To All the Girls I've Loved Before: Academic Love Letters on Mentoring, Power, and Desire

This epistolary essay features 6 letters portraying mentoring relationships among 4 women in the academy. Interrogating both genderless and gendered models of mentoring, this essay argues for “entrustment,” a symbolic mother-daughter relationship between women is a better account of women's power and desire than traditional frameworks of male power and female mutuality. Second, these letters put academic labor in the background to foreground the multiple contexts—career, family, heterosexual relationship—from which women of different ages, races, and status approach work and relationship in the academy. Third, these letters pay debts to specific women, as well as paint portraits of past and future generations of women, in the creation and inheritance of legacies of cultural work. This project takes the risk of strategic separatism to create and to enact women-centered spaces in the academy where academic and relational labor thrives.