I am the compliant academic

This chapter is an autoethnographic account of my life as a female academic. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy it works with the notion of cracks. Cracks are used to examine ways in which I subject myself to the 21st-century University’s machinery, and in doing so, become the compliant female academic marching to the beat of its incessant and relentless machinery. Identifying binaries that have seeped into and permeated my life and the ways in which these have worked to stifle and quash the vitality of life, I begin to pry them apart to see how they hold potential to better understand what it might mean to enter into ethical couplings. The aim here is to identify ways of ‘doing’ academia that permit joy and passion and allow movement and experimentation as a female academic. In conclusion, chapter argues that there are other ways of being and becoming the compliant female academic that need not reduce and bind life to the restrictive, life-sucking machinery that the 21st-century University has become.