
When: Thursday, March 24 at 4:20 p.m.
Where: WGST Village Patio, UNH 3500
For more information please contact Sina Kramer, Department Chair, at Sina.Kramer@lmu.edu or Dean Messinger, Senior Administrative Coordinator, at Dean.Messinger@lmu.edu.
The senior Women’s and Gender Studies class invites you and your tired bodies to a night of consciousness-raising, generative complaint, and community care. Our contemporary moment is one marked by a culture of burnout: constantly navigating COVID-19’s evolution, demanding more from institutions while expecting even less, and performing “progress” in a time of world upheaval. As José Esteban Muñoz might note, the “quagmire of the present” is indeed exhausting. And as Sara Ahmed teaches us, complaint is an important tool in the feminist killjoy toolbox, and a means of honing a feminist ear.
Burnout is a concept originating in organizational and administrative studies that describes feelings of stress, exhaustion, and cynicism that result from persistent mismatch between a worker and their workplace. This mismatch can be located in expectations about workload, in issues of control or lack of community, or in fairness and values. Usually, burnout speaks to all of these.
During the course of the SARS-COV2 global pandemic, burnout has become itself a secondary pandemic, driving workers out of their jobs, in search of better working conditions. This “great resignation” may have greatest impact on women and especially on women of color, or on those who often staff low-wage jobs in hospitality, food service, or the health care industries. As the work of caring for families – teaching children, caring for elders, and keeping a home that quickly also became an office for many families – was work assigned to women, it had the lowest labor force participation since 1988. Burnout captures many of these conditions, and shapes our own work and study here at LMU, from students, to faculty, to staff. But it also indicates that there are larger structural reasons we are exhausted! Exploring the roots of our exhaustion begins with opening space for us to allow ourselves and each other to complain about it.
Recognizing this exhaustion, the WGST senior cohort’s annual Women’s History Month event will provide a space for radical rest, burnout analysis, and feminist complaint. There will be free food, a book exchange, and an outdoor blanketed space on the lawn to engage the age-old feminist survival tactic, “complaining.”
Student contributors include Women and Gender Studies majors Jordan Boaz; Marie Darroch; Lorraine Gardner; Sehaj Sethi; Elizabeth Hecht; Taylor Keinath; Catherine Kaczor; Harrison Hamm; Jolie Brownell.
DEI Buzz
- Join us: For the next Systemic Analysis Report Out Session on March 29, from 4-5 p.m. This session features Mission and Ministry and Student Affairs. Register here.
- You are invited: To the ACE Scholars Recognition Event on Friday, March 25, at 3 p.m. PST to recognize our scholars and graduating seniors. Click this link to access the event.
- Register: To participate in Faculty-Staff Critical Reading Series, focused on Sara Ahmed’s book, “On Being Included,” and led by our CTE-DEI Faculty Fellow, Dr. Linh Hua. Deadline to register is March 25, 2022. For more details, contact Linh Hua (linh.hua@lmu.edu).
- Save the date: For the first of a series of Zoom Story Circle workshops, led by our 2022 DEI Faculty Fellow, Arnab Banerji (Theatre). LMU faculty and staff are invited to participate in a Story Circle – a lightly facilitated dialogue process that uses the Rx Racial Healing methodology, the signature practice of the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) national network that LMU is now part of. Participants will have the opportunity to gain self-knowledge through supported self-reflection and to forge authentic connections with members of our LMU community.