ABSTRACT
The author met Jackie in a toilet at an autoethnography conference at Sussex University in 2017. She was having a moment by the sink, having watched a presentation that made her feel deeply uncomfortable about power relationships between mentors and mentees. Women’s public bathrooms open up spaces not already hyper-commodified, Gap-ed, privatized, and colonized. Nestled inside this space for labia only swells a profoundly gendered world in which women can produce, critique, engage, witness, eavesdrop, separate and join. Jackie has a knowing and sympathetic look and a mischievous laugh. She has sent the author her excellent work about her autobiographical experiences in education, her relationships with her family and, more recently, with Brexit. It is always vivid, moving, stimulating and threaded with anger. The co-edited transcript of our recent conversations gives an insight into how mentorship – without calling it mentorship – can and should be.
