Lesbian Academics in Canada

(Reprinted from The Lesbian Issue, RFR/DRF vol. 12, no. 1, March 1983) My interest in writing this paper emerged from my own experience as a recently lesbian in academia. My growing feminist consciousness has been enriched by my thorough woman-identification, and rendered more difficult by the marginalization inherent in being lesbian in a heterosexist world, even in feminist circles. I participated in this lesbian issue of RFR/DRF through an increasing need to make my own personal-political connections, by making public that which heterosexist society keeps silent and invisible. I have also experienced a growing need to learn how other lesbian academics struggle with the problems and experience that excitement of being lesbian in an academic environment. Reading about the courage and commitment of US lesbian academics and the ovarian work in lesbian studies in the States (see my review of Lesbian Studies, this issue) has been both inspirational and terrifying. I needed to know how representative this work is of the experience of lesbian academics in Canada and how similar or disparate my experience might be from that of others. In the process of preparing the paper I talked with six other lesbians who currently are teaching or have taught in Canadian universities. These seven (including myself) women are not necessarily representative of Canadian lesbian academics; they are simply the women to whom I had access and who were willing to talk to me. I knew only one of them prior to the interviews; three others volunteered to be interviewed in response to an ad at the November CRIAW conference in Ottawa; the other two were suggested by mutual friends. We are limited, with a single exception, to academics in Ontario who have some commitment to the feminist movement, although the level, length and nature of our commitment vary considerably. Fully closeted lesbian academics, who are most likely to be the largest proportion of us, are not represented. Our academic appointments have included sessional instructorships, senior tutor positions, and tenured faculty positions. Our disciplines are English literature, journalism, anthropology, law, sociology and psychology, with a BA degree, LLDs and PhDs among us. We are all in our 30s or 40s, have identified ourselves as lesbian for at least five years and have been teaching from 2 to 14 years. Some of us, Suniti Namjoshi, Maureen Fitz-Gerald, Kathleen Lahey and myself, have chosen to be publicly identified in this article; the other women have asked that they not be identified. In talking with these women I was particularly interested in their perceptions of their academic environments, and whether they had experienced reprisals because of their lesbianism. I wanted to kow whether they were in their academic environments and their experiences during their coming out process. Finally, I was interested in whether and how their lesbian identity may have influenced their feminist consciousness, and the extent to which both lesbian identity and feminist consciousness informed their productive work. A variety of other issues emerged during the interviews but due to space limitations I've restricted my discussion to these major areas. Our observations about the nature of our academic environments have some common features. Most of us have sexual orientation clauses in our contracts; cannot be openly sanctioned for being lesbian. Though several women have failed to have contracts renewed or have not been granted tenure or tenure-stream appointments, their lesbianism was never publicly mentioned as a reason. If they think we don't want her here because she's a queer, they can think of other reasons. That's the level on which that kind of thing operates. If people don't want you they can get rid of you. They would never say that was the reason. Only one of the women knew of a specific instance in which her lesbianism was cited as reason for dismissal by her dean, and the dismissal attempt was effectively quashed by a male colleague who took strong exception to this whole line and confronted the dean, told him that he thought it was an unacceptable reaction. …

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