Basically, the article tells a disturbing story about the labor politics of early 20th-century American college students. In essence, college students from such places as Columbia, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Univ. of Minnesota, Univ. of Chicago, Tufts, Brown, Univ. of Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Univ. of Southern California, and various engineering schools volunteered to serve as strikebreakers in a large number of labor disputes. It’s not news that college students of that era were elite and conservative, but their extreme hostility towards organized labor is nonetheless striking. Some 9 of 10 of Yale students, we’re told, “subscribed ‘to anti-labor attitudes with fervor’” as of 1910 (334); but the heart of their anti-labor sentiment was expressed less in political statements — as they were apparently too frivolous on the whole to articulate any clear political philosophy — than in the sheer violence of their physical confrontation with striking workers.

Norwood explains that not only did elite college students (a redundant expression, by the way, given the times) replace striking workers at their posts, they also relished the brawls that often broke out as they crossed picket lines. In New York in 1905, “Stories circulated around Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute that ‘Poly’ students working on subways had ‘bested roughs [ie, workers] a dozen times’ ” (331). Two years earlier, “hundreds [of students] answered the Minneapolis flour millers’ call for strikebreakers. Among the first to volunteer were varsity athletes from the University of Minnesota, who with a ‘lusty Shi-U-Mah’ (the Minnesota cheer) formed a wedge, and blasted through the picket line” (338). In 1912, students “joined the militia companies sent in to quell the Lawrence [Mass.] textile strike… students enjoyed the opportunity to precipitate violence, as they enthusiastically disrupted picketing and strike parades” (339). A few years later, in 1919, students were themselves victims of retributive violence. “In riots in the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Providence, and Malden, which were sparked by the strikebreaking of students from Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Brown, the working class took its revenge on the collegians, badly mauling several. In Boston, for example, some student strikebreakers were beaten unconscious and one had his teeth knocked out” (339).

Norwood proposes a joint explanation for this strikingly physical form of class warfare. First of all, he argues that the antipathy of the rich towards the working classes made the students particularly suited for strikebreaking. While students themselves alternated between familial conservatism and sheer festive indifference to anything serious, their administrators, athletic coaches and trustees held clear anti-labor doctrines. “Columbia’s president Nicholas Murray Butler,” for instance, “denounced the strike in general as an ‘act of war’ ” (334). Students’ involvement in strikebreaking, apparently, was catalyzed by the active encouragement of these campus leaders. Moreover, because students were wealthy elites, they afforded businessmen the chance to hire a more publicly “presentable” group of scabs — the alternative being to hire lower-class, less seemly “riff-raff” and “slum dwellers” as substitute workers (332).

Now for the second piece of Norwood’s explanation: he suggests that involvement in strikebreaking was in large part a response to what he calls a turn-of-the-century “crisis of masculinity.” He argues that, as upper- and middle-class men were increasingly decoupled from physical work, they found themselves having more trouble performing the “muscularity,” violence, “daring deeds,” and “strenuous life” that were stereotypical characteristics of manhood. Violent sports, according to Norwood, were hence increasingly valorized as a sort of substitute site of masculinity pageants. However, the increasingly bloody and ridiculous rites of passage that emerged at elite colleges themselves became too unseemly, and administrators eventually banned them as “relic[s] of barbarism.” “Strikebreaking,” Norwood goes on to argue, “was the perfect replacement for the banned violent rituals. It provided students with the opportunity for mass participation, denied in organized college athletics, and satisfied their pressing need for a ‘test of masculinity’ ” (338).

As one would expect from this somewhat heterogeneous cluster of motivations, students’ experiences of strikebreaking were complex: they seemed to live it as a gigantic “lark” (333); as a test of physical prowess; as a sort of break from campus (some even got course credit!); but also as something that satisfied a certain craving for heroism. While this craving for heroism was no doubt essential to the masculinity complex of the day, it strikes me that these idly rich students may also have harbored fantasies of doing something less useless than drinking and making fools of themselves on a daily basis.

In the end, the period of strike-breaking (from 1901-1923) came to a close, Norwood argues, above all because campuses became more co-educational in the 1920s, and the frivolous pursuits of college boys were redirected towards “heterosexual activities.” It’s a ridiculous ending to a ridiculous bit of history.

Questionnaire on Sexuality

• Where do you think your heterosexuality comes from?
• When and under what circumstances did you decide to be heterosexual?
• Could it be that your heterosexuality is only a difficult and troubling phase that you’re passing through?
• Could it be that you are heterosexual because you are afraid of people of the same sex?
• If you’ve never slept with a partner of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer one? Could it be that you’re just missing out on a good homosexual experience?
• Have you come out as heterosexual? How did they react?
• Heterosexuality doesn’t cause problems as long as you don’t advertise these feelings. Why do you always talk about heterosexuality? Why center everything around it? Why do the heterosexuals always make a spectacle of their sexuality? Why can’t they live without exhibiting themselves in public?
• The vast majority of sexual violence against children is due to heterosexuals. Do you believe that your child is safe in the presence of a heterosexual? In a class with a heterosexual teacher in particular?
• More than half of heterosexual couples who are getting married this year will get divorced within three years. Why are heterosexual relationships so often bound for failure?
• In the face of the unhappy lives that heterosexuals lead, can you wish for your child to be heterosexual? Have you considered sending your child to a psychologist if he or she has turned out to have heterosexual tendencies? Would you be ready to have a doctor intervene? Would you send your child to in-patient therapy to get him or her to change?

