Sometime in 2019, I noticed that my former teacher, Lauren Berlant, had changed their pronoun to they. They’re gone now, and the work of mourning is ongoing. Yet it seems to me that the most optimistic thing we can do is to keep learning from their work, their thought.

This might be awkward, since our relations to our teachers are so often enigmatic and awkward. Yet they can also sometimes be transformative and life-sustaining. Once, in a rare autobiographical moment, Berlant evoked the power of teachers to hold us together when we’re not really OK:

As though they knew what it was like to be me in my family, my teachers, and the world of school and work they sustained, made my life possible. I do not know whether I expected it, or demanded it, or even whether they knew what they were doing, or whether I deserved it.^[1]

I do not know whether they knew what they were doing: we can all say this of our teachers, even if they made our lives possible. I’m not sure exactly what Berlant meant by adopting they, late in life. I do know, though, that Berlant’s life was organized by a long-term disidentification with gender and femininity. As a genderqueer person, I felt a sudden kinship with their pronoun choice, an impersonal joy in finding myself together in the same gesture as my teacher. This joy does not imply any deep mutual understanding or transcendence of the structural distance that always separated us. But it might make space for thought. And what I want to suggest here is that Berlant’s embrace of they was not merely a personal identification. Rather, it is a clue to their larger theory of subjectivity in general.^[2] It sheds light on their theoretical project and its grounding in life and history.

(Caveat lector: What follows is a bit long and somewhat theoretical.)

A real flower child

By the time I met them, Lauren Berlant was an illustrious and contradictory figure in the academic world. They were on the far left at a fundamentally conservative institution, the University of Chicago. They possessed many kinds of capital and openly supported the graduate student labor union. They sympathized with anarchism while occupying a professorial chair named after George M. Pullman — Pullman being famous for owning a railroad company town where, in 1894, striking workers were shot by federal troops. No wonder, perhaps, that Berlant felt profoundly alienated by the university where they worked, while being in some ways deeply ensconced there. Ninety years after the Pullman strike, Berlant was hired — at age 26 or 27 — as an assistant professor. By age 35, Berlant was already writing about how disappointed they were with the possibilities for radical, progressive, or left action at the university. Their efforts at feminist utopianism in turn had attracted derision. “You’re being characterized all over as ’68, a real flower child,” Berlant reported hearing from a colleague in those days, the early 1990s.^[3]

Where did Lauren Berlant come from? Berlant’s own coming of age seems to have been traumatic and utopian, marked by multiple forms of abandonment and awkward intermediacy (particularly in social class terms), and by attempts both to escape from life and to reattach to it. “I was eleven in 1968,” they commented, “and a precocious—wild—eleven… And so I went to a commune when I was fifteen, I went to rallies, I hated Nixon appropriately, and I had socialist proletarian grandparents on one side of the family.”^[4] By the time Berlant graduated from college — the countercultural Oberlin in the late 1970s — they were already an experienced feminist teacher. But once they began graduate school, the utopian impulses may have proved a mixed blessing. Berlant has described their graduate education at Cornell University in the 1980s as a scene of trying to survive in a pretentious culture of “high theory.”

Everything was extremely poststructural at Cornell, and besides not having a Continental philosophical background—which I quickly had to cultivate—I was also a Marxist and a feminist. I didn’t think that these should be deemed vulgar compared to what was deemed high theory.^[5]

Some people find stability in defining themselves as feminists or Marxists, but for Berlant, while these identities offered space for thinking, they also seem to have conferred a risk of stigma and exclusion. Berlant recalled graduate school as a moment of being socially unrecognizable, “quite blundery and Martian-like from the perspective of my colleagues as well as myself,” and of “struggling terribly, partly because I felt stupid all the time, as usual, and partly because at that time there was very little feminism for graduate students in the English department.”^[6] A patriarchal institutional culture can readily produce both an organized absence of feminism and a sexist climate of representing illegible outsiders as “stupid” inferiors. Berlant’s rightful rejoinder to this was that there’s nothing vulgar or unintelligent about feminism.

