, BAME people, disabled people, and trans and queer people. It’s important to stress that these impacts aren’t independent, but intersectional. Sexism, racism, disablism and so on aren’t separate forces. Not only do they interact, but each helps make the others what they are. What’s more, the issues this strike addresses are not just to be considered by the groups that experience them. We ask that we all acknowledge our complicity in campus injustice. That is why we are here.

In 1983 Andrea Dworkin said to a conference of men that ‘all of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape’. Yet here we are in 2019, when the number of rapes at universities are double the national average - not that there should even be a national average (1). In 2019, when Warwick University cannot decide how to discipline students who actively conspire to rape (2). In 2019, when the University of Birmingham has repeatedly failed to properly investigate reports of sexual assault (3). In 2019, when the memory of students plastering ‘uni girls love rape’ over the floor of halls of residence here in Nottingham is still fresh in our minds (4). In 2019, when 62% of students have experienced sexual violence at university (5). All our political actions are trivial if we do not acknowledge that gender injustice happens on campus every day and is part of a more complex system of gendered and racialised power dynamics. 

It feels like the entire system is rigged against us: if you aren’t a white cis straight man, you aren’t a credible source of testimony. Reporting figures are lower than average in marginalised groups despite incident rates being higher than average. Students do not feel that they can report. There have been cases of students being told not to bother reporting to the police (6). There have been cases where students have been told that telling their parents would just make the situation ‘difficult’ (7). They have been told these things by their universities, who are supposed to provide a home away from home, a safe space. At present, universities reproduce the rhetoric that keeps abusers safe, keeps them in the good books, even if the institutions themselves do not realise it. 

Campus rapists are ‘good boys’ and high achievers, they are on sports teams, they are in the cadets, they raise money for charity, they are training to be doctors, they might even consider themselves ‘#feminist’. They don’t fit what society has painted a rapist to look like: they aren’t a scary knife wielding monster that only comes out at night. They are sons and friends and brothers and boyfriends. They know it couldn’t be them. They are just ‘boys being boys’. Because of our warped, racist, fear-mongering assumptions of what a rapist looks like, so many rapists don’t even know that that’s what they are. And the ones that do know this also know that they won’t ever be held accountable because they don’t fit the bill. Because of this, so many survivors question what happened to them. So many universities under-estimate this epidemic. The result is that students are silenced every day.

Over half of students who said they had been sexually assaulted also said they felt it wasn’t ‘serious enough’ to report (8). Because of this atmosphere only 14% of those who have experienced unwanted sexual behaviour at university ever report (9). Most feel embarrassed and ashamed, and many internalise blame for what happened to them. Perhaps they would seek support if they felt they would be treated respectfully and believed. However, many students do not trust that they will receive the right kind of help and are at a high risk of re-traumatisation through poor practice. Since most students don’t want their studies, their means of income, their right to stay in the country, to be affected any more than they already have been, they would rather not report than devote time to re-living their ordeal on a regular basis, only to be disbelieved. It seems that the onus is on the survivor to really prove their status, to investigate themselves, spending months contacting the right people and saying the right things to be credible. So they turn to their lecturers and their tutors, people like them whom they trust, who understand their experiences, and they seek the empathy and acknowledgement that they cannot receive from the reporting process. Staff do their best to make sure they receive support from the proper channels and the university has a large network of resources, but the ideological damage is done and the cracks will only continue to spread.

This support cannot fix the problem. We want to be believed, but mostly we want to be humanised. Maybe then it wouldn’t be such a problem to begin with. Sexual violence has become so commonplace, so much a part of masculinity, that some young men can’t remove it from their concept of sex, and somehow society can’t remove it from its idea of young men. As Mary Pipher puts it, ‘young men need to be socialised so that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism’. And where are they socialised if not at university? Isn’t this where we come to create ourselves? So why isn’t more being done to leave sexual violence and gender and racial injustice at the door? Why are old systems being given the space to be naturalised, to take root and reinforce the patriarchy? 

I am shouting about this at a staff strike because in the same way that assault isn’t always overt and violent, gendered and racialized violation filters into the workplace and expresses itself in ways that the system naturalises until we accept it as law. The ideology is self perpetuating and it is everywhere. And it is women, LGBTQ folks, disabled people, BAME people within the university who end up picking up the pieces, working tirelessly to right the wrongs of the system and help survivors. 

We want changes to the way the university supports us: the students and the staff whose office doors are always open. We want changes to the entire culture of university. We want young men to see that the problems of students that don’t look like them are still their problems, still their responsibility, and to face head on their own complicity. We want the university to acknowledge and actively fight how it upholds a multitude of injustice by allowing this to go unchallenged. At present there is support in place, but the support seems to be entirely disconnected from and disproportionate to the magnitude of the problem. If we cannot even acknowledge that sexual violence is rife at university it will be impossible for us to combat it. It will be impossible for us to make any kind of progress whilst sexual violence is still part of university culture. We do not want our political actions to be in vain.

