Academic Exceptionalism, Liminality and Space as Patterns of Abuse in Dark Academia

With Dark Academia’s focus on student-teacher relationships, it provides an ideal setting for stories about abuse in the classroom. The analysis of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russel and Miller’s Girl by Jade Bartlett helps understand how space, crossing of boundaries, and favouritism can be catalysts for abuse in these stories. Teachers manipulate students by offering them academic support, utilising liminal space to breach boundaries and luring students outside of the classroom to further their relationship. To explain the fringe spaces and identities at play, liminality is utilised and a new concept, academic exceptionalism, is created to show the strategic isolation within the grooming process. This understanding helps to identify similar patterns of victim and abuser in fiction and reality.