Over Ten Million Served

Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces

Edited by Michelle A. Massé & Katie J. Hogan

Subjects: Feminist, Higher Education, Social Context Of Education, Labor Economics
Series: SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Paperback : 9781438432021, 312 pages, August 2010
Hardcover : 9781438432038, 312 pages, August 2010

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Table of contents

Introduction
Katie J. Hogan and Michelle A. Massé

Part 1: Service Stations

1. Careers in Academe: Women in the “Pre-Feminist” Generation in the Academy
Mary Burgan

2. Superserviceable Subordinates, Universal Access, and Prestige-Driven Research
Sharon O’Dair

3. Superserviceable Feminism
Katie J. Hogan

4. The Invisible Work of the Not-Quite-Administrator, or, Superserviceable Rhetoric and Composition
Donna Strickland

5. Foreign Language Program Direction: Reflections on Workload, Service, and Feminization of the Profession
Colleen Ryan-Scheutz

6. Ten Million Serving: Undergraduate Labor, the Final Frontier
Marc Bousquet

Part 2: Non Serviam: Out of Service

7. The Value of Desire: On Claiming Professional Service 123
Kirsten M. Christensen

8. Outreach: Considering Community Service and the Role of Women of Color Faculty in Diversifying University Membership
Myriam J. A. Chancy

9. To Serve or Not to Serve: Nobler Question
Shirley Geok-lin Lim

10. Not in Service
Paula M. Krebs

11. Experience Required: Service, Relevance, and the Scholarship of Application
Andrea Adolph

12. Humble Service
Margaret Kent Bass

13. Welcome to the Land of Super-Service: A Survivor’s Guide . . . and Some Questions
Phyllis van Slyck

Part 3: Service Changes

14. Service and Empowerment
Patricia Meyer Spacks

15. The Hermeneutics of Service
Donald E. Hall

16. Rewarding Work: Integrating Service into an Institutional Framework on Faculty Roles and Rewards
Jeanette Clausen

17. Curb Service or Public Scholarship To Go
Teresa Mangum

18. “Pearl was shittin’ worms and I was supposed to play rang-around-the-rosie?”: An African American Woman’s Response to the Politics of Labor
Valerie Lee

 

Selected Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index

First book on gender and academic service.

Description

All tenured and tenure-track faculy know the trinity of promotion and tenure criteria: research, teaching, and service. While teaching and research are relatively well defined areas of institutional focus and evaluation, service work is rarely tabulated or analyzed as a key aspect of higher education's political economy. Instead, service, silent and invisible, coexists with the formal "official" economy of many institutions, just as women's unrecognized domestic labor props up the formal, official economies of countries the world over. Over Ten Million Served explores what academic service is and investigates why this labor is often not acknowledged as "labor" by administrators or even by faculty themselves, but is instead relegated to a gendered form of institutional caregiving. By analyzing the actual labor of service, particularly for women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, contributors expose the hidden economy of institutional service, challenging the feminization of service labor in the academy for both female and male academic laborers.

Michelle A. Massé is Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. She is the author of In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Katie J. Hogan is Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Carlow University. She is the author of Women Take Care: Gender, Race, and the Culture of AIDS and coeditor (with Nancy L. Roth) of Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS.

Reviews

"…a perceptive collection that aims to break silences and rile assumptions regarding university service practices/policies in the United States … [it] has the potential to serve a wide range of audiences as a vital addition to the ongoing critique of the amped-up, superserviceable, capitalistic version of higher education at which so many of us wince—and desire to actively transform. " — Enculturation

"Building their reflections around Hogan's idea of women's contributions as 'superserviceable,' the editors and contributors take an expansive view of service, defining it broadly to include not only administration and community service but also certain types of academic work, among other activities. The articles are both rigorous and personal … The volume constitutes an important contribution to the scholarship both on faculty roles and rights and on gender in the academy. " — On Campus with Women

"Over Ten Million Served is an ambitious attempt to reconceive service and its place in the academic workplace. It has a moral seriousness and a topicality that make it an effort that really can't be ignored. It's a book whose time has come. " — Bruce Robbins, author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State

"This collection performs important intellectual work in analyzing a truth almost universally unacknowledged: that service in the academy upholds an economy crucial to, but not often credited by, the institutions that benefit from it. In discussing the 'genderization' of service, Massé, Hogan, and their collaborators shed light on the invisible labor performed in and for the academy. " — Karen R. Lawrence, President, Sarah Lawrence College