Guest blogger, Karin Sarsenov, writing from Lund, Sweden.

I chose the academic career because I hated to buy clothes.

In the department, my status depended on my intellectual brilliance, my rhetoric performance, and not on whether my attire radiated perfection and unobtrusive taste (or at least, so I thought). And – there were women who dressed even more carelessly than me!

In my Humanities department, I am surrounded by people with the most diverse sense of status. There are scholars of the more anal kind, finding their pride in scrupulous detail, exactness, tables, and figures. Then, there are the more frivolous, high-spirited, with IDEAS, assigning obscure titles to their books. And a dozen of other types, but common for all is that their dress code, if they have one, is purely a personal whim, never imposed by the social community.

Or so I thought.

Then I discovered the magic of clothes. Looking at a person who takes joy in dressing gives me pleasure. My female colleagues, who accentuate their figures with the right kind of costumes, bring about an atmosphere of sensuality that fertilizes the controlled academic discourse. They tell everybody: here I am, look at me, isn’t life beautiful! And men who… no, I can’t say that there is magic in male scholars’ way of dressing – not for me. Alas! I like male scholars with an intensive gaze and hardy egos that can stand the thought of not being the centre of the world all the time. As long as their clothes emphasize these qualities, they’re fine with me.

So, it turns out that I am one of those pillars of patriarchy, that keeps the body-mind dichotomy in place, objectifying women into a source of corporeal pleasure. Well if it is so, it’s better to admit it.

Being a woman in academia is a heroic task, it’s about facing challenges that you are not socialized into coping with. It’s about trying, failing, and trying again. The university is acknowledged a “greedy institution”, and that’s true! If you don’t watch out, it takes you all, your intestines, your creativity, energy, sexuality. It might give you something back, but it might as well spit you out, wet and miserable. When fighting with whitening knuckles to avoid that fate, your gaze grows determined, you move and talk fast, you acquire a no-nonsense relationship to most areas of life.  That’s why I adore lazy, overweight women with a loud laugh, who makes mistakes but aren’t bothered.

I see university life as a temptation: it lures you into substituting your own sense of identity with the one given to you by its bureaucratic machinery – but this identity is so tenuous, so frail, you blow on it, and it disappears.

I still hate to buy clothes. But I receive such a pleasure from being dressed to my own liking, to moving smoothly, and just not bothering too much about what other people think or what will happen to me next.

Karin Sarsenov is a research fellow in Russian literature at Lund University. She worked as an interpreter in Moscow while the Soviet Union was crumbling in 1990, then went there again in 1994 as a marital migrant, raising her first child. She defended her Ph.D. in 2001 and has worked at Lund University ever since, teaching, performing academic leadership, writing articles about Russia, literature and power relations. In 2003, she did her post doc at University of Pittsburgh.