F eminism

&
‘Young feminists’ doing recognition & reflexivity & (r)evolution
Psychology
Feminism & Psychology
2015, Vol. 25(1) 73–77
XIII. Between euphoria ! The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0959353514563993
feminist academics fap.sagepub.com

navigate the
ambivalences of
neoliberal science
production
Nora Ruck
Sigmund Freud Private University, Austria

Being a feminist to me means something quite mundane and still rather astonishing. It
means that it is constantly possible for the world as I know it to appear in a somewhat
different light. I know of no other theoretical tradition so able to capture the complex-
ities of the social world and their interrelation with the realm of everyday experience,
action, and thought. Furthermore, feminism challenges me to ask just what power
relations are at play at a concrete time and place and how they interrelate. However,
it might be my hopes, dreams, and aspirations that express my feminist identity most
thoroughly. Being and working with others, in particular, allows me to realize parts of
my visions of a better future in the present like the safe space envisioned by Andrea
Smith (2013): a space that does not escape reality but creates it; a space to practice
the very world we want to realize.
‘‘I am overburdened to the point of nausea. I don’t have a life.’’ I noted these
sentences almost two years ago when I kept an observation diary about a course
called ‘‘Activation, coaching, computer literacy.’’ The Austrian unemployment
agency had compelled me to attend the course in order to improve my job-seeking
skills during a prolonged period of unemployment after my PhD. Before starting it,
I decided to conduct a study on the experience of unemployment together with my
friends and colleagues Katharina Hametner and Markus Wrbouschek and to write
an observation diary for this purpose.
One of the individual ‘‘activation’’ coaches assigned to me augured that I could
make an indefinite amount of money in addition to my unemployment benefits as

Corresponding author:
Nora Ruck, Department of Psychology, Sigmund Freud Private University, Schnirchgasse 9a, 1030 Vienna,
Austria.
Email: nora.ruck@univie.ac.at

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74 Feminism & Psychology 25(1)

long as I engaged in contract work. She was convinced that I could deduct all my
spendings (including the unpaid labor I spent on my research) from my taxes if I kept
an excel chart that listed everything I bought and did every day. At the end of each
year, I was supposed to hand this chart to the tax office as part of my tax adjustment. I
got ecstatic at the promise of becoming a billionaire while being unemployed. In my
diary, I talk about feeling ‘‘energetic’’ and ‘‘euphoric’’. When in the afternoon I sat
down to write my observation diary, however, I started to feel sick. I noted that I felt
like this was the point where I was expected to learn how to ‘‘commercialize all spheres
of life’’ and to ‘‘be an entrepreneurial unemployed person’’. By evening, I was entirely
sick and I had a terrible headache. I noted that I did not have a life.
My realization that I was about to commercialize all spheres of my life coincided
with my feeling sick. My theoretical realization marks the point where euphoria
turned into nausea.
To this rather long period of unemployment, I owe a deeper understanding of
my own entanglement with capitalist structures and an urge to analyze gender
relations in tandem with relations of production. My (current) focus within fem-
inism is thus deeply situated. In this essay, I explore my entanglement with neo-
liberalism, locating my sickening experience of unemployment within the no less
nauseating realities of neoliberal academia more generally. I look at some of the
ways in which navigating the complex and sometimes incommensurable realities of
neoliberal academia entails the kind of dissident participation Sabine Hark (2005)
has described as the relationship between feminist and institutionalized knowledge
production. The critical knowledge projects we create with the intent of decon-
structing and overthrowing power structures are formed within the very academic
economies we want to change and their critical potential needs to be measured
carefully against the very concrete power relations at play.
Feminists have pointed out the complex ways in which neoliberalism intersects
with patriarchy. For one, neoliberalism has strong gendered effects. When public
costs for all sorts of care work are cut and privatized, it is usually women who
cover the residual workload in private (Michalitsch, 2004). The deregulation of the
economy has also increased the segregation of the job market into regular jobs with
stable working conditions and salary on the one hand and irregular and precarious
jobs on the other. It is mostly migrant and/or racialized women who are forced into
the most precarious, underpaid, and informal work sectors. Precarious and deregu-
lated working conditions are not a new phenomenon introduced by neoliberalism
but have been a reality especially for women of color for a long time (Collins,
2000). However, in neoliberalism, they have been generalized to an extent that has
led Cristina Morini (2007) to speak of a femininization of labor that has taken place
not least in the sphere of intellectual production and has resulted in increasingly
precarious and deregulated working conditions in academia.
The deregulation of academic work in Austria has many faces. Universities
notoriously cut down tenure positions and increase precarious jobs. A growing
number of research positions at universities are part of funded research projects
and offer only temporary employment or contract work without employment.
Masses of adjunct teachers are hired from semester to semester. The work

