Performative safe space and the burnout of racialized women in academia

Burnout affects racialized women in academia at disproportionately high rates, and this is neither accidental nor reducible to individual overwork. It reflects the cost of surviving in institutions that demand constant excellence and emotional labour from those who are already marginalized. Racialized women are expected to continually prove their qualifications, justify their presence, and exceed standards simply to be granted a legitimacy that remains conditional and precarious. Their expertise extends beyond teaching and scholarship into managing conflict, addressing injustice, and safeguarding dominant institutional narratives. This role often positions them as stabilizers of institutional fragility. Under neoliberal logics, the responsibility for maintaining safe spaces while leaving colonial and patriarchal foundations intact is shifted onto racialized women. They are tasked with absorbing and managing the very tensions these structures produce, resulting in chronic burnout rooted in systemic inequity rather than personal limitation.

Safe space, once a political idea, shifted into a depoliticized and neoliberal practice. Rooted in feminist and LGBTQ histories, safe spaces emerged as refuges for marginalized communities and sites of political action and advocacy (Black, 2016; Olgesby, 2019). They were intended to foster belonging, collective solidarity, and critical dialogue (Kennedy, 2001). In recent decades, the term safe space has become part of higher education policy and language, yet its exact meaning and application remain convoluted. Safe space is often misinterpreted as the avoidance of difficult conversations or the suppression of courageous dialogues. In reality, safe space in higher education often protects institutional comfort, especially white, Christian, middle-class comfort, while leaving structural harm intact and shifting the emotional and political labour onto marginalized people, especially racialized women (Hawks and Meadows, 2023).

The neoliberal language of safe space often functions as an avoidance strategy, allowing institutions to evade meaningful accountability for racism, sexism, and systemic violence (Hawks and Meadows, 2023). In practice, it produces a conditional welcome in which acceptance depends on performing neutrality and political correctness. Such expectations restrict honest critique and dilute the transformative potential of safe space. Within this framework, racialized women inhabit a structural contradiction: they are welcomed only when their critique is restrained and institutional harmony remains undisturbed, yet they are simultaneously expected to lead equity efforts and confront oppression. This contradiction produces alienation and burnout, as racialized women are expected to uphold an image of inclusivity while continually navigating their own unbelonging. It masks the unequal labour required of them to support institutions that fail to support them in return.

The conditional welcome operates through a politics of comfort embedded in neoliberal understandings of safe space. In practice, welcome is extended in ways that preserve ease for dominant groups, rather than disrupt inequity. Comfort is produced through everyday institutional encounters, where acceptance depends on aligning with established norms, expectations, and modes of interaction (Ahmed, 2015, 2017; Derrida, 2000). In this way, safe space becomes less about justice and more about maintaining an atmosphere in which dominant arrangements remain undisturbed. In comfort, there is harmony; one does not have to exert effort to belong or to explain one’s presence. In this context, however, comfort is not universally accessible; it is unevenly distributed across bodies within the institution. Racialized women’s presence can be experienced as a disturbance to dominant comfort. They may be subtly or explicitly asked to minimize themselves, to regulate their speech, behaviour, appearance, or demands so as not to unsettle the comfort of the patriarchal space. Within this dominant framework, racialized and marginalized voices may be recognized, but often only conditionally and temporarily. Recognition is extended as long as it does not challenge existing power structures. Inclusion becomes acceptable when it can be absorbed without disrupting underlying norms. In this way, the language of safe space is instrumentalized to preserve comfort for those already secure within the system.

In the name of creating safe spaces, racialized women are often expected to absorb tension, soften critique, and translate experiences of injustice while remaining composed, even when facing harm or violations of their rights. This expectation frequently requires assimilation into institutional norms that prioritize comfort and stability over accountability. Beyond this emotional labour, racialized women are also called upon to take leadership roles including educating others, mediating conflict, and repairing institutional damage (Ahmed, 2015, 2017). Yet this work rarely comes with real authority, recognition, or adequate support. In practice, we are asked to make difficult conversations comfortable while protecting the institution’s positive image and advancing inclusion. This contradiction places racialized women in the position of both exposing injustice and managing its consequences. The deeper impacts of this labour, burnout, silencing, and the devaluation of work often remain unrecognized. As a result, racialized women often do not experience the institutionally promised comfort, but instead persistent disorientation; a sense of being out of place that becomes routine rather than exceptional. The burden lies not only in striving to belong, but in managing others’ comfort while never feeling safe ourselves. When safety is reduced to comfort, it shields dominant norms from critique instead of confronting racial, gendered, and sexual violence. For those aligned with institutional power, safety feels like ease. For others, it demands assimilation, reshaping oneself to approximate dominant standards of legitimacy. Assimilation is not simply social adaptation; it is a disciplinary expectation to conform to the normative ideal. Yet the discomfort of misalignment can also be generative, revealing the limits of institutional norms and opening space for critique and transformation.

