Undoing the tough stomach: Feminist countercultures and rest as reorientations in Academia

The traumatic pedagogy of the Tough Stomach in contemporary Academia

Contemporary academic life is marked by precarity (see Kambouri, 2021; Manesi, 2023), acceleration, and intensifying political hostility toward the humanities and critical scholarship (Scott, 2026; Speri, 2026). Yet when one begins to unpack these parallel phenomena, the landscape becomes even more complex and more troubling. What we encounter is not only instability but also a dense assemblage of pressures: extreme antagonism normalized as intellectual rigor; the quantification of “quality” through metrics that compress diverse forms of knowledge into comparable units; the persistent reproduction of classed, racial, and gendered exclusions within academic institutions; anti-intellectual currents that frame critical thought as excess or threat; anti-trans rhetorics that directly target scholars, students, and entire disciplines; loose and short-term contracts that institutionalize uncertainty; and an atmosphere in which academic freedom and free speech appear increasingly fragile.

At the same time, political activity within universities is frequently condemned, while academic knowledge is expected to remain depoliticized—even as the institution itself is profoundly shaped by political forces. The result is a contradictory demand: produce critical, innovative scholarship, but do so without unsettling dominant frameworks. Engage publicly, but remain neutral. Compete intensely, but appear collegial. Endure instability, but do not name it as structural.

These developments are not isolated. Together, they constitute a regime that shapes institutional structures, but more importantly academic subjectivities—how we feel, how we inhabit our bodies in the university, and who we come to imagine ourselves becoming academics. These conditions reorganize everyday academic existence: how we work, how we relate, how we orient ourselves toward the future.

“Academia requires a tough stomach.” Most readers will recall having heard it repeated countless times by mentors, professors, or colleagues. It almost appears as a common sense. It is offered as advice, as warning, sometimes even as encouragement. Yet what does this expression actually mean, and how does it operate?

I argue that this formulation condenses an institutional ideal and establishes a normative condition. It does not merely describe a difficult environment; it prescribes a particular academic subject and sustains a particular social and epistemic order. To have a tough stomach is to endure rejection without visible reaction, to absorb instability without protest, to tolerate antagonism as ordinary, and to treat exhaustion as inevitable. It signals that vulnerability must be managed privately and that emotional disturbance should not interrupt productivity.

The tough stomach abolishes limits. It converts boundary-setting into weakness and frames refusal as incompetence. It demands that scholars accept everything—accelerated timelines, humiliating critique, unstable contracts—as the natural terrain of intellectual life. In this sense, the tough stomach does not operate as an individual trait but it becomes a disciplinary expectation. It shapes how scholars are trained to inhabit critique, competition, precarity, and accelerated temporality. It teaches us which affects are legitimate and which must be suppressed. It normalizes the idea that success is inseparable from endurance and that endurance is inseparable from hardening.

The pedagogy here is traumatic because of what is gradually lost in the process of acquiring this toughness. We lose the capacity to register harm without self-blame. We lose the legitimacy of vulnerability as part of intellectual life. We lose the temporal space necessary for cultivation—the slow/reparative reading (Sedgwick, 1997) and reflection through which ideas mature. We lose, often quietly, the relational openness that allows inspiration to circulate. What is eroded is softness and imagination.

The expectation of the tough stomach is sustained structurally. After the PhD, many scholars enter a continuous race for funding, positions, and publications. Intellectual formation unfolds alongside the acquisition of institutional know-how—learning the language of funding bodies, mastering proposal techniques, navigating editorial processes. Even the cultivation of ideas occurs under competitive pressure. Success itself is unstable. The moment of contract-signing produces abrupt relief, yet each contract functions as a countdown clock. Relief is shadowed by expiration. Precarity shapes temporality. Loneliness compounds this condition. Despite the deeply collective nature of knowledge production, academic structures reproduce isolation. Precarity circulates affectively as a politics of despair, constraining our capacity to imagine ourselves within academia’s future. Add to this the socio-political and academic devaluation of the humanities and gender studies, and the tough stomach emerges as a survival technology.

Burnout, then, is structurally induced. If burnout is structurally produced, resilience cannot be the only answer. The question is not how to endure better, but how to undo the tough stomach. How, in other words, do we do Academia otherwise? (Cain et al., 2025).

Reorientation

Undoing the tough stomach requires more than critique; it requires reorientation (for more, see Ahmed, 2004, 2010, 2014). A structural shift in perspective means refusing to locate burnout within individual insufficiency and instead interrogating the institutional norms that equate harshness with rigor, continuous pushing with excellence, and control with commitment. These norms are not abstract. They are sedimented through policy, but more crucially through everyday interactions, repetitive gestures, and mimetic practice (Ahmed, 2017; Athanasiou and Tzelepis, 2010; Butler, 2004). The micro-politics of critique, evaluation, mentoring, and collegial exchange either sustain or unsettle the tough stomach. We do not simply inhabit Academia; Academia is a set of practices we perform and reproduce.

Reorientation, in this sense, is not metaphorical. It is spatial, affective, and epistemic. It concerns what we turn toward and what we turn away from. It concerns which bodies feel at home (for more, see Ahmed, 2014) in academic spaces and which must adjust, harden, or contort themselves to survive. The tough stomach operates as a demand for alignment. To reorient is to refuse that alignment. Such reorientation is feminist in at least three interconnected ways.