Yet Berlant’s feminist critique, and their personal struggles against illegibility and marginalization, did not culminate in radical or melodramatic rejections of poststructuralist theory either. It all led into something more nonbinary; and yet the nonbinary for Berlant has never been a simple negation of binaries. Instead it is a way of opening space within, outside and alongside them, a way of holding incompatible things together without subsuming them into a definite theory, a single genre, or a stable affective style.^[7] Even after Berlant started using “they” pronouns, they also kept “she” pronouns. I think they saw the pronouns as optimistic invitations, not fixed identity markers. In Berlant’s thought, too, the nonbinary is a conceptual gesture, not an organized object. This gesture consists of a radical affirmation of multiplicity.^[8] Multiplicity pervades Berlant’s analysis of subjects and their subjectivities — an analysis which largely eschews conventional psychology in favor of exploring “the multiple tethers of the subject to the world.”^[9]

What, then, is Berlant’s account of how we are tethered to the world?

Subjectivity is multiple

Berlant did not prefer the general to the particular, and they did not set out to formulate a general theory of subjectivity. On the contrary, they participated in a version of queer theory where “theory… has meant unsettlement rather than systematization.”^[10] Nevertheless, when I sat down to read Berlant’s work last year, certain common observations about subjectivity did become clear to me. Let me suggest a provisional list of Berlant’s conceptual axioms, even if these are heuristics, not absolutes.

1. Subjectivity is multiple. It’s so easy to say this, and yet so hard to think it all the way through. The subject’s multiplicity means many things. It means that there is never just one kind of social subject; there are always many kinds of subjects. It means there is never one thing going on within us, always lots happening. “I would foreground non-coherence as a principle of being rather than a cumulative effect of serial finitude,” Berlant says, “I never thought that the subject ought to be seen as in one state.”^[11] It means we are always in multiple relationships (of kinship, sex, school, work, fantasy, etc), never just one primary relationship (it’s not all Oedipal triangles). Our many relationships each emerge, overdetermined, from many different histories. We also have many desires, and many desires about our desires, and many desires not to desire. We have many stories and theories about ourselves, and many relations to these stories. Subjectivity is soothing and it’s vertigo: it proliferates scales and modes of being, oscillating between the abstract and the concrete, the social and the affective, the big deals and the little nothings that are all wrapped together in a life.^[12]

2. Subjectivity is radically historical. Such a view has been a hallmark of critical theory since Marx, at least. Berlant particularly insists, following Foucault, that what is historical is not just identities and subject positions, but also all the terms and processes of our affective existences. Thus one of the great moments in Berlant’s work is the analysis of “trauma” as an emergent moment in the history of late capitalist public subjectivity, an analysis which in no way denies the reality of trauma and social violence, but which insists that the genres of traumatic expression have their own history.^[13]

3. Subjectivity is conventional. To be a subject, then, is to inhabit terms of subjectivity that come to us from outside, and we can call these terms conventions. But characteristically, Berlant insists that interpellation and conventionality are not only negative processes. Rather, they organize our optimism: “To love conventionality is not only to love something that constrains someone or some condition of possibility: it is another way of talking about negotiating belonging to a world.”^[14] Thus it is not necessarily bad to be conventional, and we cannot really avoid it anyway. Being a person implies inhabiting genres of living and being that capture our attachments, or that teach us what attachment means in the first place. Conventions are not only fetters; they are a space of fantasy and pedagogy.

4. Subjectivity is worldly and permeable. Berlant takes our inner lives very seriously; like a novelist or a therapist, they believe in the complexity of our psyches, of our moods and affects, defenses and boundaries. But they also take seriously our subjective locations within histories, scenes, relationships, and social formations. As they put it, subjectivity is always subject to “the overdetermining work of ideology, atmosphere, the unconscious, distraction, ambivalence, attention—in short, the many ways the subject takes up a position in any episode and in the world.”^[15] This is a materialism in several senses. It acknowledges the material impact of feelings and shared moods. It also chronicles the material impacts of systems of cultural production, economic precarity, vulnerability and violence.

5. Subjectivity is a survivor. The subject gets by. Even when we are hit and kissed and damaged and sickened and disappointed and scared and in love and horribly broken, we might still find new places to turn, or even find comfort in our own stuckness. And the very existence of predictability can be a pleasure; on Berlant’s view, a pleasure is simply “a repetition that makes a form, not necessarily something that feels good.”^[16] There is a ruthless practicality about the subject, trying to get by in the face of a bad world. This practicality is nevertheless not the essence of the subject either; it is just one more pattern one might notice about people.