After this mock questionnaire, the flier remarks that “these questions which marginalize, psychoanalyze and denormalize (anormalise) — non-heterosexual people suffer from these questions, and face them on a daily basis.” And it goes on to enunciate a political agenda which argues, in effect, that queer and women’s issues belong together, “because heterosexuality,” in addition to harming gay, lesbian and trans people, “is a political system which divides the world in two, into men and women, and which assigns one side to maternity and domestic labor while giving the others privileges and power.” Their list of political demands hence included not only equality and an end to homophobia but also (and this struck me as being a little more unusual) an end to the traditional system of dichotomous sexual classification. Indeed, they claimed “the free disposition of one’s body and the free choice of one’s sexual identity, sex and gender.”

This placed them in the paradoxical position, it seems to me, of being a feminist group trying to undermine the category of ‘women’ that served as their tacit basis of political unity: while open to all, as of yesterday no males had joined. I’d guess that they’d interpret this apparent paradox by saying that in fact they’re brought together by shared domination on the basis of their gender, and that of course the whole point of the project is to overcome this domination. But the political horizon of this project is very far off; the moment where gender domination will be overcome is infinitely far in the future from the point of view of the present.

(Photo by Imen I., a student in sociological methods at Paris-8.)

The title at the top reads “Some people are pretending that students don’t have housing problems.” The caption in blue on the photo says that “Damien and Mélanie, 22 and 23 years old, each still live with their parents.” You can’t really read the bottom, but it informs you that UNEF, the biggest student union in France, demands students’ right to housing. (Relevant background information: there’s a major shortage of dedicated student housing in the Paris area.)

This poster has, as far as I’ve seen so far, tended to shock and irritate campus-dwellers more than it attracts support for its ostensible cause. It depicts a young couple having sex in a parental bed while the parents are sleeping. The couple is similar, they both look pale-skinned, they both have dark hair, they’re both equally nude. The sex is hetero although, since the girl is on top, it is slightly less normative than it might be. I don’t really have a good point of cultural reference here, but for lack of anything better, French wikipedia claims that “La plus courante est la position du missionnaire.” Anyway, the boy’s body is stretched out on the bed and he’s gripping his partner’s head and thigh with his hands; the girl seems to be holding herself up with her left arm. It looks like they’re kissing, and the boy’s eyes are shut. I hope he hasn’t fallen asleep.

The parents are sleeping. Or are they? The old man’s sleep mask hints that it takes an effort to stay unconscious. The parents are turned away from the middle of the bed as if trying not to pay attention, trying not to know; if this were a real scene, they would at best be pretending to be asleep. They’re wearing nightclothes that blend into the bedding, as if symbolically they were only the unwanted backdrop to the sexual act in progress, to the young couple’s bodies that, compared to the rest of the bed, are so much more visible and so much more saturated with color. The bodies of the young couple seem to be physically right up against the bodies of the old couple, the girl’s right side fitted into the curve of the old man’s curled-up body, the boy’s shoulder possibly propped up on the old woman’s back. But at the same time, the bedding (that garish quilt) seems to act as a physical and, by implication, a symbolic barrier between the young and the old couple. It seems to maintain a minimum of physical separation even as the whole scene emphasizes the reckless and scandalous closeness of the children’s sex act to the parental bed. Taboos are being broken in this image, but only within limits.

The image is organized in such a way as to manifest a series of oppositions between the two couples:

The bodies of the young couple serve here to divide the old couple from each other. Here the young mediate and interrupt the old: symbolically, this looks something like an allegory of the way that children’s sexual relations interfere with their elders’ relationships, of the way that inter-family sexual relations interrupt intra-family (kin) ties. One of these young people is presumably the child of the sleeping parents; but here this person, whichever it is, is represented not as the child but as a member of a new couple opposed and probably annoying to their elders.

At the same time, it has to be said that both couples are obviously very similar in some ways. They both look white. They both look straight. And although only the young couple is having sex in this picture, we can infer that the old couple was, at a previous time, also having sex, since we can assume that that would have been the social and biological origin of one member of the young couple. In that light, the old couple should perhaps be viewed as “post-sexual” more than “asexual,” as the sleepy remainder of past scenes of sexual passion. It comes to mind that the only thing really taboo about this scene as a social situation is that the young couple is in the same bed as the parents. Aside from that, it’s a textbook image of hetero sociosexual reproduction. One couple produces a child who forms a new couple which in turn strives to produce a new child… That’s about as normative as it gets, on my understanding of French social order.

Now, although it seems to me that everything I’ve just said about the image is basically obvious, is basically something that one can read in the image without a great deal of interpretive risk, it must be said that, to the best of my knowledge, none of these considerations figure in local interpretation of the poster where this image appears. No one I’ve met sees this as a picture that deeply invokes norms and scripts of social reproduction; my sense is that local interpretations start and end with a scandalized sense that it’s a picture of a couple having sex. The depiction of sex — at least in the fairly unrelated context of a student housing campaign — is viewed as a scandal in itself, end of thought. Or perhaps just as a tasteless bit of political advertising. Someone told me: maybe this would make sense for a condom ad, but here!?…

The implicit logic of the poster, of course, is something like: “for lack of adequate student housing, students have to live at home; thus they have nowhere to have sex but their parents’ bed; which is absurd and scandalous; hence the current housing shortage leads to scandal and demands action.” It’s a logic of political shock, quite likely designed to catch the eye and stick in memory more than to elicit any direct political action. And insofar as it has indeed caught the eyes of the campus (a long row of these posters is put up in a series by the solitary university entrance), it seems to be, paradoxically enough, a success. The scandal represented in the image becomes the scandal of the image itself.

