Borderline Academic: Precarious Work, Life, and Self

Abstract

As a cultural studies scholar in the business of teaching media literacy and critical thinking, I’m intellectually curious about the media’s role in perpetuating mental illness stigma, and personally curious about the recent (re)framing of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in particular: in part, because it’s a highly stigmatized and misunderstood diagnosis, but mostly because it is one I have personally received. Driven to be productive on my long commute, I recently listened to a psychology podcast episode entitled ‘The Unexpected Gifts Inside of Borderline Personality’. As usual, though, I was somewhat disillusioned by the content, which assures listeners of BPD sufferers’ deep empathy while validating their purportedly typical childhood experiences of neglect and trauma: notions to which I cannot personally relate. It prompted me to wonder if I’m just not ‘borderline’ enough: if I’m too well to be ill, if I’m malingering under a label that justifies social maladaptation.

My tenuous relationship with my diagnosis is mirrored in my similarly ambivalent response to being a casual academic. Such employment offers flexibility, autonomy, and intellectual stimulation – which allow me to build and adjust my schedule according to my fluctuating emotional wellbeing – but is steeped in precarity: recruitment and onboarding (AKA induction) processes are informal and opaque, governance varies significantly between departments and institutions, workloads and schedules are unpredictable, and continued employment is never guaranteed. Even as we are expected to compete for teaching roles, academic institutions insist we accept that our work is sessional (i.e. part-time and temporary) and that we are ineligible for the opportunities and benefits afforded to continuing and fixed-term staff. Yet casual academic work is not actually ‘casual’: it demands commitment to continual innovation and professional development, and sustained engagement with recent scholarship.

The ‘gig economy’ – where workers labour for piece rates in roles with varying levels of industrial protection – is frequently the only option for early career arts and humanities researchers to gain teaching experience and pursue scholarly ambitions. This kind of precarious work has ‘traditionally been defined by what it is not, namely […] a full-time secure job’.¹ It occupies the point of convergence between dichotomous spaces: employment and unemployment, belonging and exclusion, eligibility and ineligibility. The precarious worker is both on the edge and, consequently, on edge, because uncertainty in one’s professional sphere inevitably affects stability in other areas – from short-term financial and social planning to mortgage and rental applications and superannuation entitlements – potentially rendering not just one’s career but one’s life precarious.

The features of a precarious life are the same features that designate a person as mentally ill: unpredictability, volatility, liminality. In the same way, I hesitate over a form asking my occupation (Academic? Teacher? Lecturer?), I hesitate over a checkbox requesting my disability status (am I clinically impaired or just a bit faulty?). Those of us (professionally or otherwise) deemed mentally ill find ourselves perpetually on the border between well and unwell, acceptable, and unacceptable, defined by yet excluded from institutional systems. Nowhere is this paradoxical dynamic more evident than in the nomenclature of BPD: the term evokes a state of flux (borderline) that is persistent (affecting the whole personality), and which produces a kind of chaos (disorder) that can, ironically, be captured in prescriptive symptomology.

Historically, the label indicates a purported midpoint between neurosis and psychosis, speaking to psychiatry’s incapacity to adequately conceptualize, categorize, and treat it. Yet BPD sufferers are dependent on this same psychiatric institution for validation that their distress is not the result of an irremediable deficiency – an assurance that was denied for decades. Precarity is imposed onto those with personality disorders, not just via the discord surrounding aetiology and taxonomy but through the varying degrees of moral culpability attributed to symptom display. It’s little wonder identity disturbance is often listed as a feature of BPD when sufferers have been declared narcissists, masochists, malingerers, manipulators, and, now, victims of trauma: considered both ‘not sick’ and untreatable.²

Described by Lauren Berlant as ‘a condition of dependency’, precarity produces a power dynamic that sees the involuntary transferral of one’s agency to a self-interested administrator.³ The antidote to this condition (which is presumably temporary) might, then, be certainty: the comforting assurance that one’s status is unchanging, the diagnosis that rationalizes irregularities, the employment status that confers organizational belonging. But is a permanent state, even if it’s undesirable, preferable to a variable one?

Being employed on sessional contracts necessitates that I undertake several roles simultaneously; the result is a perpetual low income, unpredictable workload, and anxiety surrounding future employment. Marked by sudden and apparently disproportionate affective responses, BPD leads to interpersonal difficulties that can, however, render a static professional environment undesirable. My present arrangement is not entirely undesirable; it diffuses my dependence on any one employer and, importantly, incites continual re-evaluation and self-reflection: am I supported? Is this a healthy workplace? How can I improve this situation – for myself and others? From my vantage point on the threshold and without a permanent job at risk, I can challenge the institutional, systemic precarity that is embedded in academic institutions.

It is vital, though, to resist glorifying or idealizing my or others’ experiences of mental illness or disadvantage; the wisdom and intuition engendered by acute emotional sensitivity don’t counteract the deep anguish, nor does the personal freedom of casual teaching work negate the relative financial and professional stagnation. As Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson note, pre-2000s scholarship optimistically framed the ‘borderlands’ as ‘the privileged locus of hope for a better world’ despite the fact these spaces are premised on exclusions.⁴

Nevertheless, I do believe there is profound potential in being ‘on the border’; as Renato Rosaldo writes, ‘borderlands should be regarded not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production that require investigation’.⁵ Never entirely comfortable in a space, we on the borderline can find generative ways of adapting – through, for example, creative expression, personal and professional upskilling, and the interpolation of disparate perspectives – thereby resisting the binaries that characterize hegemonic normativity.

Footnotes