Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled and Intersectional Politics Interrogated

Journal of International Women's Studies Volume 25 Issue 1 Article 2 February 2023 Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled and Intersectional Politics Interrogated Maria Tsouroufli Brunel University, London, UK Follow this and additional works at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws Part of the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Tsouroufli, Maria (2023) "Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled and Intersectional Politics Interrogated," Journal of International Women's Studies: Vol. 25: Iss. 1, Article 2. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol25/iss1/2 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Authors share joint copyright with the JIWS. ©2022 Journal of International Women’s Studies. Tsouroufli: Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled a Migrant Academic/Sister Outsider: Feminist Solidarity Unsettled and Intersectional Politics Interrogated By Maria Tsouroufli1 Abstract Feminist sisterhood has been heavily criticized by Black feminists and others as installing a false sense of equality among women and being overly ambitious in disrupting the models and boundaries of the neo-liberal university. This paper draws on the autobiographical account of a White-other, female European migrant academic in the United Kingdom to consider how intersectional disadvantage and privilege shapes feminist sisterhood with profound implications for academic identities, careers, and belonging in the internationalized university and the wider socio-political British context. I draw on my professional trajectory to demonstrate how othering and violence in the form of verbal abuse, microaggressions, misrecognitions, and xenophobic and racist performances of professional authority and superiority operate as dividing mechanisms among feminists within the context of institutional inequalities, color and class prejudice, and global hierarchies of North/South and East/West. I argue that the conditionality of Whiteness, coupled with the gendering, racialization, ethnicization and citizenship rights of European minorities within the pre/post Brexit context affect female migrant academics’ sense of legitimacy, belonging, and solidarity. Moreover, unraveling hegemonic feminist subjectivities and the boundaries that are erected against female migrants can expose the racialized aggression and lack of feminist solidarity in neo-liberal British academia. Keywords: Solidarity, Intersectionality, Migrants, Feminist sisterhood, Autobiography, Racism and Xenophobia, Higher Education, United Kingdom Introduction Globalization has led to a substantial increase in international mobility in many occupational fields, including the academic field. Highly skilled migrants are an important source of labor force growth in the knowledge-based economies of many parts of the world (Shirmohammadi, 2019). Yet, management has not paid sufficient attention to the discrimination experienced by highly skilled migrants and the implications for identities, organizations, and the economy (Zikic, 2016). Moreover, social inequalities have almost exclusively been treated as the terrain of low-skilled migration (Triandafylliadou & Isaakyan, 2015). Feminist sisterhood has often been romanticized, despite criticisms from Black, transnational, and ‘third world’ feminists (Collins, 2000; Hernandez-Wolfe &Acevedo, 2020; Hundle et al., 2019) who have drawn attention to unequal relations among women and wider entrenched inequalities and hierarchies within higher education spaces. This paper is concerned with the interface between feminist solidarity, intersectional politics, academic migration, and internationalization of the market-driven university system of the United 1 Maria Tsouroufli, Ph.D., holds a Chair in Education at Brunel University, London. Her research is concerned with theorizations of gender and gender equality in the Global South/North; education and medical education policy implications for gender and professional identities; racialization processes of migrant academics and other minority groups in British academia; and the othering of international students. Maria works with a diversity of non-Western epistemologies including various intersectionality frameworks, transnational feminist and post-colonial perspectives. Published by Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University, 2023 1 Journal of International Women's Studies, Vol. 25, Iss. 1 [2023], Art. 2 Kingdom. I explore the complexities of intersectional identity through a reflexive account of my academic career in the UK, while explicitly drawing from personal experiences of marginalization within White patriarchy, of gendered racism, and of religious discrimination in an attempt to unravel configurations of sisterhood among women. I treat strands of diversity as fluid constructs, contingent on various organizational and socio-political parameters, and interwoven in versatile ways across spatial and temporal contexts (Tatli & Ozbilgin, 2012a). To draw on Audre Lorde (1984), I identify as one of many “sisters-outsiders,” and I occupy a space of otherness as a migrant academic who is perceived as a foreigner or stranger (xenos) in British higher education and society. In the field of Human Resources Management (HRM) and organizational literature, there is an increasing interest in intersectional inequalities and privileges in the careers of migrant academics (Sang et al, 2013; Shinozaki, 2017). The idealization of internationalization of higher education and academic mobility and its assumed gender neutrality has recently received criticism by feminist academics (Henderson, 2019; Morley et al., 2018). However, higher education and its policy literature remain largely oblivious to the intersectionality of highly skilled migration and gender in academic careers and identities, and how these might be influenced by migration policy and migration discourses; organizational, local, and global hierarchies; transnational relationships; and solidarity in the workplace. Intersectional Disadvantages and Privileges of Academic Migration Research with Indian and South-Asian migrant academics (Fernando & Cohen, 2016) has shown that they have an advantage in research-heavy universities in the UK due to symbolic capital accumulated through international connections and networks. Their ability to pursue challenging careers is supported by an extensive network of transnational family relationships and resources. In their research with female migrant professors in British academia, Sang et al. (2013) have shown “the sur (...truncated)