First, it insists that what is dismissed as “personal” is structurally organized. Burnout is not an individual psychological failure; it is an effect of institutional arrangements and affective economies. To name this is already a political gesture. It exposes how endurance is moralized and how vulnerability is privatized. Reorientation thus begins by refusing the shame attached to exhaustion and by re-situating fatigue within broader regimes of value. Second, reorientation involves a refusal of the binary between rigor and care. The tough stomach pedagogy frames sensitivity as weakness and emotional response as distraction. Feminist reorientation contests this separation. It understands affect as knowledge—an index of what institutions demand, silence, and exclude. To feel exhaustion, anger, or despair in the face of institutional precarity is not to fail; it is to register the violence of certain norms. Third, reorientation is collective. It shifts the question from “How do I survive?” to “How do we transform the conditions under which we work or under which we produce knowledge?” This means that even within hostile conditions, practices can be reconfigured.

To do Academia otherwise, then, is to intervene at the level of practice. It is to examine how we enact critique, how we teach and structure seminars, how we respond to failure, how we evaluate colleagues, and how we share. It is to question the mimetic dimension of academic life—the ways in which we reproduce what we ourselves endured. If the tough stomach is learned, it can also be unlearned.

Reorientation also involves temporal disruption. The tough stomach is oriented toward speed, accumulation, and perpetual readiness. Feminist reorientation slows down the scene. It makes space for cultivation, for relational exchange, for thinking that is not immediately convertible into output. It resists the internalization of countdown temporality and challenges the idea that worth must be constantly demonstrated and compared.

Crucially, reorientation does not romanticize fragility. It recalibrates the conditions under which critique and ambition operate. It asks, What would rigor look like if it were disentangled from humiliation? What would excellence mean if it were not measured through exhaustion? What would commitment look like if it did not require self-erasure?

Feminist countercultures—solidarity networks, encouragement, inspiration, affective transparency, collective rest—function as structural reorientations precisely because they alter these conditions. They do not eliminate precarity or dismantle hostile policies overnight. But they reorganize relational and epistemic environments. They redistribute vulnerability, make despair speakable, and cultivate inspiration as shared resource. In doing so, they produce a different economy of knowledge—one in which creativity is not extracted through pressure but generated through relation.

Reorientation is therefore an enactment at the level of lived practice. It marks the shift from diagnosing the traumatic pedagogy of the tough stomach to inhabiting alternative pedagogies—ones that do not require hardening in order to think.

Countercultures: Surviving and living Academia

Undoing the tough stomach requires the cultivation of countercultures—relational, epistemic, and affective practices that reorganize how academic life is inhabited. Countercultures are not external alternatives. They are modes of over-living academia: practices that allow us to survive, experience, inhabit, and transform institutional space differently. If the tough stomach is a pedagogy of hardening, countercultures are counter-pedagogies of reorientation. They do not deny precarity. They refuse to let precarity determine the only possible form of academic subjectivity.

Naming what is already otherwise

To undo the tough stomach is not to imagine an Academia that does not exist. It is to refuse the claim that the tough stomach is academia.

One of the most subtle ways in which burnout sustains itself is through reduction. When we describe the university solely through precarity, antagonism, and acceleration, we risk consolidating those conditions as its defining truth. The thick skin becomes not a norm to be questioned, but the institution itself. In that move, we lose something essential: we lose sight of those who are already enacting different ways of doing Academia.

As long as we/they are there—teaching differently, mentoring differently, sharing differently, protecting time differently—Academia is already being done otherwise. Politics of despair become politics of hope. The tough stomach and the thick skin are not the institution. They are reproduced when we naturalize them as inevitable, when we accept them as the only recognizable form of seriousness. They gain strength when we speak of “Academia” as if it were singular and internally coherent. But the university is never singular. It is continuously constituted through heterogeneous practices.

Naming countercultures is therefore not celebratory rhetoric. It is an act of resistance. It is a way of making visible those who refuse humiliation as pedagogy. Those who redistribute knowledge. Those who slow down conversations so that fragile thought can surface. Those who treat exhaustion as structural signal. Those from whom we learn, by whom we are inspired, and with whom we become. If we fail to name these practices, we risk erasing them. And in erasing them, we inadvertently reinforce the narrative that hardening is the only way to remain.

Resistance to burnout, then, lies both in refusal and in recognition. It lies in acknowledging that alternative pedagogies, relational infrastructures, and temporalities are already in circulation. It lies in understanding that collective becoming does not begin in some future transformation; it is unfolding in the present.

To remain in Academia while refusing its reduction to the tough stomach is itself a political stance. It affirms that institutions are not fixed entities but fields of ongoing negotiation. Every time we choose relation over isolation, accountability over indifference, and rest over extraction, we participate in that negotiation. The skin we bring into Academia does not need to be sacrificed in order to remain. It can remain responsive and attentive. Through it, we register what harms and what sustains. Through it, we learn from those who are already living the university otherwise. As long as countercultures are enacted, Academia exceeds the tough stomach.

And in that excess—in that collective becoming—burnout is no longer the only horizon.