A Career to Conjure By: Representations of Women's Academic Careers in Fantasy Novels


Anastasia Kulpa, University of Alberta/Concordia University of Edmonton

The inequalities and challenges of academic life and careers are difficult to ignore. In contemporary universities, academic labour is increasingly precarious, and faculty face intensifying demands on their time, leading to high levels of stress, concerns about not having done enough, and pressure to preform. These pressures are often greater for academics from marginalised backgrounds (e.g. women, people of colour, persons with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities, etc.), as well as anyone in a precarious position in the academy or with significant caregiving responsibilities. Although these experiences of inequality are well documented in scholarship, they are poorly represented in media images of the academy. This project presents a discourse analysis of Deborah Harknesses’ All Souls Trilogy (adapted to television as A Discovery of Witches ), with a view to understanding how women’s academic careers are presented. In this series, the protagonist, Diana Bishop, is an academic, as well as a witch; she both works as a historian of science at Yale, and has the ability to change the weather and walk through time. Here, the contention is that the depictions of her career and work life are just as fantastical as her magic powers. A central premise of fictional works like these is that they represent a world very much like ours, save the addition of some fantastical element (in this case, the existence of witches, vampires, and daemons). However, Diana experiences a degree of flexibility, and an ability to direct her own time and step away from professional responsibilities which have very little in common with the academic literature documenting women’s work lives. Her academic world contains no precariously employed or sessional faculty, none of her students ever complain about anything, she does not experience time pressures at the end of term or because of administrative demands, and the only other human academic she is described as having sustained interactions with is a MacArthur fellow. While these representations would be of interest regardless of authorship, they are especially so in this case, because the author of these novels is a tenured faculty member at the University of Southern California; she has exposure to the realities of academic work, and nevertheless represented it in this way. The intent of this project is to examine what images of normative academic careers are presented in these books, to understand what is being presented as an “appropriate” or “successful” academic career, including both notions of what female academics should be doing, and how they should feel about and understand this work. Existing scholarship demonstrates that unrealistic portrayals of women’s bodies, and motherhood, among others, can affect women’s perceptions of themselves and their self esteem. This project aims to build on those contributions by highlighting the ways that women’s careers, specifically in the academy, may be represented in similarly idealised ways. It also contributes to scholarship on notions of the ideal worker in the academy, both from the perspective of the institution (e.g. the expectation of no, or few, commitments outside the academy) and the perspective of academics (e.g. an emphasis on aspects of academic work that academics themselves find satisfying and/or valuable in the construction of legitimate identities). Although this project is focused on a single series of novels, these novels are a significant portion of the overall media representations of women’s academic careers, both because of their immense popularity and the relative lack of representation of women’s academic careers in fiction overall. Please let me know if you need a French abstract as well.

This paper will be presented at the following session: