Working with Imposter Feelings: A Queer Feminist Invitation to Imposter Sociology

Abstract

Imposter “syndrome” is anecdotally ubiquitous among academic workers, and is overwhelmingly understood as an individual personal problem of self-esteem or confidence. However, queer feminist sociological approaches reject such prevailing discursive frames, and push back against equally ubiquitous self-help style responses. Rather than conceptualizing imposter feelings as internalized deficiency, this work turns towards feelings of unbelonging, inadequacy, and inauthenticity as public feelings in the university. Understanding imposter feelings as social, political affect means situating them in the context of intersecting educational inequalities and epistemic hierarchies, including as a diagnostic that can tell us about the operation of power in contemporary Higher Education, and asking how such emotional states might serve as grounds for agency and collective political action. This essay reflects on my attempts to work with imposter feelings sociologically, offering readers an invitation to imagine a queer feminist imposter sociology, focusing on how we might turn towards imposter feelings as a political resource in the contemporary university.