An Academic Conference Survival Guide: From One Femme Queer to the Next
by Emily Blair
So, you’ve been accepted to present your paper at an academic conference. Let’s assume that you have turned that fun idea called abstract into a 15-minute presentation, distilling a semester or a year or five years of thought and research into something for people to skip to grab that coffee with their friend from their M.S. program instead. I’m proud of you.
If you want someone to tell you not to bother with the academic life, job market, graduate school, or college altogether, articles abound for those topics. Instead, let’s assume that you have a good reason to present at an academic conference. Here’s how you survive those two to four days, especially as a woman, a femme, or a queer person.
1. Do: Stay somewhere with a door that locks, with exactly one trusted friend, or alone.
Look, I love a good deal like everybody else, and I have also been a graduate student who couldn’t afford a hotel room and the registration for a conference. I have slept on many a couch, futon, large chair, and floor in my years as a dirtbag college student. But men are trash, and men who aren’t trash are notoriously bad at picking up on their friends’ creepy vibes. Even aside from the possible safety issues of open sleeping floorplans: Do you really want a Ph.D. student to sit on the end of your bed slash the couch in a shared AirBnB regaling you at 1:00 a.m. about the joys of Bob Dylan’s music and totally not reading the room when you just want to go to sleep? Additionally, if, like me, you tend to attract the 8:00 a.m. presentation time slot at conferences, you don’t want that one last hurrah at the hotel bar bringing all your housemates back at 2:30 a.m. Recently I reexamined my needs and realized that I am, in fact, too old to sleep on floors and couches. Stay somewhere with a door.
2. Don’t: Expect to randomly network in the conference hallways.
So maybe you can skip this one if your immediate reaction was oh honey of course but to all the new academics out there: everyone lies to you. They say, “Oh don’t spend all day in panels! Your conference paper is a ticket to great networking!” What they don’t tell you is that if you know exactly nobody at that conference, you have to go to things for networking! These activities will likely be (wait for it) after panel discussions, in plenaries or afterward, ticketed meals, sponsored mixers, box lunches, or the local bars (more on that in a minute). But no one, and I mean absolutely no one, will walk up to you, my dear nobody in the field, while you sit with your lanyard on and the conference program open in the hallway. You’ll just give yourself a stress ulcer from the tension and free coffee.
3. Don’t: Get drunk, or do it alone.
You’re a femme queer person, so I don’t have to explain the absolute unfairness of this tip. I’m sorry that it exists – I’m sorry that I can’t tell you that you will be safe every single time that you drink in a public place. You know the general rules about this situation from every victim blaming conversation you’ve ever had.
Instead, I’m going to focus on the other two parts: “drunk” and “alone.” Don’t get drunk at a conference. Unless you’re twenty-two years old or doing it often, you’ll get so hungover that you’ll lose an entire day to lying in bed watching a rom-com and eating cheese crackers from the hotel vending machine. Hotel bars are expensive; Lyfts are expensive; pizza at midnight from that dive joint the college kids frequent is expensive. If you do hope to network, you want to be able to remember people’s names the next day, and not squat in a pee-soaked bar bathroom and puke in the stall next to a well-known feminist theorist (true story), only to relive you every retch in startling detail for the rest of your life on nights you can’t sleep.
And as to getting drunk alone, nothing piques my imposter syndrome like drinking a bottle of wine and looking at myself in the mirror. Am I even real? What’s happening? Why should I be here? What’s the point? You don’t want these feelings alone in your hotel room, when your FOMO will kick into overdrive anyway because everyone else is drinking with their fun conference friends and you’re not. I highly recommend eating giant bags of M&Ms instead.
4. Do: Speak with the authority of a tenured white man.
I want to start this section with the fullest possible disclosure: I’m a twenty-seven-year-old community college instructor with a master’s degree in English. I’m not even someone who has potential anymore; I am in the uncanny valley of academia, in which I am just close enough to being an autonomous professor that people don’t try to take advantage of my labor and far enough from any ounce of power that graduate students don’t try to get to know me. I bring no influence into any academic conversation. I don’t even have a Ph.D.
