Dirty work, emotion work and safety work. Experiencing rape threats as a feminist researcher

Violence against women is a pervasive and enduring problem that has been amplified through digital communication technologies. Throughout this reflexive article I analyze the impact of receiving violent rape threats as a feminist academic. I discuss the invisible emotional labour and safety work women scholars undertake to minimize risk, and how this is amplified when our work is considered ‘dirty’. In drawing on my lived experience, I hope to challenge discourses of shame associated with so-called dirty work, contest discourses of responsibilisation for my victimization, and make visible some of the unseen risks in the gendered neoliberal university. In doing so I show how emotional labour and safety work become intertwined, and shape both the production and dissemination of knowledge within and beyond the academe.