Teaching Writing as Invisible Labor in India: Teaching, Gendered Work, and Institutional Marginalization

Abstract

In higher education systems around the world, teaching and academic writing instruction hold a paradoxical position: they are vital to students’ success but are consistently underappreciated as intellectual labor. This article explores how similar patterns of feminization, marginalization and invisibility characterize writing instruction in Indian higher education, drawing on Cynthia Selfe’s groundbreaking claim that teaching has historically been framed as women’s work. This article examines how teaching in India is viewed as remedial service-oriented and emotionally taxing work that is frequently assigned disproportionately to women and early-career faculty through a critical contextual analysis. According to the article, this position is structurally produced by colonial legacies, examination-driven pedagogies, neoliberal institutional logics and gendered presumptions about teaching care and language. The study illustrates how teaching instruction in India is both crucial and deprofessionalized by applying Selfe’s framework to a postcolonial multilingual setting. The article’s conclusion urges institutional changes that acknowledge teaching pedagogy as essential rather than incidental to academic life, as well as a rethinking of teaching instruction as intellectual work.