Dancing for Daddy
For someone in the business of relationality, I carry a shame that I’ve never been to a works Christmas party. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m too cool for school but I lost that status somewhere around 2007 as I entered the world of psychoanalysis.
There’s something in the performance of Christmas parties that brings on a profound existential nausea in me. The viscous terrain of blurred boundaries courtesy of day time drinking combined with uncomfortable shoes and exhaustion. I fear that Siberian wind moment when a white-man-in-management says those jolly-rioja words “Urm Liz, uh, I’ve been meaning to say something to you, can I just give you some feedback?”. The moment in my recurring dreams where I commit career harakiri by saying out loud that I can’t wait for patriarchy to die.
In a few weeks I leave my four year tenure leading a sociological journal of some rare and genuine excellence. A masterclass in the craft of writing and a longed for intellectual space where I could be my sharp ended self. But as we see the re-surfacing of profound inequalities for women in the professions I fear the emerging fault lines will be missed, tucked away behind the micro-aggressions and zoom chats. Within this precious community of practice we will shortly see the impact of the pandemic on research outputs and funding marking our future job losses and failures to progress and with it the concretisation of sexism.
We will be distracted from this reality by the veneer of radicalism that replaces us. The emergence of an all male cast of rising stars, gig-economy-algorithmic boxes ticked but safe in the knowledge that they won’t personally be subject to the professional body blows this entails. I wish I didn’t know this but this emergent intellectual caste are, unlike their female colleagues, advantaged by having children. This is not to denigrate the many beloved and feminist men I work with but it is to articulate an emerging fault line we will have to navigate where gender inequalities are not in the academic.
A mean girl I admire who looks down on me for being kind once told me about why she was so unforgiving of her academic colleagues. She said that the problem with academics is that they think they are exceptional. They might write about unfair systems of impossible targets and performance management and say clever things about psychosocial dynamics but they still think they deserve their own successes.
They think that although the system sets others up for failure, their own elite status is based on merit.
Throughout 2021 I found myself repeating a grotesque phrase - Dancing for Daddy. This was bequeathed to me by someone I love and admire not least because she’s the only person I know who makes me look like I’m in denial. These are my cruel-but-safe words, designed to tweak a nerve and bring me back down to earth. A mental elastic wrist band I use to trigger a repulsion at my own ‘internal oppressor’ the internal voice that demands I press repeat and continue to play the game of excellence. The part of me that has led to my making the same self-defeating mistake decade after decade of working life.
The realisation that overcoming our professional Stockholm syndrome is the key to our survival makes it hard to imagine ever getting through a job interview again. Au revior reflective practice and adios sick leave. As an experienced psychoanalytic Rottweiler dryly said about my attempts to shine, don’t waste your time trying to compensate for being ordinary. We don’t do brilliance here in the deep.
So this is what I know. The world is being held together by extra-ordinary-ordinary women who care. And for those of us in our middle age we do this despite being systematically devalued, bullied and then ignored. A woman I love, who has over achieved for her entire life recently said “2021 has taught me that I just can’t keep auditioning for a place in my own life”. Amen to that.
Back away from the works disco kids. Rest, love the people who need it and prepare yourself for what lies ahead.
Surviving Work will be back in 2022.