C.11: Gender and Geography: Co-authoring feminist and queer geographies 3

Co-authorship is hard work, often playful sometimes painful, almost always rewarding and even thrilling. In this paper I will reflect on the perils, possibilities, and pleasures of collaboration across time—life course time, generational time, deadline time—and space—the stretched and intimate geographies of communication, of writing and rewriting, of editing and talking through. Thinking about this presentation, I realized I have collaborated on films, edited books, articles, interviews, presentations, and conversations blurred into publications and events; participating as a student, a faculty member writing with students, a colleague, a peer, a partner, and a friend. Drawing on these experiences across continents and years, I will ruminate on questions of power, of temporality and disparate work rhythms, and of communication styles, both clashing and consonant. In this presentation I ask what is entailed in thinking together side by side, across virtual space and time, or through material exchanges—tracking changes, blurring tracks, and occasionally throwing oneself across the tracks. I address these issues and the challenges they suggest to imagine futures of collaboration, to hope for renovating their reception in academia and elsewhere, and to spark new geographies of shared theory-making, writing, and practice.

We write this paper as relatively new co-authors but long-standing collaborators with shared commitments as feminist geographers in North American neoliberal universities. In our approach to working together, we argue the goal in one’s writing is not to simply be pulled along by forces outside of oneself, nor is it to simply be productive. Instead, we use our bodies as a source of knowledge to better understand the neoliberal academy’s fast paced rhythms reproduced in writing cultures emphasizing continual productivity, individuality, and transactional interactions. In doing so, we have worked to resist neoliberal rhythms, creating a writing practice embedded in a relational, rhythmic praxis that helps us to care for ourselves and each other. In this presentation, we discuss how rhythmic praxis requires everyday fine tuning in relation to our silences, the pace and tempos of exchange, and shifting visceral responses to our circumstances. This constant attunement to ourselves, each other, and the world around us, creates space to attend to our physical and emotional needs in our writing, making room for the ambivalences of so-called ‘slowing’ down, such as the exhaustion and frustration we bring into the slower space that sits alongside the pleasure of writing while attuned to our shared rhythm. An embodied approach to our collaborative writing helps us to transform our everyday academic work in gently radical ways, and has extended into the classroom and conference settings, inviting others to explore the generative potential of different rhythms.

Constructing and sustaining research collaboration can be tenuous, tedious and thorny. It can also be tender, fervent, and joyous. This presentation will discuss a research collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous queer researchers and community members/activists who worked together on a research project with young Indigenous LGBTIQ+SB peoples to explore their experiences of, and aspirations toward, social and emotional wellbeing. The research process was underpinned with reflexive engagement to make space for deep listening, questioning, analysing, interpreting and producing new knowledges. These new knowledges were produced through a slow and respectful approach that included co-design, co-research, co-authorship, without co-ownership. Drawing on the lessons learned and profound experiences of working in this way this presentation will provide insight into the reasons that brought us together, the seasons of co-production, with a pondering of whether this collaboration of friends/researchers/activists will be sustained for a season or a lifetime. 

Suburban cities have existed as planned spaces for heterosexual nuclear families. Today, however, there is a movement toward finding a comfortable way of life as an individual. This involves mutual support in which mothers of nuclear families with husbands and children, care for and support each other's children and friends in the community. This study examines the possibility of "care" among mothers who practically support one another, especially women who take on the responsibility of housework and childcare. In addition, I have used qualitative data obtained from interviews with mothers in their 40s in a suburban new town.

Most of the women were full-time housewives who quit their previous full-time jobs after getting married or having children and migrated to a new town when their husbands relocated for work. When the first stage of childcare was complete, they looked for jobs in the area and took up temporary employment in call centers and stores. Their daily lives were harsh and lonely, as they raised their children and worked part-time by themselves while their husbands were away at work. However, the care of their children's school acquaintances, neighborhood friends made time for them, relieved their anxieties, and provided support for them both physically and mentally. In the suburbs, which traditionally have revolved around the lives and careers of men, the fact that “care” such as consideration and support are now directed toward fellow women may lead to a breakthrough in existing gender relations and the possibility of de-centering heterosexualized spaces. 

This paper reflects on digitally-mediated co-authorship as part of our practice of queer co-mentorship as feminist and queer geographers. We frame queer co-mentorship using the metaphor of “the magical yet”, an aspirational and emergent process of dreaming and trying, making and doing things together that individually we may not yet have imagined or accomplished. We focus on the commitments and dynamics of co-mentorship, a feminist praxis that strategically builds self-reflective solidarity and care to transgress neoliberal academic distortions of competitive individualization, social isolation, and personal vulnerability. In our authorial partnership as geographers, queer co-mentorship involves seeing and affirming, communicating and appreciating, caring and listening, in order to support each others’ career-goals as the messiness of same-sex everyday households and extended-family life churns around us. We argue that queer co-mentorship through the digital intimacies of co-authorship leverages the subversive power of the “magical yet” to facilitate queer worlds of care within heteronormative and often uncaring academic institutions. Accelerated through the re-domestication wrought by Covid-19 lockdowns that moved our teaching responsibilities and social lives online in ways that blurred public-private divides, through the interfaces of Skype and Google Docs, digital technologies intensified our co-mentorship by enabling our collaborative writing practice across in-real-life (IRL) spaces. This creative virtual retreat away from pandemic uncertainty deepened our friendship and trust, fed and sustained our intellectual curiosity, allowed us to generatively refine our practice of co-authorship and knowledge production, all of which made our queer lives more liveable.