Dr Katharine Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham

In 1975, socialist feminist Silvia Federici opened a pamphlet with the words: ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.’ (10)

Federici was talking about housework, but she could just as easily have been talking about much of the work that academics do. 

She and other socialist feminists showed how capitalism fundamentally relies on women’s domestic work to keep the current workforce alive and produce the next generation of workers. This fact is masked by the idea that housework is a natural attribute of women – is, in fact, not work, but just something that magically happens in our vicinity, clean nappies and hot dinners emanating spontaneously from our feminine essence. Federici argues that demanding a wage for this work is essential for unmasking the fact that it is work, and hard work at that. 

There are two ways in which I think this socialist feminist analysis of domestic work applies to the situation of academics in the neoliberal university. 

The first is that we are supposed to ‘love knowledge’ and ‘love our research’, and therefore it is assumed that we ought to be happy to do our research work in the evenings, at the weekend, and in our annual leave. Well, many of us do love our research. But we also love our families and friends, our hobbies, and our health, and we shouldn’t have to choose between these and our research. Our research is part of our job. It’s in our contract. If we didn’t get any of it done for long enough, we’d eventually get fired. So we need the time in our working week to do it, and we must demand that time.

The second way that I think the socialist feminist analysis applies to academics is directly related to what Jess has had to say, and this is the idea that we love our students. We will go above and beyond our formal obligations because we care about our students and we want them to do well and to flourish. Now, in my experience, the majority of academics do care, deeply, about our students, and we do work many, many more hours than our contracts specify in order to do our best for our students. This applies both to our teaching and to our pastoral work as personal tutors and informal sources of support. But as the philosopher Amia Srinivasan said recently on twitter, ‘the work of love is still work’ (11). Academics’ care for our students is used against us as a tool of exploitation. Many of us are burnt out because our care compels us to do the work our students need even when the cost to us as human beings is high. 

This issue – the vexed relation between care and work under capitalism – is at the heart of the rather dry-sounding dispute over ‘workloads’. We ought not to forget that, nor should we forget that socialist feminists have grappled with this same issue over many decades in relation to women’s domestic work and have many helpful insights to offer.

Now, I think this exploitation of our care for our students affects staff of all genders and social groups. But I do think it also has some distinctly gendered dimensions, which are further inflected by race, class, disability status, and queer and trans status. On the teaching side of things, student expectations of individual help and support are higher for women staff, for example. We face greater demands from students, and harsher evaluations of our teaching (12) – evaluations that are used by our managers to evaluate us in turn.

On the pastoral side of things, those of us who are members of oppressed groups are essential sources of support for students experiencing that form of oppression. Women students seek out women staff, trans students seek out trans staff; and, of course, we want to help. Often, too, we know that we are well positioned to help, sometimes uniquely positioned to do so. But this help, this solidarity – this, too, is work. 

I teach feminist philosophy and I teach about sexual violence, about homophobia, and about transphobia. I teach these topics because we as a society desperately need to understand them better so that we can change the way things are. And when I do teach these topics I always say that if students have been affected by the issues we are covering they are welcome to come and talk to me; that I don’t have any counselling qualifications but I can signpost them to sources of support, and that I will listen to them and believe them. I couldn’t square it with myself to teach these topics and not make that offer of support. It would be unconscionable. And the work I’ve done to support students who have experienced these things is by far the most valuable work I have ever done or ever expect to do. But I do it largely invisibly, and largely without formal support from the university or reduction in my other tasks.

The university’s official position is basically that we ought to immediately direct students in need of this kind of support to the welfare team. All of the members of the welfare team with whom I have worked are brilliant at their jobs and wonderful people. However, sometimes, what they are able to offer is not what’s right for a student. Teaching can create a relationship of trust that means that a student feels able to open up to a particular academic about something that’s really painful and personal in a way they couldn’t open up to a welfare team worker who, however well qualified, is a complete stranger. Honouring that trust and offering that support is part of what it is to teach ethically. Universities should enable academics to offer that support without suffering disadvantage themselves. And, more importantly, universities should be doing much, much more to resist the forms of oppression that make that support necessary in the first place. 

Under capitalism, and in the neoliberal university, love is work. Care is work. Solidarity is work. In the long term, this is part of what those of us on the left must struggle to change. But in the short term, we have to fight to make this work fairer, and above all to make it visible in the first place.

So I’ll end with another quote from Federici: ‘The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already doing, what capital is doing to us and our power in the struggle against it.’