Intersectionality and Mentoring as Organic Praxis: When Feminist Killjoys are Too Hot to be Mentors

As with nearly all words that promise a better future, co-optation can turn the concept against its original intent and/or institutionalize it in a manner that strips it of its transformative potential and serves to continue oppressing the usual subjects. Such is the case with “mentoring.” As mentoring moves from buzzword to major institutional goal, I want to explore some of the differential potential of mentoring’s application, which, unsurprisingly, disproportionately affects women of color in the faculty. The three potential layers of discrimination that I want to briefly address are: the differential/inadequate mentoring that women of color and other minoritized people receive; the increased labor on senior women of color as formal and informal mentors; and the displacement of women of color as too radical of mentors, which then turns informal mentoring into unrecognized and unrewarded labor. These layers of discrimination render mentoring more of a rhetorical than a substantial approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion in the academy (Ballard et al., 2020;,Valdivia, 2021).