Contemporary Fairy Tales: Narrating Women Academics Through Metaphors

Abstract

This article contributes to the feminist literature that explores the vast landscape of metaphors on the professional experiences and identities of women academics found in scholarly works. In their now classic studies on the semantic content of these tropes, feminist scholars have identified one large cluster of metaphors that allude to structural barriers or natural phenomena (e.g., ‘glass ceiling’ and ‘chilly climate’), criticised for overlooking human agency. This paper is novel in that identifies (and problematises) another ample cluster of shared meanings: ‘tale and myth’ metaphors drawing from fairy tales, legends, sagas, folklore, mythology and religious imagery. I argue that many such metaphors aim to capture the lower status of women academics (e.g., ‘Cinderella’), and are characterised by: liminality, as they open up possible-worlds and untested social arrangements (e.g., ‘Alice in Wonderland’); ambivalence, as they portray women as either monsters, or prodigies, or both (e.g., ‘intellectual Frankenstein’); reductionism, in that they implicitly seek to subsume complex social phenomena under familiar fictional plots; and (relatedly) normativity, in that they create expectations as to the likely development of a situation and implicitly suggest a course of action. Particularly the latter two characteristics constitute significant limitations of ‘tale and myth’ metaphors: nonetheless, can there still be merit in their use? In the paper, I advance a suggestion.

Keywords

• gender
• discourse
• higher education
• organisations
• metaphors