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The Costs of Staying: Experiences of Racially Minoritized LGBTQ + Faculty in the Field of Higher Education

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Abstract

This critical qualitative study illuminates how racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty in the field of higher education navigate racist and heterosexist systems, leading to inordinate challenges related to tenure and promotion and deteriorating health and well-being. This system of higher education fosters isolation, hostility, racial battle fatigue, and LGBTQ + erasure offering limited support, negative institutional environments, and insufficient mentoring for faculty with multiple minoritized identities. With intersectionality as the theoretical foundation of this research, three themes emerged from the data including problematizing productivity, exposing tokenization, and the costs of staying in the academy. I posit that refusal is a necessary strategy for racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty who navigate the neoliberal institution.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper the term minoritized is used to explain the action of ‘minority’ status imposed upon populations who are not white and heterosexual strictly because of the social construction of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity, which dictates who holds power and who does not. The term ‘minority’ does not necessarily relate to quantity, but rather to a social status given to a group of people determined to be ‘less than’ based upon assumptions of those in power (Benitez, 2010; Stewart, 2013).

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    Raquel Wright-Mair

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Wright-Mair, R. The Costs of Staying: Experiences of Racially Minoritized LGBTQ + Faculty in the Field of Higher Education. Innov High Educ 48, 329–350 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-022-09620-x

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