At some point a ways into the conversation, one of my friends wanted to tell us something about gender in academia. It was a mixed gender conversation, I hasten to add: a woman to my left and a man to my right. (I pick these gender category terms out of resignation, feeling that all available lexical options disappoint, wanting to signal social types without endorsing them, not wanting the essentialism of “woman” and “man,” not wanting the diminutives of “boy” and “girl,” not wanting to hint at biology with “female” and “male,” wanting the informality of “guy” and “gal” but “gal” is too contrived.) Anyway, my friend said she’d noticed that, when academics talk about other academics, they are likely to use the first and last name when referring to a woman academic, while men academics often get mentioned by last name only. This to her was entirely part of everyday life, undesirable but obvious.

But I was taken somewhat aback by this claim, and I think the other guy there was too. I realized afterwards, to my shame, that our common reaction was one of doubt. We wanted to think of counterexamples. Exceptions that would disprove the rule. Isn’t Judith Butler pretty reliably called Judith Butler? we were asked. But isn’t Butler a pretty common name? Well, but there aren’t any other famous academics called Butler, now are there? Or take Simone de Beauvoir. Pretty much always Simone de Beauvoir, isn’t she? Well, yes. Who could deny that? While on the other hand Sartre, it came to my mind, is indeed pretty much always just Sartre. Or take Hannah Arendt. Is Hannah Arendt always Hannah Arendt? Well, yes, pretty often, though I think maybe at the philosophy department in Paris-8 she may occasionally become just Arendt. But other mid-century German male philosophers seem to go by their last names far more often. Marcuse is just Marcuse. And “Adorno” also seems to travel pretty well by itself, as a practically self-contained sign of pessimistic dialectical prose convolution. Or take Eve Sedgwick. She’s pretty often called Eve Sedgwick, no? But not really Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that’s a mouthful. We didn’t reach agreement about that.

It came to mind that this sort of disparity in naming is pretty well known in American politics, where last year Hillary was often Hillary but Barack Obama pretty quickly became plain old Obama. But I hadn’t ever thought about it in an academic context. I wanted to know, is this the same in writing? No, said my friend, you hear it more in spoken contexts, while in writing there are slightly more formal protocols about when you mention the first name. What about in personal contexts? Like with first-naming your advisors? Yes, she conceded, things change when it’s someone you know. If you were going to do a research project about this, how would it go? We weren’t sure about that.

It was a conversation that was partly inconclusive, a conversation torn by the din of other conversations elsewhere in the bar, a conversation as full of social and emotional static as of audible interference. But at any rate, our doubt, our skepticism, our resistance to the claim at hand, I mean mine and the other male’s resistance, as I concluded later after we’d all gone home, was not laudable. Our doubt, I felt, was only accidentally about expressing scholarly skepticism about an unfamiliar claim. A lot of our defensive response seemed in hindsight to have been saying tacitly: what, who me? Me, possibly uneven in my treatment of others? Me, uneven according to an unconscious and institutionalized principle according to which academic males would be allowed to claim the privilege of impersonality, according to which men could be coded objective and scholarly by being tacitly depersonalized through the everyday effacement of their first names, while women would remain the marked category, marked as having gender, marked as women, through a logic of association whereby first names would invoke a more personalized relationship to strangers who are thus marked feminine? What, me, maybe casually sexist? Who, me?

That moment of undesired interpellation, of nonlinear listening, of gender revealing itself as at once object of discussion and structure of interaction, that moment of asymmetrical vulnerabilities and reception of unwelcome truths, of scholarly discourse become a means of delaying the unwelcome, that moment of intensely personal impersonality where one discovers that one’s conduct is gendered and pre-scripted in ways that are just typical, that moment where one finds out (again, but each time it’s a surprise) that unfortunately we are not in control of ourselves and that we do things without knowing them — all these moments are minor, themselves typical. But there is something important, to my mind, about thinking through those everyday moments where we discover that we were objects all along, determined by structures we haven’t mastered.

I would like to see more passionate, more personal and more risky public thinking about gender in the academic worlds I live in. Yet without being publicly autobiographical in a way that would be compromising or ostentatious. Yet without retreating into the anaesthesia of theory and pure abstraction. Yet without retreating solely into research or into a generalizing discourse — as urgent as the overall statistics remain — that would remind us how flawed the system is as a system but that would fail to think through the inescapably personal surface where that system is lived out.

