Whiteness as the academy’s orientation: On gendered and racialized boundaries and the disciplining of women of colour in Dutch academia
通过13位荷兰大学有色人种女性的访谈，揭示白人性如何作为情感取向通过认知评价、白人怀疑和种族监视来规训她们，并探讨抵抗行为及去中心化白人性的必要性。
Despite universities’ increasing commitments to diversity, racial and gender inequality persist in higher education. In the Dutch academic context, such inequalities are maintained through the continuous (re)drawing of racialized and gendered boundaries that normalize the exclusion of women of colour. This article examines how whiteness functions as an affective orientation that structures Dutch academia and disciplines women of colour into normative academic subjectivities. Drawing on 13 interviews with women of colour working in Dutch universities, we show how whiteness as an orientation operates through: (1) epistemic evaluations that mark non-white female bodies as lacking legitimacy, (2) white incredulity that affectively reinstates racialized and gendered boundaries when these are disrupted and (3) racial surveillance that spatially and institutionally repositions women of colour as ‘bodies out of place’. These dynamics discipline women of colour but also provoke acts of resistance and refusal. We argue that challenging whiteness in higher education requires disorienting the academy’s white orientation in both research and diversity practice. This study contributes to scholarship on whiteness, academic inequality and the experiences of women of colour in higher education.