6. Subjectivity is wishful. It is a den of fantasies. It is not always centered on our “lived experience” or our “ordinariness.” It is genuinely escapist, whatever content it might give to its escapes. Ironically, this also means that fantasy makes lived relationships more manageable: “Without fantasy… there would be no way to move through the uneven field of our ambivalent attachments to our sustaining objects.”^[17] Since desires are multiple, we frequently find that we want a thing and its opposite, or we want something that interferes with what we also want. This interference might not be a problem; Berlant repeatedly cites the Freudian dictum that “there is no negative in the unconscious.” Nevertheless, our wishfulness or fantasy life might threaten our own wish for coherence or our relations with others; just as we are often trying to catch up with others, so too are we stuck trying to catch up with our fantasies.

7. Subjectivity is rhythmic. Rhythm organizes what is overwhelming in our lives; it helps manage our fantasies and contradictions. Thus we can “be ourselves” at one moment and radically out of character the next, and the rhythm of these moments can prevent their interference from being destructive. Sometimes bad rhythms or the breakdown of rhythm do become a problem; but the impact of a rhythmic disturbance is something we can negotiate with, not something that is given all in advance. It is perhaps salient that one of Berlant’s chief instruments of childhood optimism was a rhythm instrument (the guitar).^[18] The notion of rhythm comes to orient Berlant’s theory of form, where we attune ourselves to rhythms and patterns that may or may not have any names, genres, or regulatory apparatuses yet. (A genre is an institutionalized rhythm.)

8. Subjectivity is affirmative. This certainly does not mean it is not full of negation, both in the aggressive will-to-destruction-and-incoherence sense^[19], and in the sense of being subject to oppression and suffering. Still, “any object of optimism promises to guarantee the endurance of something, the survival of something, the flourishing of something, and above all the protection of the desire that made this object or scene powerful enough to have magnetized an attachment to it.”^[20] Desire might be destabilizing or destructive in practice, but the form of it always has a sort of affirmative, optimistic force in the world.

9. Subjectivity is projective and object-oriented. This means that all our relationships constitute their objects. All subjectivity veers towards fetish subjectivity: “The fetish reproduces the general structure of desire, which is an activity that aims at repeating pleasure by finding substitutes for a lost or unstable object.”^[21] Nevertheless, “objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.”^[22] Thus all objects are also placeholders for other things. Every attachment is also a reference to an earlier attachment; every scene is derivative of other scenes; nothing in social life is entirely sui generis. These references can become quite abstract too, since many of our desires are for very abstract things. Sometimes what we like in an object is that it represents the very existence of possibility itself or even the possibility of transformation.

10. Subjectivity is impersonal. This means at least three things for Berlant. 1) We are never seen fully by others; they are always projecting so much onto us that, ultimately, they see what they arrange to see. Thus, whether I am being subjected to “violence” or “love” from others, it “isn’t about me.”^[23] 2) What’s personal about us, in an emotionally-authentic-and-vulnerable sense of the personal, is at most only one part of our lives. We also contain impersonal multitudes: we can be robots of convention, agents of discipline, radical interruptors of our own personal narratives, bewildered sleepwalkers, and so on. 3) Finally, our very notions of what is “personal” are themselves the result of genre conventions.^[24]

11. Subjectivity is incoherent. This follows from its being multiple and having multiple desires. It follows from its being deeply personal, and also deeply not. Subjectivity’s incoherence involves contradictions, tensions and antagonisms. But the impact of its incoherence is an empirical question. Our antagonisms might or might not be experienced as conflicts or dramas. They might just be experienced as alternative “positions” that we can take up one after the other in our fantasies. “The scenic form of fantasy enables the desiring subject to produce a series of interpretations that do not have to cohere as a narrative.”^[25] By removing the assumption of radical coherence or of radical incoherence in the subject, we can then be more curious about when coherence does or not happen, and when this does or does not pose problems.