We have, of course, plenty of existing discourses on gender in academia, but I’m not convinced that our collective faculties are fully engaged in them. (Especially when it comes to men.) There are so many ways to evade, so many ways to cope, so many ways to make critical discourse into a condition of inaction. Sometimes our discourse on gender is privatized, relegated to the bar or cafe or hallway, a matter for personal frustration or conundrum or amusement more than collective engagement. Sometimes gender is specialized, turned over to statisticians who will tell us that, yes, women earn several or many percent less than men on average, or to semioticians who can explain to us, rigorously, just how gender difference is encoded in names, or to anthropologists who teach us about how gender is culturally configured elsewhere. And sometimes discourse about gender is itself (for lack of a better word) feminized: in my corner of the academic world, at any rate, women are much more likely than men to be thoughtful about gender relations in their work environment, which certainly is not coincidental. Needless to say, there is nothing inherently wrong with an expert investigation of gender that makes it a research object, or with private conversations that temporarily offer liberty and intimacy, or with modes of perception that are especially acute among certain groups. But this division of discursive labor is a clumsy one, promoting compartmentalization and pockets of disengagement, and tolerating crude if not entirely prereflective analyses.

One way forward is perhaps to try to conceptualize the minor moments in academic life where gender comes into our own field of ordinary vision. (Regardless of our status as specialists in the topic.) And just what was gender in the moment I’m describing here? A structure of social difference, certainly; a structure of phenomenological perception, a way of objectifying things in the world, that too; but above all a structure of resistance, a principle of disagreement, as if gender was what authorized one’s experience or authorized the dismissal of another’s experience, as if gender were a principle of mutual unintelligibility, temporary at the very least, that made conversation especially incoherent and desperate for at least phantasmatic resolutions, like those of our academic debate over the claim at hand. It was as if gender were the signal of a banal acknowledgement (it’s not news that people of different genders are treated differently in academia) but simultaneously of a curious anger or bewilderment or scorn that seemed to be lurking, waiting, like the little red line of a burst vein on the sea of an otherwise placid eye, a negative dialectic of cynicism and vulnerability. When our presumed egalitarian universalism was thwarted (“there’s no gender difference here,” we began the conversation by presupposing), it was as if there was nothing left to do but retreat defensively into gender asymmetries (our views are pre-scripted by our genders, I eventually felt). But if a presumed universalism is a false utopia from the start, what more livable kinds of utopian gender negotiation remain practically available? What kinds of optimism are available in a scene of self-betrayal and compromise?

But maybe there’s something dangerous, too, in overthinking a moment like the one at hand. If gender were already a major determinant of the academic will to power, wouldn’t that mean it would be suspect to reduce gender to an object of thought or reflection? If the flight into academic disembodiment is something that is itself radically asymmetrically available to academic males, does that mean that a disembodied contemplation of gender would already be a display of gender privilege? Or a better question: what can one do with those parts of a social scene that are meaningless, those moments of conflict and disagreement that in hindsight seem so avoidable, those moments of blockage and stupidity that inherently cannot be thought through because by definition they consist in making situations impossible to think through? This kind of irreducible frustration can also be the scene that gender offers us.

At any rate, these are the kinds of nonconcepts that this scene makes me think about. But I warn you, nothing here should be taken as a general claim or a fixed position. This text claims no authority. On the contrary, it wants to try to acknowledge the reality of situations where claims to & struggles over authority are symptomatic of contradictions that can never be resolved textually.

Come to think of it, the very topic in question in the situation at hand, that is the question of gender disparities in academic naming practices, is in itself a question about ways that gender codes authority. As my friend said at the bar, it isn’t obvious that it’s a bad thing to mention someone’s first name when talking about them. Perhaps the effacement of first names is only an academic mechanism for pretending objectivity while actually withdrawing into the name of one’s father (for most Western academics inherit their “family” names patrilineally). But at the same time, the marking of a false familiarity with strangers that’s implicit in mentioning an academic’s first name is not, itself, an unqualified virtue. Which would one prefer, the authority of false objectivity or the illusions of exaggerated subjectivity?

Neither, I suppose. Neither.

I still don’t know how gendered disparities in naming practices would look on some grand statistical level; I have no large-scale data, though maybe one day I will have enough recordings of academic events to make it worthwhile to sort through them and see how the numbers look. The Sartre-Simone de Beauvoir comparison seems pretty convincing in itself, to be honest. (And, as a matter of fact, I did a bit of research on google.fr and found out that Sartre (1.39 million hits) is used 2.75 times more often than Jean-Paul Sartre (505,000), whereas de Beauvoir (828,000) is only used 1.34 times more often than Simone de Beauvoir (619,000). It thus appears that, as predicted, ‘Sartre’ frequently passes as a name by itself, while ‘Simone’ is a much more obligatory addition to ‘de Beauvoir.’ Statistically speaking, I mean.)

But I guess in the end this post is less about gender in academic naming than about trying to figure out how to name gender in ways that might make accessible new ways of living with it.

Something should be said about professor-student relations. For the most part, contact is limited to the classroom, where the student’s ignorance is taken for granted and the professor does all the talking without permitting questions. The theory is that the students haven’t enough background to make intelligent inquiries.

At Nice last summer, on the final day of a month-long session, the students, under the direction of the two young American assistants, prepared a series of skits commenting on their experience. One skit consisted of two scenes in a classroom. First, an “American” professor entered in sports shirt and tennis shoes, telling his students he wanted to know them and inviting them to his office to discuss their problems, even their life outside the classroom. When he had finished his brief, informal talk, he asked if there were any questions, and of course no hands were raised. The next scene presented a young woman, a doctoral candidate from the Sorbonne, as the lecturer — chic, crisp, equipped with a quire of notes. At the end of her virtually unintelligible lecture, she too asked if there were any questions. When a dozen eager hands shot up, she replied coolly, “Answer them among yourselves. I shall see you again next week at this same hour.”

