Misogyny in English Departments
When Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign as governor of New York in August 2021, a commentator on CNN remarked that he had "not gotten his own memo" on sexual harassment that he had signed into law two years earlier. Misogyny in English Departments theorizes the results of a qualitative empirical study of the ways women in U.S. college and university English departments experience misogyny, and the effects that misogyny has on their personal and professional lives. It seems that we in English departments, too, have not gotten our own memos. English departments market themselves as spaces of equity and diversity, as dedicated to inclusivity and social justice, as committed to rooting out injustices like misogyny via such means as socially just, feminist, and critical pedagogies. We are some of the very people who teach students to recognize and fight back against social injustices like misogyny, and yet, as the women the author interviews demonstrate in this book, we are no less likely to engage in gender-based discriminatory and abusive practices.
Amy E. Robillard is professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric, composition, and life writing. She is the author of We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories and the editor, with Shane Combs, of How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship and, with Ron Fortune, of Authorship Contested: Cultural Challenges to the Authentic, Autonomous Author. Her academic essays have appeared in a number of journals, and her personal essays have appeared on The Rumpus and on Full Grown People.