12. Subjectivity is ambivalent.^[26] Ambivalence is an affective corollary of incoherence: ambivalence is how our incoherence is lived. On Berlant’s view, ambivalence is “an inevitable condition of intimate attachment.”^[27] As such, it is often unfairly stigmatized. Ambivalence means in part that our feelings are always plural and that we are always partly open to feeling incompatible feelings. We are open to affective flows that might push us away from the positions we thought we inhabited. The clichéd view about ambivalence is that it is a genre of inner drama, such as a grandiose struggle between two opposing poles, love and hate. But Berlant does not see ambivalence as having a fixed plot, or even any resolution other than provisional. Rather, ambivalence is something more nonbinary: it is the prerequisite of our existing in multiple ways in the world. Nor is it a purely passive state; it is a site of action, whether conscious or unconscious, and perhaps even “a pleasure in its own right.”^[28] At one point Berlant suggests evocatively that “ambivalence is a kind of temporalized bargaining.”^[29]

I might emphasize here that a nonbinary theory of the subject is not the same as a theory of nonbinary subjects. Berlant has not to my knowledge specifically analyzed nonbinary gender subjectivity. Rather, what is nonbinary about Berlant’s approach to subjectivity is its rigorous intellectual refusal of dualisms, schematisms, simplifications and closures. It is a radical affirmation that everything that is, is also something else — and thus that everything is enigmatic. Even “the nonbinary” is multiple, in the end. In Berlant’s work, the nonbinary might describe an unconscious desire (to refuse and refashion femininity, for instance); a conceptual commitment (to multiplicity); and a structure of feeling (we feel many things at once). Was this somewhat effervescent approach to thought not influenced by the social and intellectual life of the 1960s and 1970s, and their famously affirmative “philosophies of desire”? Perhaps, but Berlant’s thought always has a dialectical moment too, a moment of negation and critical ricochet. Sometimes I think one can read Berlant as trying to create a dialectics without binaries, a dialectical writing that stays true to immanence, historicity and femininity. Where conventional Marxist dialecticians have tended to privilege production, energy and motion, Berlant was equally interested in reproduction, exhaustion and stuckness.

Fort-da with the dialectic, or supervalent thought

Over the years Berlant came to identify less as a Marxist than, more broadly, as a “materialist.” They quit their campus Marxist Theory Workshop in 1985, switching their focus to feminist and queer studies, and later to affect studies. There was surely a gender politics in this: they tended to avoid masculinist critical theory culture, in its boys’ club version. Nevertheless, like the critical theory tradition, Berlant’s writing always aims to produce thought that is radically immanent to a brutal and inconsistent world. Berlant describes their project at one point as “the activity of being reflexive about a contemporary historicity as one lives it”^[30]; they also cite a “desire to angle knowledge toward and from the places where it is (and we are) impossible.”^[31] Such a project has no definite genre and no plot.

But this form of thought might still have its organizing images. Berlant at one point anchored their intellectual work around something called supervalent thought, which was also the title of their blog. They explained:

A supervalent thought is a thought whose meaning resides not only in its explicit phrasing, but in the atmosphere of intensity it releases that points beyond the phrase, to domains of the unsaid. It’s a pressure. A supervalent thought produces an atmosphere, disturbs modes of apprehension, consciousness, and experience. It wedges things while inducing leaking. It’s a resource and a threat.

It’s a concept from Freud’s Dora. Freud uses it to describe an expressed thought (I don’t love you) that covers up a concealed thought that is its opposite (I love you). But the spirit of the concept is that in the penumbra an ideation, a sensed concept, generates all kinds of contradictions that can be magnetized to induce an impact beyond what’s explicit or what’s normative.^[32]

A supervalent thought is too multiplicitous, too heavily charged, too overflowing and too resonant to pin itself down in any single dialectical drama. In a supervalent thought, the contradictions aren’t gone; they are everywhere. And there is no hope of finding a single driving logic in things or in thoughts. The large “penumbra” of a thought does not necessarily point us towards a Hegelian Absolute or any definite horizon. Rather, it stirs things up, “disturbing” us, shaking us out of our norms or perceptual habits, changing our space of possibilities without imposing a telos. The effervescence of supervalent writing might mirror the incoherence of the world in which we are writing. While much dialectical writing seems to aspire to sovereignty over its object, in supervalent thought we are always outmatched by the multiplicitous force of the unconscious. Supervalent thought might carry us away in spite of ourselves, inducing a sense of nonsovereignty in our thinking.