I found this in an American’s comments on French university pedagogy… set in Bordeaux… in 1966. In other words, in a moment fairly far removed — one might think — from contemporary university realities here. It’s a description from an era when a novelistic style of describing everyday life was more common in academics’ professional commentary, and some of its syntax is not contemporary. Take the last sentence of the first paragraph, “The theory is that the students haven’t enough background to make intelligent inquiries.” Is there not a ring of a different era in this phrasing, this vocabulary?

Now, obviously the main point of this passage is to dramatize a cultural difference between French and American academic systems. The conceptual structure here is more complex than it initially appears: what we have here is a retelling of a French skit about American and French professors, that is, an American representation of a French representation of an American’s pedagogy apparently understood by French students within a logic wherein differing national characters are mapped out in pedagogical space. A logic where cultures are projected into pedagogies and individuals are taken, more or less, as tokens of a cultural whole. Admittedly, the author goes on to describe these episodes as “humerous hyperbole”; but we can see a whole logic of structural difference here:

As a structural diagram of one moment in the construal of cultural difference, this one has some intriguing elements. France is personified as a young woman and America as a man; France is formal and distant while America attempts to be friendly and personal; France is well dressed while America is in sports clothes; French academic discourse is apparently very hard to understand but nonetheless a major local prestige object (or at least it attracts lots of questions), while American academic discourse is linguistically simple but culturally and affectively incomprehensible (evoking zero student response). One thing that Anglo readers might miss is the tacit reference to a well-entrenched historical pattern that the young French lecturer embodies: at least since the 19th century, I believe, young French academics have taught in the provinces but are still, at heart, Parisians, may even be weekly commuters from Paris, and generally scorn the provincial world, just as she appears to scorn her students. The figure of the young woman is deeply aestheticized and gendered, apparently not merely by the American observer but also by the French students themselves. I don’t really know how this fits into French academic imaginaries, but I am sure that haughty Parisian intellectual culture must have a distinct and problematic image in the provinces. This haughtiness is, of course, demonstrated and confirmed by the professor’s refusal to engage in dialogue. Whether the students’ eagerness to ask questions was (ostensibly) because of the institutional prestige of the lecturer, the incomprehensibility of her discourse, or the nonacademic qualities of her style or gender, I can’t really make out here.

But something striking, and perhaps the reason why I’m posting this seemingly distant historical tidbit, is that certain features of this pedagogy are basically still accurate today, for several of the philosophy classes I’ve seen in action this autumn here in Paris. Teachers who tell their students that it’s a université de masse and that there are too many of them so they better talk among themselves? Check, yes, I’ve seen that. Formal academic impersonality with next to no pedagogical metadiscourse? Yep, seen that too. Failed efforts to get the students to talk? Yes, that’s pretty common. With the friendly as well as the standoffish faculty? Yes, student passivity isn’t terribly discriminating about that sort of thing. No overt complaints even in the face of incomprehensible lectures? Indeed.

A massive disclaimer seems to be in order: this isn’t meant as any kind of general educational indictment or global comment on anything. I’m not trying to say that all pedagogy here is bad or anything else of that scope. Nonetheless, I’m rather struck to see that some of the local modes of disengagement and pedagogical frustration haven’t changed much in four decades. As for the questions about how national characters are mapped pedagogically today, I can’t say that I’ve encountered anyone talking about that here so far, but I will keep my eyes open…

I want here to present some quick graphs that suggest the changing gender dynamics within American anthropology. This first graph shows the production of new doctorates since the 60s. It is commonly thought in the field that there has been something of a “feminization” of anthropology over the past few decades, and as we can see here, the number of doctorates awarded to women (in blue) has indeed been greater than the number of doctorates awarded to men (red) since 1992. We can see here that males were demographically dominant in the production of doctorates until 1984, after which there were eight years of approximate equality (where the two lines overlap) followed by divergence.

Important to note, it seems to me, is that although it’s true that the relative place of males and females has indeed been inverted, the overall picture here is that the two lines have risen together fairly regularly. Quite often, especially in the last fifteen years, we can see that little shifts correlate across genders, as in the little drops in 2001 and 2005. And the demographic expansion of the field in general is of a far greater demographic magnitude than the shift in gender balance. In 2007, we awarded more than five times the number of new doctorates as in 1966 (519 vs. 98) — a fact whose significance I will come back to later. But to get a better sense of changing gender ratios, consider a graph of women as a percentage of the total pool of doctoral recipients.

Since this is a graph of women as a percentage of all PhDs awarded, the 50% mark signifies the point of gender balance. As we can see, in the 1960s women comprised a fairly small minority of new doctorates, but grew fairly steadily through the 1970s, hovering around parity during the 1980s as I said above, and now comprising between 55%-60% of new anthropologists. This definitely constitutes a majority, but a far from overwhelming one. Women have not become as demographically dominant as men once were; if anything, the proportion of women among new anthropologsts may even be converging on some sort of rough slightly-majority equilibrium.

However, when we look not at doctorates awarded but at total graduate enrollments (many or most of which are at the Master’s level), we see that the gender gap has in fact been continuing to widen fairly steadily.

