Asserting the Right to Belong: Feminist Co-Mentoring among Graduate Student Women

Introduction

This empirical case study aims to identify how graduate student women mentor each other when tutoring writing and, through doing so, assert their right to belong in the academy. Much existing literature on feminist mentoring emphasizes the need for better mentoring for women, whether in work or school environments, in current or future faculty positions (see, e.g., Bona, Rinehart, and Volbrecht; Darwin; Eble and Gaillet; Enos; Fishman and Lunsford; Goeke et al.). Across the literature, there is also attention to the role that peer mentoring or co-mentoring plays in providing support for women in higher education. Jennifer Goeke et al., for instance, have shown the importance of peer mentoring among junior faculty for achieving both scholarly productivity and work/life balance. Lori D. Patton has documented that peer mentoring among African American women provides a range of benefits, including “sharing information with friends, writing and studying together, seeking advice, and simply enjoying conversations with a person they could trust” (529). And in reflecting on their own relationship, Gail M. McGuire and Jo Reger have argued that reciprocal co-mentoring provides encouragement through shared success, allows individuals to pool knowledge and resources, and makes a space for sharing doubts about academia (62–63). While this literature suggests the value of mentoring, particularly feminist co-mentoring, it also indicates a need to understand better the nature of these collaborations. Specifically: what does feminist co-mentoring look like in practice? What interactional and relational work is involved when graduate student women mentor each other?

Toward answering these large but central questions, we use the method and theory of applied conversation analysis (CA), which allows us to present and closely analyze a case study based on videotaped interactions of two graduate student women of color who met weekly in a campus writing center over several months. This case was recorded as part of a larger study that involved videotaping writing conferences and interviewing writers and tutors about their ongoing relationships and work together. Though the case study participants never explicitly name their collaboration “feminist co-mentoring” (likely because this vocabulary is unfamiliar), they both study feminisms (Chicana and Black feminism) and use the language of co-mentoring (i.e., support, solidarity, caring-for, and power) when describing their collaboration. When analyzing this data, we observed feminist co-mentoring, or two-way (reciprocal and mutual) teaching, learning, and laboring together among many participants of the larger study. These participants (writers and tutors, many of whom are graduate student women) mentor each other through complex writing tasks, including first publications, theses and dissertations, teaching philosophy statements, and job application materials. Through writing, the participants assert their right to belong within their chosen fields, as they also develop as future faculty members.

However implicit it may be, asserting the right to belong involves writing up to audiences with institutional power (with power over the writers) such as established faculty in their disciplines. What we see in the videos and hear reported in interviews is that assertions are made possible, at least in part, based on the mutual support of another person (the sharing of power with), which defines feminist comentoring. In what follows, we first argue for feminist co-mentoring as an alternative and much-needed approach to traditional/hierarchical mentoring. We then describe our methodological approach and selection of the case. As we turn to the case study, we introduce the participants and analyze a span of their talk that involves collaboratively moving from a hesitant stance to one of making strong claims. We conclude by offering implications both for individuals and institutions committed to mentoring.

Imagining mentoring as collaborative and feminist

Our review of literature indicates that despite the many forms, methods, and contexts through which mentoring occurs, there is a need for re-envisioning mentoring as a collaborative and feminist practice. This framework of feminist comentoring, we contend, not only describes the mentoring among graduate student women in this study, but also provides the means for achieving more mutually fulfilling relationships, which, in turn, facilitate access to networks...