Reflecting on the experience of being a participant in the Work of Teacher Education (WoTE) research, and drawing on conceptualisations of teacher education as "domestic labour," I argue that teacher educators' closeness to classroom practice acts as a determining factor in their symbolic annihilation, a concept usually applied to study of the media that argues that the absence of representation, or underrepresentation, of some groups of people is a means of maintaining social inequality. Teacher educators' necessary closeness to practice affects promotion, academic outputs and recognition and constitutes a two-tier system that closely mirrors "blue collar/white collar" inequalities in wider society, underlining Bourdieu's characterisation of academics as the "dominated fraction of the dominant class". Reviewing data derived from my own practices as a teacher educator in relation, and doing so with reference to the larger WoTE data-set, I argue that the feminised connotations of teacher education work contributes to teacher educators' symbolic annihilation within the public discourse, which includes the wider education community.