ABSTRACT
From the stories told, the difficulties for academic women in writing for publication are often about making space in their lives. Here we understand space in two ways: one is the literal sense of finding the time and place for writing, the other is the metaphorical sense of making imaginative spaces to occupy as writers. In this dual sense, the struggle is not just with the material day-to-day realities of our gendered positions within a normatively masculine academy, but also with our own sense of self. While these struggles are also real for many academic men, as they too negotiate the conflicted subject position of ‘academic’, the struggles to make literal and metaphorical space are likely to be more difficult for women for many of the reasons explained below.
