Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 503 Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University The asymmetrical, uncompensated labors of academe have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years—well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious “parallels with family life,” critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportionate amount of institutional caretaking: non-research and non-teaching functions such as serving on institutional committees, managing admissions processes, writing student letters of recommendation , and advising, mentoring, and counseling students from underrepresented and marginalized communities navigating hostile or indifferent environments.2 Research plainly shows that such caring labor is disproportionately conducted by feminized workers, and increasingly feminized workers of color.3 Advice for how to rectify these inequities , echoing the victim-blaming bromides delivered to overwhelmed 1. Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression , translated by Diana Leonard (London: Hutchison, 1984); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 2. Patricia A. Matthew, ed. Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2016); Anna M. Agathangelou and Lily HM Ling, “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 3 (2002): 368–98. 3. Karen M. Cardozo, “Academic Labor: Who Cares?” Critical Sociology 43, no. 3 (2017): 405–428; Brandi Lawless, “Documenting a Labor of Love: Emotional Labor as Academic Labor,” Review of Communication 18, no. 2 (2018): 85–97. 504 Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam housewives, often is reduced to individual behavioral modification, as when “senior female professors” are encouraged to “model self-restraint” for untenured faculty members by “learning how to say ‘no.’”4 Meanwhile , metrics-driven university reward structures center scholarship over teaching, and teaching over the “softer,” even more thankless work of institutional service. In the pandemic university, however, caringhas assumed new status. Rather than touting their world-class research productivity or competitive institutional ranking, university communications offices have pivoted deftly toward emphasizing the student-centered, safety-conscious concerns of their academic enterprises. Via university-maintained Instagram and Twitter accounts and strategically curated alumni newsletters, one can now read a lot about the caring nature of faculty, clerical, professional , and custodial staff and the abiding devotion to undergraduates found across campuses. Care work, heretofore ever-present but largely invisible within the university, has been rebranded as particularly laudatory and significant—as, in fact, “essential.”5 And yet, as in the obvious parallels with “family life,” the symbolic elevation of care as a virtue is not necessarily matched by meaningful transformations in working conditions or material compensation. Rather, in the pandemic university, labor is merely extracted even more efficiently and surreptitiously via the sentimental imperatives of love and commitment. In what follows, we use the term “housekeeping” as shorthand to refer to the sort of invisibilized, undercompensated, and utterly indispensable labor that feminist analysts have long attended to. Such labor, the vast, vital, and complex activity of social reproduction, is, as Ai-jen Poo succinctly defines it, the “work that makes all other work possible.”6 4. Cassandra Guarino, “Why Higher Ed Needs to Get Rid of the Gender Gap for ‘Academic Housekeeping,’” The Conversation, September 27, 2017; Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, et al., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012); Andrea Nikischer, “Vicarious Trauma Inside the Academe: Understanding the Impact of Teaching, Researching and Writing Violence,” Higher Education 77, no. 5 (2019): 905–16. 5. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minnesota University Press, 2017). 6. Ai-jen Poo, “The work that makes all other work possible,” TEDWomen 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/ai_jen_poo_the_work_that_makes_all_other_ work_possible/transcript?language=en#:~:text=It’s%20the%20work%20that %20makes,for%20granted%20in%20our%20culture. Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam 505 Social reproduction consists of the effort required not only to create...