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R e F l e c t i o n Amy Koerber Like Rose, I am in a department that includes a number of married couples in which both partners are employed in tenure-track or tenured positions. We also have faculty members whose spouses or partners have become employed in other departments as a result of dual-couplecareer accommodations. I am, in fact, part of a married couple who has benefitted greatly from our university’s willingness and ability to employ both my spouse and me as tenured faculty in the same department. When we began our tandem job search several years ago, my spouse and I were both made acutely aware of the political dimensions to which Rose refers. At that time, these politics seemed to be squarely situated in the departments, perhaps because that is where a job candidate makes the most contact with the university in a typical job search. Yet Rose’s point about the many levels of politics surrounding dual-career-couple hiring is an important one. As she reminds us, “The department is not a more ‘political’ site than a faculty couple’s relationship or the offices of central administration. It may simply be that the conflicts are most visibly played out at the site of academic departmental work” (141). This is a point well taken, and Rose is correct to point out that raising the dual-career-couple hiring decision above the politics of the department, as my essay recommends, is far from a panacea. In fact, with a few years now separating me from my own direct experience with the politics of spousal hiring, I would add to Rose’s observations that the politics of spousal hiring do not end at the locations she identifies either. To fully account for the gendered politics of spousal hiring, we need to consider the wider world beyond the university, a world that still treats men’s and women’s decisions about career paths in fundamentally different ways. Considering the gendered politics that exist at all these levels echoes the editors’ observation that resilience is not a once-and-for-all resolution of a bad situation, but an ongoing process: “Resilience does not necessarily return an individual life to equilibrium but entails an ongoing responsiveness, never complete nor predetermined” (7). This insight is an important one to keep in mind as we continue to grapple Diversity and the Flexible Subject in the Language of Spousal/Partner Hiring Policies 143 with the many complexities that surround dual-career-couple hiring. If we take these observations seriously, we need to not only consider politics in multiple spaces, as Rose suggests, but also to think about politics that might play out at different moments in a couple’s academic career. Although much of the intensity and attention seems to occur at the site of the hiring decision, academic careers are typically long, and the intensity can increase over time as members of the couple face tenure and promotion decisions and all the years of reviewing and scrutiny that lead up to those decisions. Echoing the notion of resilience as a longterm process, it is important to note that gendered politics feature into every moment of dual-career-couple employment, from the moment the job search begins, to the weeks, months, and years after both partners are employed in some manner. These politics operate in some obvious ways, but they can also have a mệtistic, hard-to-detect quality that resides in comments and judgments and of course in a couple’s internal relationship and both partners’ ongoing feelings about the employment situation. If we are to fully understand what it means to be resilient as an academic couple, and for institutions and society at large to foster such resilience, any future research conducted on spousal hiring policies must examine such policies in the context of these long-term effects. If resilience is to be theorized as “not a state of being but a process of rhetorically engaging with material circumstances and situational exigencies ” (7), as noted by the editors of this collection, we must make conscious decisions about who is going to define those exigencies, who will be rhetorically engaged, and what will be the terms of that engagement. As we move forward with efforts to theorize a feminist rhetoric of resilience , I hope that we will keep such questions in mind and that we will address such questions through research that honors feminist principles of care...

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