Abstract
In this chapter, I depart from my personal experience as a child in a country living through a revolution that restored democracy in Southern Europe. I discuss how the severe gender inequality of the dictatorship, the experience of living in a family with women working outside the home for four generations and the social climate of the times when “poetry was in the street”, to quote Sophia, a major Portuguese poet, paved my way to university. I will explore this in articulation with ideas of being tough (Nelson 2017), using humour (Billingsley 2017, 2019; Crawford 2003; Hart 2007; Watson 2011, 2015) and being explicitly feminist as strategies of resistance in a context where, the more you interact with power, the more you feel the misogyny (when not the open sexism) of the institution. I will be using proteins with an “intrinsically disordered nature” [I thank J.E.A. for suggesting it] (Uversky 2013) as a metaphor for my own multiple and diverse, yet strong, connections with academia.
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Notes
- 1.
A precondition that generates its own inequalities: until today, when women are almost half of the workforce, they earn significantly less (16.7%) than their male colleagues (http://cite.gov.pt/pt/destaques/complementosDestqs2/Desigualdade_salarial.pdf).
- 2.
A tradition of “welfare family” that, in Portugal and surely in other South European countries, has compensated for the rudimentary status of a “welfare state”.
- 3.
I thank Denise Mifsud for pointing me in the direction of Cate Watson.
- 4.
As a witness of my two daughters’ pathways to young adulthood, I am happy to say that some of these discussions are miles away from today’s reality, but unfortunately, some of the problems do persist, as the statistics in relation to gender discrimination and dating violence confirm even for the younger generations (UMAR 2019; UNI+ 2019).
- 5.
That still exists under the designation of Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality (https://www.cig.gov.pt/).
- 6.
Affirmative psychotherapy refers to recognizing and advocating homosexuality as a valid identity/sexual orientation, as opposed to currents that use to view homosexuality as a mental health problem or a deviation (Carneiro 2009).
- 7.
In case you did not have a master degree, the law previewed this alternative academic/professional public examination, but demanded that you had at least a two-year experience teaching at the university.
- 8.
In my university, almost everyone asked for this three years leave to complete their Ph.D., and I can’t remember anyone being denied this time off teaching. I convinced myself I could do the Ph.D. while continuing to teach, and so I did. Of course, it took me five and a half years to complete the Ph.D., but one does silly decisions all the time in real life.
- 9.
This patriarchal culture was probably more pervasive for students, as gender issues—especially LGB topics—were frequently approached in a very unsophisticated way, when not overly conservative and discriminatory. This coexisted with feminist approaches, but also with openly affirmative and anti-discrimination discourses.
- 10.
Although Oliveira et al. (2014) refer that the percentage of women elected in my university was 40%, in fact it was only 33.3%.
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Menezes, I. (2019). Being Tough, Being Humorous and Being Explicitly Feminist—The “Intrinsically Disordered Nature” of My Ways Around Academia. In: Murray, R., Mifsud, D. (eds) The Positioning and Making of Female Professors. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26187-0_2
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