As above, there are some overall similarities in the graphs, some similar local maxima, but it is very clear that the number of men enrolled has been falling slightly since 1995, while the number of women enrolled has continued to increase. Compared with the previous graph, which you’ll recall dealt with doctorates awarded, this seems to suggest that there are a lot of women graduate students who don’t end up with PhDs. Or, put differently, there’s greater gender parity by the end of doctoral education than there is at the beginning stages of graduate programs. As we know, people who get doctorates have to pass through the earlier stages of graduate education. If there are proportionately more men at the later stages, that has to mean that women are disproportionately being screened out along the way.

Worth noticing, in passing, is that if we look slightly farther back into the 1970s, we can see that women as a fraction of total graduate enrollments passed the 50% mark in 1977:

So women attain parity in overall graduate enrollments in 1977, while as we saw in the first graph above, women first attained parity as recipients of anthropology doctorates in 1984. This seven-year difference is an interesting time gap because it is just what one would predict if one expected it to take about seven years on average to get a anthropology Ph.D from the start of one’s enrollment in grad school. In other words, we can see the likelihood that gender parity was reached around the time of the 1977 grad cohort, but that it then took seven years or so for this cohort to graduate.

I do have some further graphs of continuing gender imbalance in the discipline, alas. Take a look at the gender balance across different levels of degree recipients (based on degrees issued in a given year, not enrollments).

Again, the 50% line marks the point of gender parity. The top line (orange) indicates the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women; the middle line indicates the percentage of master’s, and the bottom line (yellow) indicates doctorates. Insofar as each curve here is rising, we see again that the fraction of women in the discipline has continued to increase at all levels for a long time. But we can learn two new things here.

First, on the down side, the basic demographic structure of our field has preserved a kind of masculine bias for decades — indeed, since the start of the data. In other words, men have always been increasingly well-represented the higher up you go in anthropological education. This shows again, and more clearly than above, that women have always been, one way or another, disproportionately weeded out of the ranks of new anthropologists.

Second, on the positive side, the curves do seem to be converging. The difference between the fraction of women who get bachelor’s degrees and the fraction of women who get doctorates is decreasing. My sense from this graph is that convergence was happening much more markedly through the 1980s, while since then there has been more of a steady state. (See how the curves are roughly parallel in the right-hand part of the graph? That’s what I have in mind.) This means that this demographic dominance is smaller than it used to be. A double conclusion suggests itself: while men are no longer demographically dominant, and are even a minority (remarkably so at the undergraduate level, where women receive nearly 70% of anthropology degrees), there are still gendered principles of selection at work in the field.

These lingering gender dynamics will not, of course, be a major surprise to anyone. But it’s good to have some statistical confirmation of what is intuitively viewed — somewhat paradoxically — as both an increasing feminization of anthropology and an ongoing masculine bias. That said, I would stand by my earlier remark that the most demographically striking thing here is still the overall population growth of anthropology, hundreds of percent over the decades. The effects of growth on disciplinary social dynamics are probably vast and worth much further exploration. This demographic expansion seems linked to a number of fairly important intellectual changes in the field: there are a lot more little subfields and subspecialties than there used to be; there are a lot more AAA sections than there were when the discipline was smaller and probably more socially homogenous; and there is currently perhaps less of a shared set of ongoing debates or even of a shared theoretical canon. Some professors say they don’t really know what makes something cultural anthropology anymore, and have no further sense of a shared disciplinary endeavor; old-timers sometimes conjure the nostalgic image of an earlier, pre-World-War-II era when the discipline was small enough for everyone to know everyone else. All of these, I would point out, are the subjective or experiential correlates of the objective fact of decades of vast disciplinary growth.

I do have some additional data on gender balance in other social science fields, but I’ll have to postpone that momentarily because I promised to start blogging about comparative university neoliberalisms…

My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National Merit finalist, President Scholar candidate, and a winner of MI Southeast Conference All Academy Award (only five students in her school win). She is a cellist in symphony orchestra and a varsity crew member on the rowing team.

Yet she was rejected by four Ivy schools and put on the waiting list for the University of Chicago. What went wrong? Her counselor was stunned by her rejection. What should she do to get off the waiting list?

…
Answer:Your daughter sounds like a terrific scholar, musician, and athlete. The world of selective college admissions is so hyper-competitive that trying to read the tea leaves about why decisions were rendered is almost impossible…

One feels sorry for the daughter, she is such a quantitatively perfect person. Her SAT score is higher than most graduate students’ monthly incomes. She has perfect grades. She has perfect stats. She has more honors and decoratations than a military veteran. She comes from a public school, so she isn’t too marked by obvious badges of class status. She appears, at least to her parent, as a completely flawless unit ready for insertion into what was, evidently, expected to be a flawlessly meritocratic system.

Such was the strength of the expectation, that perfect preparation equals perfect success, that its failure provokes a moment of stunned incomprehension. “What went wrong?” On one level, this question is rhetorical, even performative: the parent already knows what went wrong: their daughter didn’t get in where she was supposed to. The very question what went wrong? presupposes an assumption that the daughter could not possibly have been rejected, projects an image of a world that functions automatically, a giant sorting system in which the best reliably get what they deserve.

The system is fake, to state the obvious. For one thing, because the qualities that make one a perfect student are themselves not evenly distributed from equal starting points; rather they’re a function of family background, class status, home town, gender, race… The response to her letter read in part: “Gender does play a role and it is simply more competitive for young women at most places these days.” I wasn’t aware of that but I guess it’s not surprising, given statistics that more women than men are going to college.

