JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY IN HIGHER EDUCATION, 2017 VOL. 41, NO. 4, 590–607 https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2017.1331424 Emotional masking and spill-outs in the neoliberalized university: a feminist geographic perspective on mentorship Fem-Mentee Collective*: Alison L. Bain a , Rachael Baker a , Nicole Laliberté b , Alison Milan a , William J. Payne a , Léa Ravensbergen b and Dima Saad c a Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada; b Department of Geography, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada; c Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada ABSTRACT This paper addresses the emotional dimensions of academic mentorship from a student mentee perspective and contributes to an emerging literature on geographies of emotion in higher education. It presents a pedagogical practice of self-refexive co-mentorship – self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring – and deploys it methodologically to analyze three biographical narratives. From diferent student mentee vantage points, these narratives reveal how the scales of the body, the family, and the nation are interwoven within the geopolitical and manifest within mentoring relationships. We argue that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentorship allows people at diferent academic career stages to share personal experiences of navigating the academy as a means to challenge institutional systems of power. Our argument answers three questions: How and why do we express and manage our emotions in mentoring relationships? What spatial scales are invoked through our emotional experiences and with what implications? How are diferent power structures embedded in the requirements, practices, successes, and failures of emotional management? Our discussion highlights how emotional masking and spill-outs are tools to navigate the emotional terrain of the neoliberalized academy. We conclude that self-peer-ceptive feminist mentoring can unsettle the structural hierarchies that require a “masking” of feelings for the sake of professional distance. Introduction Tis paper is inspired by “Toward mentoring as feminist praxis: strategies for ourselves and others,” published in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education by six feminist geogra- phers (Moss et al., 1999) who provide a notable critique of the long tradition of informal mentoring in the academy. Moss et al. (1999, p. 413) remind us, “we need to develop widely based mentoring strategies” rooted in “self-mentoring,” suggesting that we are our own best mentors – that “we must remember and refect on our own experiences, think for ourselves, and counsel ourselves as taking on the role of our own, most trusted guide” (p. 424). Tey KEYWORDS Mentoring; emotions; self-peer-ceptive; feminism; neoliberalized university ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 May 2016 Accepted 23 January 2017 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Alison L. Bain abain@yorku.ca *The authors’ names are listed alphabetically.