‘Playing it right?’ Gendered performances of professional respectability and ‘authenticity’ in Greek academia

Abstract

This paper draws on the career narrative interviews with 15 female academics to unravel the performative politics of gender in Greek Medical Schools. I explore the gender positioning and embodied performances of Greek women as they relate to the contingencies of participation, recognition, and esteem in academic medicine and framed within the wider gendered discourses and structures of the increasingly neo-liberal Greek academia and society. Drawing on Butler’s notion of performativity, I illustrate the possibilities of making the successful Greek female academic subject through subjection to normative, gendered discourses of respectability, encompassing integrity, respectable aesthetics, and affective work and scripted along intersecting privileges of class and heteronormativity. I argue that although Greek women’s gendered professional authenticity and respectability projects demonstrate intentionality and agency, they leave little, if any, room for displacement of gender norms. Gender transformation and promotion of gender equality in Greek academia requires institutional support and political action.