But these kinds of systematic biases are relatively minor flaws in the meritocracy compared to its real problem, which is that sometimes it just doesn’t produce the reliable result one expected, sometimes it doesn’t pick people who seem to be the best, sometimes its results are shocking, random, arbitrary. This arbitrariness is understood by the people making the choices between applicants, I think, but is viscerally felt much more by the system’s rejects.

One feels sorry for the daughter, or at least for her parent, whose fantasies of vicarious success seem to be developed to a high degree. It doesn’t seem to occur to people like these to long for a world where higher education wasn’t organized as a massive meritocracy, where the education was more even in quality across different institutions, where a few overvalued elite institutions (and I should know, having gone to two of them now) get more credit than they deserve. There seems to be no chance of a political analysis of class reproduction occurring in this situation. Ultimately, it’s not just the daughter’s rejection that’s shatteringly arbitrary, it’s the whole system of higher education that comes to appear like a castle in the clouds, a fantasy world of success more longed for than understood.

It’s quite a long piece, this confession. But it has a recurring image that seems deeply suggestive: the male husband polishing the woman president’s shoes.

If they could see me now. I am sitting on the floor of the president’s house, polishing the president’s shoes for her. My wife is now a lot busier than I am, and has a sizeable staff. Her importance on and off campus is a lot greater than mine, so I suppose it makes sense that I polish the presidential shoes – which are smaller and easier to polish than my own shoes (which rarely need to be shiny). I have sometimes seen people polish the shoes of other people, but only when they were paid for it. And the polishers were always male, as were the polishees. Shoe-polishing used to occur in railroad stations, or in old-fashioned barber shops that were bastions of maleness – quiet places, with discreet sounds of snipping and stropping of razors, with a ballgame on the radio, and smells of witch hazel, shaving lather, and shoe polish. So here I sit polishing a woman’s shoes and not even getting paid for it.

So when he polishes shoes, it seems, he finds himself in a moment of gendered abjection. He’s down on the floor, not even getting paid, polishing shoes which are symbols of power and sometimes sexuality and are themselves down on the ground, protecting the foot from the grime of the world; he’s in a position of no importance on campus so it’s pragmatically sensible for him to devote his time to polishing the shoes, for him to be doing this traditionally feminine work of the care of the working spouse’s appearance.

There’s something poignant about the fact that pragmatically what the guy has to do is hard for him and takes re-learning and is symbolically dissonant for him. The echoes of his 50s upbringing are loud, as if he’s judging his life against the gender norms of the past even as he knows the world has changed, gender norms have blurred, roles have reversed. Pragmatically, he feels like he’s just not completely ready for the task of taking care of the household while his wife works long presidential days. He seems happiest when he gets to take care of the car, when he drives his wife around, when he cooks dinner.

As boys, most men of my generation never learned to do “girl things”. As a consequence we are not very good at the practical or aesthetic details of maintaining an elegant home, or paying attention to all the important minutiae that underlie the public lives of presidents and their spouses. Things like making sure the silver is polished, as well as the shoes, and checking that napkins and table cloths are ironed and matching. Before her dinner parties I can recall my Mum putting out ashtrays and placing cigarettes in elegant silver receptacles from which smokers (a majority back in those days) would extract their smokes. The most she expected me to do was tidy up my own room. Surveys have shown that the only task husbands do almost universally is taking out the trash. In recent decades some of us also learned to do cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the kids, etc., but we reminded many people of the chimpanzee who typed out a novel — nobody expected us to do such things well, and it was remarkable if we could do them at all.

And he seems sad that some things he might be doing – making the house elegant, polishing the silver, doing the ashtrays – are things that boys just weren’t taught. Masculinity here is a practical predicament. Masculinity here is not just a gender identity but a set of quotidian competences and another set of lacking competences, of practical incapacities. Gender as point of pride, as product of socialization, as disability, as occasion for solidarity with other guys who like to work on cars. Gender would seem to be a contradictory situation that causes many things to happen at once. He seems half sad that he can’t do some things and half accepting, with an almost traumatized calmness, that he probably won’t do and wouldn’t entirely be expected to do women’s work that still, in the crevices of the language of this text, seems to appear to him as abject.

Shining shoes, for example. Someone in the comments section of the article asked if she (I think she) could drop hers off outside his office door. But I think she was kidding.

Incidentally, if you count, this comes to 18 males (prof included) and 23 females (TA included), i.e., 44% male and 56% female. The “Me” is yours truly, and the “?” is someone who may or may not have been sitting across from me, but was masked, in any event, by someone else’s head. In any event, the “objective” gender balance isn’t that far from even.

We see here, first and foremost, a striking emergence of same-sex spatial blocs (colored lavender): a large male block is in the bottom right corner, while a large female bloc is in the upper left. Elsewhere in the room, the seating was more mixed by gender.

Why might we see this pattern? Is it because certain academics simply prefer to sit beside people of the same sex? Surely many academics are conscious of gender and sexuality in public settings, and in choosing who to associate with among strangers. This was the first day of class, after all.