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Ruck 75

biographies of young scholars are increasingly characterized by a succession of

phases of employment, precarious jobs, and unemployment. I have been affected
by this neoliberal scientific economy because I have had my share of often poorly
paid temporary jobs, my future seems dreadfully unclear and beyond my control,
and the deregulation of scientific labor has put me at risk of multiple and prolonged
periods of unemployment. At the same time, I have been privileged because I held
an employed position at the University of Vienna before my unemployment and I
hold a temporary but well paid employed position at the Sigmund Freud Private
University Vienna at the moment.
On the level of subjectivity, neoliberal governmentality produces subjects who
manage themselves like a business venture and who act as individual entrepreneurs
in all domains of life (Foucault, 2008). There is an aching ambivalence to the ways
in which I have been playing along these requirements since all of my full-time
academic jobs have been in the form of project funding. During the non-unem-
ployed phases of my work biography, I have profited from the neoliberalization of
science I am politically opposed to because it has loosened the strings of disciplin-
ary conformity. In Austria, third-party funding, the necessity and ubiquity of
which is so characteristic for the neoliberalization of science, has dissolved discip-
linary borders in order to increase competition between all researchers across all
disciplines. For my current project, for which I wrote the application while on
unemployment benefits, it was an advantage not to be reviewed against the back-
drop of the disciplinary standards of psychology. The same held for a transdisci-
plinary project of feminist science critique I conducted together with Julia Riegler,
Julia Hertlein, and Iris Mendel during my PhD. Taking part in the logic of funding
agencies, we were complicit with the nasty elitism and competitiveness of science
funding and with neoliberal governmentality, managing ourselves and our work
like a business enterprise.
However, we also engaged in some resistive practices. For example, we created
space for feminist psychology and feminist science critique at the University of
Vienna and experimented with alternative and joyous modes of knowledge cre-
ation. We had deliberately chosen a mode of transdisciplinarity that forced us to
interrogate our respective basic assumptions, methodologies, and scholarly roots.
We gave talks and lectures and authored articles collectively, we engaged in the
2009/2010 student protests, we moved to Berlin together and two of us lived
together; and we talked, endlessly and caringly: about our work, our lives, our
emotional turmoil while finishing our PhD’s, the ways all those insane structural
adversities took their toll on our own mental and emotional sanity.
On this small scale, within our very own safe and caring bubble, we made space
for creating and experiencing knowledge the way we longed to. Our involvement in
the 2009/2010 Austrian student protests was an attempt to construct such a ‘‘safe
space’’ (Smith, 2013) on a larger scale. The protests not only created a sense of
solidarity between students, (mostly adjunct) teachers, and homeless persons who
stayed in the then squatted lecture rooms but also politicized many students in
psychology who have since then been organizing talks, conferences, discussion
rounds, and autonomous lectures.

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76 Feminism & Psychology 25(1)

A group of students and adjunct lectures at the University of Vienna (Andrea

Arnold, Manuel Binder, Markus Brunner, Tobias Gerlach, Jan Greifenstein, Miro
Kilic, David Kumnig, Vera Luckgei, Peter Mattes, Marius Menholz, and Salonida
Reinmund) and I have since the summer term 2013 organized three independent lec-
tures series at the University of Vienna. We created these lectures as spaces for students
to actively create the university courses they want to attend and for students and
teachers to collaborate as equals. Amidst all the structural adversities we still struggle
with, we have experienced tremendous happiness, pride, euphoria, and motivation
with our achievements and a strong sense of togetherness and thankfulness.
These lectures, along with the public lecture series on critical social psychology
the Work Group Critical Social Psychology organizes at the Sigmund Freud Private
University are also a way of grappling with the fact that I am currently mainly
teaching and researching at a private university despite being a firm advocate of
free education. With a bachelor program in psychology that is focused on quali-
tative methods and the history of psychology and a teaching staff that is highly
qualified in many critical theories, students at the Sigmund Freud Private University
are provided with firm knowledge in critical psychologies that is not accessible to
most students at Austrian state universities (such as the University of Vienna) or the
general public due to financial barriers. Ensuring that this knowledge is not only
accessible for the economic elite is at least a beginning to sharing the privilege of
free inquiry and teaching I enjoy at the moment.
It is quite a struggle to understand, make sense of, and fight the ambivalent,
heinous, and often contradictory political and economic realities young feminists
navigate and it is entire impossible to do it alone. In the transdisciplinary feminist
team I mentioned above, we employed the method of memory work (Haug, 1987) in
order to collectively analyze our entanglement with social structures like patriarchy
and neoliberal academia. When each of us wrote our memories on ‘‘doing my
thing,’’ I chose to write about ourselves and the process and feeling of working
and being together. In many ways, this short story is an antidote to the observa-
tional diary I mentioned above and it turned out to be a much more general picture
of how I relate to and desperately and fundamentally need others. While in my
diary, I register outer events and my corresponding thoughts, feelings, and physical
reactions, this short story is just as much about my memories of being and working
together as it is about my wishes, dreams, and longings. I talk about being ‘‘at the
stillpoint of the turning world,’’ which captures rather precisely how I felt at this
moment of belonging: elevated but very calm, a euphoria that never turned into
nausea.

References
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought. Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of
empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1978–79. New
York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hark, S. (2005). Dissidente Partizipation. Eine Diskursgeschichte des Feminismus. Frankfurt
am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.

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Ruck 77

Haug, F. (1987). Female sexualization. A collective work of memory. London, UK: Verso.
Michalitsch, G. (2004). Private Liebe statt öffentliche Leistung. Geschlechterimplikationen
von Privatisierung. Kurswechsel, 3, 75–85.
Morini, C. (2007). The femininization of labor in cognitive capitalism. Feminist Review, 87,
40–59.
Smith, A. (2013). Unsettling the privilege of self-reflexivity. In F. W. Twine & B. Gardener
(Eds.), Geographies of privilege (pp. 263–280). New York, NY: Routledge.

Author Biography
Nora Ruck After a period of unemployment and unpaid academic labor, Nora
Ruck is currently Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the Department
of Psychology at the Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna and the History
and Theory of Psychology Program at York University Toronto. Her research
interests include feminist psychology and epistemology, critical psychology, history
of psychology, and the feminist critique of science.

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