This presentation revisits feminist work on organizational housekeeping and recasts this through a  posthumanist and feminist materialist theoretical optics to reconsider how the gendered politics of housekeeping in Higher Education plays out in bodily ways in ongoing pandemic times. Our context is the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the impact this has had on work in Higher Education. The marketisation of Higher Education has continued apace, and even in some ways intensified, during pandemic times. Neoliberal logics and capitalist market ideologies have long been integrated with teaching and research (Molesworth et al., 2010) but the pandemic has brought new urgency to competition for financially lucrative international student markets (Brooks & Waters, 2011) while the necessity for online learning and teaching has required profound shifts in working practices (Howard et al., 2021) and institutional surveillance. The resulting higher workloads, accompanied with institutional demands for increased productivity and greater and quicker responsiveness to students, has accelerated levels of stress. These shifts are differentially distributed along gendered lines. Research indicates women have suffered disproportionate effects of the pandemic on their research and promotion due to caring responsibilities (King & Fredrickson, 2021). Those best able to exploit these new conditions are predominantly white middle class men, free from caring constraints. Those who ‘fail’ to navigate these ongoing shifts are those influenced by the intersections of gender, social class, racialization, sexuality and disability which result in greater levels of precarity, casualisation and lower statuses. Feminist scholars note how women academics bear these burdens in bodily and affective ways: the weight of emotional labour; the damages of self-monitoring borne of competitive performativity; shame and fear of never being good enough/of not coping (Shahjahan, 2019). Add to this that feminist work is often positioned as peripheral to institutional goals and formations and the labour required of women to work in such damaging bodily conditions becomes more apparent (Taylor & Lahad, 2018). 

We are particularly interested in gender and gendering processes and how the contexts described above impact on women’s bodies. The research questions driving our inquiry are: 

• How can posthumanist and feminist materialist theories help reconceptualise feminist work on organizational housekeeping?
• How does gender and gendering practices inform and influence organizational housekeeping?
• How can we recast autoethnography as a post-personal (posthuman) research method to investigate what these gendered schisms do to (our) bodies? 

We draw on data from various research projects which we use to develop our post-personal autoethnographies.

Our analytical framework draws on a number of strands. The first is the prior feminist work on organizational housekeeping (Morley, 2001) mentioned above. The second is a posthuman, feminist materialist theoretical framework (Braidotti, 2022; Taylor & Fairchild, 2020) that grounds our materially-inflected and capacious understanding of organizational housekeeping, and provides new insights into how bodies are materialised, gendered and positioned. The third aspect of our analytical framework draws on Mary Douglas’s (1966) formulation of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ which helps our thinking on the production of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ bodies during pandemic times. The final aspect takes up the decolonial feminism of Francoise Vergès. Her interest in “capitalism as an economy of waste” which is “inextricably linked to the production of certain human beings as ‘waste’” (Vergès, 2019: 77) provides analytical impetus for considering bodies rendered ‘unfit’ by the pandemic – those whose bodies and ill, exhausted, ‘unfit’ for work. We explore the relations of gendered bodies, viral contaminations and organizational housekeeping in the new and ongoing pandemic conditions of higher education.  

Posthumanism/feminist materialism is a heterogeneous terrain of ideas, concepts, theories, frameworks and practices with a shared desire to: unsettle the category of the ‘human’ as the historical site of political privilege and include a broader range of ontologically diverse actors; shift towards a multi-logical epistemology recognising that other accounts of knowledge have equal value; erase the well-policed boundaries between human/nature, natural/unnatural, human/nonhuman; and shift away from an idea of ‘man’ as sole, sovereign and egoistic individual separated from others by ‘his’ boundaried body and cultured mind (adapted from Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). Posthumanist theory works from the premise that humans are beings in-relation, connected to their surroundings, nature and the world in more meaningful ways. Posthumanism contests Anthropocentric Humanism and aims to elaborate alternatives to systematic colonialist, patriarchal violences, oppressions and erasures. Posthumanism and feminist materialism gives matter and materiality due regard in knowledge-making practices. Braidotti suggests that materialism not only offers a conceptual frame and a political stance but also a means to focus on “the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power” (cited in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 21). Fairchild et al. (2022) developed the methodological practice of post-personal autoethnography as a means to disturb the Humanist ‘I’ of traditional autoethnographic accounts. A post-personal autoethnography pays attention to the situated and relational nature of bodies. The foci for post-personal autoethnography asks questions such as ‘where is the human in posthumanist accounts?’ and ‘what happens to the bounded human body in wider educational assemblages?’ Situating human bodies in relations with non-human and other-than-human bodies makes it possible for autoethnography to attend to posthumanist entanglements. This work builds on the post-personal conceptualization of bodies and life explored by Taylor (2017) and Zarabadi et al. (2019) which situate the ‘I’-in-relation as a means to explore in detail how the body’s “boundaries materialise in social interactions” (Haraway, 1988, p. 595), and to become more attentive to how bodies emerge as forms in-the-making. Our development of a post-personal autoethnography in this paper comes out of our own experiences during ongoing pandemic times. As Fairchild et al. (2022) suggest, a post-personal reconceptualization of autoethnography takes account of knowledge as partial, rhizomic, emergent and multi-directional. The analytical optics shift from separate and individualized human bodies to entanglements, relations and what comes to mattering (Barad, 2007). Post-personal autoethnography offers a different purchase on viral contamination in Higher Education.

The paper concludes by considering how viral contamination can produce alternative understandings of the bodily weight of gendering practices in Higher Education. We argue that a posthumanist/feminist materialist analysis generates insights into the material-discursive micro-practices of gendering processes in institutions, allowing us to formulate alternative ways of considering how inequalities are produced through and as material-discursive practices. Our two post-personal autoethnographies illuminate how gendered inequalities and erasures are materialised and regulated within institutions: some bodies come to matter more and these bodies are related in complex ways to ‘fit’: un/fit bodies and who ‘fits’. A post-personal autoethnography considers the human-in-relation by decentering the ‘I’ position working with the premise that bodies emerge as forms-in-the-making. Such relational thinking allows for the inclusion of non-human and other-than-human bodies in the analysis of the material-discursive assemblages in Higher Education. The first post-personal autoethnographic example illuminates the relations, affects and ontological weight that attached to an ‘unfit’ body; how this is linked with organizational housekeeping; and how it limits potential through the influence of other intersecting modes of precarity. When bodies are reframed as damaged and non-normative we see how important it is to trace the material-discursive productions that dislocate bodies within the day to day experiences in Higher Education. The second example considered how the impact of workloads, the expectations of housekeeping, and the overwork which builds up over time, are materialised in exhaustion revealing bodies as weight bearing entities. The material moments (Taylor, 2013) highlight the significance of mundane, ephemeral occurrences as they press on the body in everyday institutional life and brings into sharper focus how micro instances are entangled with macro forces that produce unequal gendered lives. In this paper, we focus on the particularities of bodily events which reveal the material, affective and relational dimensions of institutional gendered exclusions.

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