On the Limits of Performed Compliance: Jill Carroll and the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurial Adjuncts

This essay explores the rhetoric of “performed compliance” through an analysis of Jill Carroll's advice columns and manuals for adjunct faculty. Carroll attempts to invert the relationship of domination experienced by most adjuncts and calls for adjunct faculty to accept their fate through a performance that she labels “entrepreneurial.” Central to this idea is the acceptance of the economic inequalities that adjuncts are subjected to and the importance of not calling attention to the marginalized condition of the work they perform. This essay argues that this version of temp performativity offers little space for adjunct faculty to resist the conditions of their own marginalization and makes adjuncts complicit in their own oppression, with devastating consequences not only for adjuncts but for all those who toil in the academy.