But at a conference, I’m a fucking superstar.
Why? Because I don’t reach for influence from others. What do I have to gain, besides good conversation? I don’t have time to write grants, the mandate to publish in academic journals, or the clout to bring others into my orbit. I smile benignly at others trying to peacock around me, because I am not in competition with them, even though we all know “academia isn’t a competition” (as if!). I ask about their research and they feel compelled to ask about mine. At the end of the day I don’t have to worry that I haven’t made a good impression, because nobody will remember me anyway. If they do, and we follow each other on Twitter or email later, then that’s wonderful, and we will have made a great connection on something beyond power and influence.
So, I approach conferences like a tenured white man. I make myself neutral, removed, interested in others but not beholden to their attention. If I want to leave a panel that has become boring or terrible, I leave. If I want to make grand but supported claims in my presentation, I do. I don’t apologize; I use the mic; I let comments not questions from the audience roll off me like a duck, because it’s adorably transparent that this person’s insecurity is making them behave like a needy toddler. I have nothing to lose and little to gain at conferences besides shared knowledge, and I hope that you will pick up some of the same mannerisms for your sanity’s sake.
5. Do: Overpack.
Forget everything you know about packing enough for four days in a backpack. What is with the obsession with underpacking? Oh, you want to wear the same pair of pants for four days? Do you not menstruate, sweat, or accidentally spill etouffee on your lap? That’s incredible. But a conference is not the time to try out your European backpacking skills.
I’m attending a conference in March, and a visiting author talk in April, both of which have me already thinking about packing. The conference in March may include any or all of the following in 3 days: 3 days of conferencing, including my own talk; 1 punk show; 1 open mic; 1 drag show; and 1 walking tour. All of these events will take place in early spring in Kentucky, which means it will be between 25 and 70 degrees on any given day. Should I really try to triple down on all these outfits for the sake of a tiny duffel bag? Because you’re already going to feel out of place in most conference spaces, why make yourself uncomfortable in the process? Pack the dress, the other dress, tights, three pairs of shoes, a blazer, those slacks, those other slacks, and seven pairs of underwear. For good measure, pack two pairs of sweats for the hotel room, in case of the aforementioned etouffee accident. You’re welcome.
6. Don’t: Answer questions that aren’t asked.
If you’re a femme queer person, you’ve probably been conditioned to be “nice” and accommodating to everyone in your life in the name of keeping the peace. While I’m not going to take on the entirety of the patriarchy in this short note, I would like to give you permission not to answer questions that people don’t ask.
What does this look like? Let’s say you’re someone people perceive as queer.
Person who doesn’t think before they speak: “So ah you know I don’t know how people these days do with their they’s and xirs! I just don’t understand it!”
You, if you are answering unasked questions: “Well gender and pronouns are actually complex systems of…” Continue to give a fifteen-minute Gender Theory 101 talk to someone who can navigate their way to an academic conference so probably also has the ability to use Google.
You, after reading this article: silence
Another example:
Person who doesn’t think before they speak: “I don’t know why a community college instructor would come to an academic conference.”
You, if you are answering unasked questions: “I enjoy research and engaging with rigorous academic discourse and also I am now justifying my presence in the same room as you are even though that feels really horrible.”
You, after reading this article: silence.
I’m not saying that you have to let bigoted bullshit fly in rooms around you. If you’re the kind of person who energy to expend on these air-suck, whiny men who demand everyone coddles their imaginative musings like a petulant tenured child, then please go fight the good fight. If, like me, after those conversations you feel damp and deflated, I give you permission to not take the faux-intellectual devil’s advocate bait.
You deserve to be there, in that room, just as you are.
Alright, that’s all the advice I have. If you need me, I’ll be eating dinner at 6 p.m. and experiencing every possible human emotion at a conference near you soon.
Emily Blair is a queer Appalachian poet and blue-collar scholar. Originally from Fort Chiswell, Virginia, she now teaches English at a community college in North Carolina, where she lives with her cat.