'Death by a thousand cuts': the violence of academia revealed in women's metaphors

Claire G. Green; Alison L. Black

doi:10.1080/01596306.2025.2483188

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'Death by a thousand cuts': the violence of academia revealed in women's metaphors

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

'Death by a thousand cuts': the violence of academia revealed in women's metaphors

Claire G. Green and Alison L. Black

Discourse, Vol.46(6), pp.813-830

2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2025.2483188

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Abstract

metaphors

gender inequity

universities

academia

violence

neoliberalism

This paper explores the embodied and metaphorical ways women describe their experiences of academic life and work. It bears witness to the impact of the academy's neoliberal, patriarchal, and masculinist cultures by attending to the disturbing themes of violence, brutality, injury, and war contained in women's descriptions of what it means to be a woman working in academia. These messages invite individual, collective, and institutional review of the distress university workplaces can cause. Resistance and re-imagining of higher education institutions is necessary, so that instead of suffering psyches and tyrannised brutalised bodies, the grip of managerialist performativity is broken. Creative methodologies help to loosen this grip, offering feminist shelters for women's experiences and bodies. Our paper invites vulnerable dialogue and visceral emotional connection - precursors for working differently, for caring for one another, and for the much-needed dismantling of damaging patriarchal practices and structures within the academy.

Details

Title: 'Death by a thousand cuts': the violence of academia revealed in women's metaphors
Authors: Claire G. Green (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Education and Tertiary Access
Alison L. Black - University of the Sunshine Coast
Publication details: Discourse, Vol.46(6), pp.813-830
Publisher: Routledge
Date published: 2025
DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2025.2483188
ISSN: 1469-3739
Copyright note: © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Organisation Unit: Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre; School of Education and Tertiary Access
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991125206102621
Output Type: Journal article

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