Or we could consider a more plausible hypothesis: does this pattern emerge because academics sit near people they know or are friends with? Certainly, when I enter a public space, I try to sit with my friends, and in this case I actually came in with friends. On this hypothesis, we might observe gendered spatial arrangement as a result of certain academics preferentially developing same-sex friendships. Such a pattern has been around in anthro grad school since the 60s and 70s, according to Susan Philips, and I think it continues today, insofar as many academic friendships are shaped by long-lasting sexual competition or collaboration, difference or solidarity, sexual desire or disinterest…

Also, we have to consider the extent to which gender is merely the expression of other forms of social organization. In this room there was a very salient, collectively recognized difference between the Anthropology Department doctoral students and the Social Science Master’s students (MAPSS). For instance, the bloc of males in the bottom right was all doctoral students, if I recall correctly. We can’t really analyze this here, for lack of knowledge of prior relationships in the room, but it’s interesting that space gets structured into blocs without anyone having a conscious will to create such structures. That a general spatial organization can emerge from a number of little personal decisions about who to be proximate with.

Gender in this space did not seem difficult to decode, on a crude level. I read it off from footware, from hats, from coats, from the length and shape of their hair, the tone and pitch of their voices. People seemed content to perform their genders in unambiguous fashion. I should emphasize: I’m not saying that “M” or “F” exhausts what there is to say about gender; it’s a crude and simplistic categorization and it needs to be generally resisted. But the sad fact is: this crude binary categorization captures real patterns in the social world.

For instance: the symbolically central space, of course, was occupied by the male professor, the “head” of the table (colored green). In an odd visual reflection of this spatialization of male authority, the foot of the table was occupied by a male student too. That guy happens to be a friend of mine, and he has long had a habit of sitting in that seat in this particular room. I don’t know if gender has much to do with that habit.

Perhaps, then, there’s no gendered pattern to read in this reflection, just contingency into which observers can project their own predetermined symbolic structures; perhaps it’s a mistake to read symbolic structure directly out of the empirical circumstances, as I’m doing; perhaps the real gendered dynamics of the room have little to do with the seating chart. Perhaps I’m ascribing structure that is meaningless to the participants (except me). Certainly, it would be hard to detect a direct link between participants’ genders and the academic conversation that subsequently took place.

The problem with analyzing gender in academia is an inescapable tension between gender as a hermeneutic that one uses to ascribe order to an indeterminate social situation, and gender as a deep structure that brings prior order to the world in unconscious and unnoticeable ways. Gender is a thing one invokes contingently, perhaps wrongly, in making sense of the social world; but it’s simultaneously what determines and regulates that world prior to anyone’s perception or action.

Feeling silly and reflexive, I said at the beginning of class when we went around: “I work on anthropology of universities. This week I’m especially interested in the gendered organization of academic discourse.”

People laughed.

Apparently the thought of social determination and gender provokes laughter. The only question is: is it the laughter of recognition or the laughter of disavowal?

But to avoid making claims based purely on the hazardous results of personal experience, let me report the following.

Today I was in the first meeting of a seminar, an anthropology seminar on biopower, taught by a woman professor who’s deeply interested in Foucault and the way that social domination works through regimes of knowledge and that social orders are discursively constituted. She told us about the syllabus and then we read two articles in class, discussing each in turn, one by Habermas, one by Foucault. She led discussion quite actively, summarizing students’ comments and proposing new questions to the room at large, generally speaking herself before and after each student remark.

Struck by the initial masculine domination of the conversation, which began when we started to discuss Habermas, I began to take notes on the gender distribution of student speakers in the seminar. It was a very large seminar, 35 people or so; unfortunately I don’t know the gender ratio in the room, but my guess would be that there were somewhat more females than males. A sequence of the (apparent) genders of speakers runs as follows, in the order in which they spoke:

First article:
M (F*) M M M M F** M M F M F F F

Second article:
M F M F F M M F F F F M F F F M F

* First female speaker laughed at a certain point in the discussion, and the teacher asked her if she wanted to say something, but she declined.

** The second female speaker, and the first female speaker to make a substantial comment, was responding to a question that happened to be about Habermas’s view of feminism as a social movement. It struck me as either a depressing irony, or else an even more depressing symptom of what topics women felt more empowered to address, that the first woman speaker chose to speak on a topic specifically dealing with the women’s movement.

Brief analysis: In the discussion of the first article, there are 8 male and 5 female speakers (not counting the first, declined female utterance), the male speakers entirely dominating the beginning of discussion and the female speakers only entering gradually into classroom discourse. In the second discussion, there are 6 male and 11 female speakers, and the gender distribution over time is much more even, although again the male speakers are very slightly clustered towards the beginning. However, while male speakers outnumber female speakers in the first conversation, female speakers drastically outnumber male speakers in the second instance.

So it certainly isn’t the case that this was a totally male-dominated discussion. In fact, of 30 turns at talk (ignoring F* because it was a declined turn, and some other peripheral utterances — jokes and interjections — which I didn’t record), 14 were by males, i.e., 46.6%.But it’s really unlikely that, in a conversation where males are talking about half the time, they’re going to randomly happen to make the first five consecutive comments. In fact, the probability of that happening randomly, if gender isn’t a factor, is only 2.1%.

So, voilà, debatable but suggestive statistical evidence that gender affects turn sequencing in academic seminar conversations. A friend of mine suggests that a much larger dataset for this research might be the lecture recordings for MIT’s Open Courseware. I normally have no inclination (and certainly have no training) in quantitative research, but if anyone wants to collaborate…

and I should be commenting on the gendered phenomenology and experience of these conversations, and on reasons why people talk when they talk. thoughts on that?