Full Description
Feminists revisit their mixed experiences of mentoring and being mentored to reclaim mentorship as a project for new generations.
Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mutual Engagements
Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman
Part I. Two-Way Streets: Finding Mentors / Becoming Mentors
Rosemarie's Hands
Rachel Adams
Tears, Idle Tears: Mentoring English Graduate Students from 1973 to 2010
Susan Gubar
The Making of an Intellectual: Mentoring, Mothering, and a Black Feminist Journey
Michele Faith Wallace
When Am I Supposed to Stop Asking You for Advice?
Hillary Chute
Mentorship: By Any Means Necessary
Sharifa Hampton
The Accidental Mentor
Jennifer Crewe
Can a Therapist Be a Mentor?
Kamy Wicoff
The Reluctant Writer: Looking Back on My Mentors
Sarah Glazer
"That was where I felt most myself ": A Conversation with Sarah Burnes about Books, Mentors, Feminism, and Mothers
Tahneer Oksman
How I Came to America and Discovered Female Mentors
Mikhal Dekel
Rainmaker: How a Mentor Transformed My Destiny
Michelle Yasmine Valladares
Transformative Adaptations: Tracking Fay Gale as a Teacher
Elizabeth Wood
Dear Ant
Aoibheann Sweeney
Part II. Rearview Mirror: Mentoring at a Distance
Ready
Joy Ladin
Mentor Ghosts
Siri Hustvedt
Writing Letters to Ghosts: On Meena Alexander's Posthumous Mentorship
Ashna Ali
Part III. The Traffic in Mentors: Horizontal Scripts
Widening the Way: An Interview with Dána-Ain Davis
Nancy K. Miller
Navigating Distance and Self-Doubt through Multiple Mentors
Angela Francis
All the Angry Young Women
Elizabeth Alsop
Mentoring and #MeToo
Leigh Gilmore
The Mentor as Mirror
Melissa Coss Aquino
Among Friends
Sarah Chihaya
A Chorus, Not a Monologue
Melissa Duclos
The Group (Text), or the Small Stuff
Sarah Blackwood
On Leaning Out
Laura Limonic
A Special Place in Hell: Women Helping Women and the Professionalization of Female Mentorship
Angela Veronica Wong
