Metaphors for women’s experiences of early career academia: Buffy, Alice, and Frankenstein’s creature

Metaphor can be a powerful vehicle and coherent frame for defining reality, structuring experience, and understanding intangibles like feelings and experiences. We are early career researchers and this chapter presents our metaphors for our lived experiences of the academe: Buffy the vampire slayer, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creature. The academe here refers to the intellectual community of academia.

We apply as method the Baradian re-turning to interrogate our metaphors. While we do not seek to speak for women in the academe, our metaphors come together to show that it is the very differences between women’s experiences of the academe in which togetherness and sameness can be found. The metaphors presented, especially their divergences, offer potential ways for women to do academia differently.