Building on this tension, we are asked to manage discomfort, guide difficult conversations, and protect the institution’s image, even as we are expected to maintain its comfort. We are encouraged to advance change, but only insofar as it does not unsettle established norms. In this arrangement, institutional structures remain intact while we absorb the emotional and ethical strain. This exhaustion is not a personal failure; it is the cost of sustaining ourselves within systems that rely on our labour while resisting structural change.

Despite common labels, the issue is not that racialized women are too sensitive, too angry, or too tired. The problem lies in institutions that prioritize comfort within neoliberal versions of safe space and reward performative inclusion, while resisting meaningful structural change and framing disruption as excessive or inappropriate. When safety becomes a performance rather than a redistribution of power, it functions as a mechanism of control rather than transformation.

Under the guise of creating a safe space, we are asked to remain professional while our communities are harmed. We are told to be collaborative while our intellectual contributions are minimized. We are encouraged to create safe space for dialogue, but rarely is this safety extended to us. Burnout, then, is not accidental. It is structural. It is produced by systems that prioritize comfort over justice and civility over accountability.

True safer spaces, in fact, require unsettling comfort rather than preserving it. They call for difficult conversations and structural critique, even when such engagement generates discomfort for those who benefit from dominant arrangements. As Ahmed (2015) reminds us, discomfort reveals the contingency of norms and opens possibilities for alternative ways of being, belonging, and knowing. Yet institutions often distance themselves from this necessary discomfort by invoking concern for a racialized person’s safety. In doing so, safety is redefined as protection from tension rather than protection from injustice. Genuine safety, however, may require disrupting comfort and challenging the norms that render racialized existence conditional in the first place.

So what?

Genuine safe spaces are imperfect and cannot promise protection, but they were never intended to provide comfort. Their purpose is to create conditions for truth-telling and courageous dialogue where oppressive narratives can be challenged. When safe space is reduced to neutrality and institutional ease, its political force is diminished. The stakes are not limited to the burnout of racialized women; the erosion extends to the possibility of institutional transformation itself. As racialized women are depleted, students lose mentors, communities lose advocates, and difficult conversations are silenced. Research shifts toward what feels manageable rather than what is necessary. The labour of racialized women becomes a buffer that shields institutional reputation while absorbing harm. The consequence is not private fatigue but collective stagnation. When comfort displaces accountability, higher education betrays students who seek a more just future.

Institutions that prioritize image over change may secure short-term legitimacy while weakening long-term credibility. Performative inclusion preserves appearance without redistributing power. Reclaiming safe space requires re-centring justice, accountability, and structural change rather than protecting dominant comfort. Surface-level assurances of safety obscure deeper inequities. Institutions appear progressive while foundational systems, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and neoliberal productivity remain intact. This dynamic reproduces inequality under the language of inclusion and gradually erodes public trust in higher education. If burnout continues to function as the hidden cost of justice work, universities will cycle through statements and symbolic gestures without meaningful transformation, exhausting those most capable of leading change.

The truth is that comfort is a privilege. Even when some of us comply with institutional expectations, following the rules, adjusting our behaviour, moderating our speech, we do not fully experience ease. We may appear to belong, yet our presence remains marked, questioned, or treated as conditional. Comfort allows certain bodies to move without friction; for others, even conformity does not remove the sense of scrutiny or limitation. Safety that protects dominant comfort cannot provide genuine security for those already navigating exclusion. When safe space is performed rather than practiced, voices are constrained in the name of harmony. Critical dialogue narrows, and silence is normalized as professionalism. The language of comfort can gradually suppress dissent and weaken democratic engagement within higher education. At the same time, repeated reliance on aspirational terms without structural follow-through erodes public trust. When institutions invoke inclusion but fail to enact it meaningfully, they undermine their responsibility to serve the public good and diminish their credibility as spaces of intellectual courage and social transformation.

The question is: Who benefits when racialized women are too exhausted to resist? And what would change if we refused to pay that cost?

The question is not only who benefits when racialized women are too exhausted to resist, but what becomes possible if we refuse to carry that cost. Our response must be collective. Feminist consciousness calls us to reject isolation and recognize that difficult moments are not minor tensions but ethical turning points where power, dignity, and justice are at stake. These moments demand engagement rather than retreat. Silence, neutrality, and withdrawal are not neutral acts; they sustain harm. Reclaiming safe space is part of this collective responsibility. Safety cannot be reduced to comfort or fragility. It must create the conditions for honest, accountable dialogue without sacrificing dignity. This requires grounding our work in transformative justice and community accountability, approaches that understand harm as systemic and relational rather than individual error. It means changing the structures that produce inequity, redistributing responsibility, and building shared practices of repair and care. Each time we invoke safe space, we must ask whether it disrupts injustice or shields dominant comfort. Does it redistribute power or preserve it? Our answers determine whether we reproduce the status quo or commit to structural transformation. Refusing to normalize burnout and silence is not only an act of solidarity; it is a collective stance against systems that depend on exhaustion to maintain control.