Still, supervalent thought needs anchors, stock images and points of departure. One of Berlant’s recurrent models for nonbinary subjectivity was the famous scene of fort-da recounted by Freud. Fort-da, as Freud reports, is a game invented by a bourgeois German child around the First World War. In the game, a small child copes with his mother’s periodic absences by banishing and then unbanishing his toys. Frequently throwing a toy away into the corner, he shouts “Fort” (German for gone). Occasionally, he also brings the toy back, shouting “da” (there). Freud speculates that this game helped the child find agency in a situation that he experienced as passivity (since he was powerless to prevent his mother’s absences), adding this may also have constituted a substitute for revenge on the beloved object (the mother).

In Cruel Optimism, Berlant approaches fort-da as a way of thinking about how we spend our lives oscillating between different subjective stances.

The child’s “loss” and “recovery” of the top is read generally as the bargaining any subject does to retain a notion that her or his intelligibility or continuity in the world is a function of her or his will. However, the capacity of the ego to respond to contingency via a principle of form should not imply that the subject “really” is contingent and only masterful in a compensatory way. Each position, repeated countless times, is its own pleasure, and the playing child is also increasing his capacity to be in the room with myriad potentialities.^[33]

In other words, fort-da is not only a pathetic Freudian symptom that compensates for the pain of having an absent mother. Rather, it illustrates Berlant’s basic views about the ways that subjectivity isn’t binary. What fort-da suggests, at its most basic, is that to be a subject is to be ambivalent about the object. (Anything, incidentally, can become an object to a subject — our “object” in psychoanalytic jargon could be a parent, a toy, an institution, a relationship, etc.) And we are not fixed in one specific subject position; rather, our subjectivity comes into being as a motion across multiple stances. We cling to our object and we throw it away; we are lost children and vengeful autocrats; we are intrinsically multiple creatures. The game of fort-da, on Berlant’s first reading, is a scene of training in multiplicity — a way in which we learn the pleasure of changing positions, and a way of increasing our tolerance for this stance-changing.

A few years later in Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant comes to question whether the game should be seen as “a form” at all, in any singular sense. They propose instead that it might be read as an experimental space where multiple things are happening at once.

Although the child’s play with a top that he loses and repossesses repeatedly is widely read as a scene of play as mastery over loss, why not read it as a scene defined by a play with multiple consequences and risks—for example, the risks of possessing, ambivalence, being in control, being out of control, being alienated or dissociated, and/or the pleasures of cycling through these? Why not read the child’s play as an experiment in potential form that does not seek out a form? Is it not possible that recontextualizing a problem shifts its conditions of extension even if one of its persistent conditions is its negativity?^[34]

On this second, more expansive reading, fort-da is a scene where we are inventing new practices to process our multiple affects and desires. The Berlantian thought that emerges from fort-da is that we are always responding to ambivalence with intensive bargaining, which becomes the ordinary praxis, in effect, that emerges from supervalent thought. In our everyday scenes of existence, whatever the object of our present desire might be, we are always trying to calibrate our relations to it, trying to make sure we have the right amount of it, but not too much. As Berlant insists, it is so easy to be either overwhelmed or abandoned by one’s object, and so hard to make sure that one’s subjective calibrations are not over-corrections that yet again miss the mark. In short, Fort-da is how people always are with objects and other people, and all thoughts are potentially supervalent.

If one reads across Berlant’s work, it is striking how much it is permeated by people’s ongoing need to bargain with the world.

Even though I wish to remain myself, I may want also to experience the discomposure of intimate relationality, yet want only the discomposure I can imagine, plus a little of the right kind extra, and how can I bear the risk of experiencing the anything that might be beyond? How can I bear not seeking it?^[35]

Or earlier:

Think of the frequent moments in the life of a relationship when you experience frustrated sovereignty, needing to feel free to be vague, wrong, opaque, distracted, withholding, or irresponsible at the same time as you need your intimate to remain open, unsuspicious, clear, and caring, as well as alive with the capacity to surprise you (but not too much!). Love demands an imbalancing act.^[36]

For Berlant, almost all subjectivity is this kind of Goldilocks subjectivity — suspended between too much and not enough of whatever our desire might seek. It is nevertheless dialectical in the sense that it is not trapped in a closed oscillation. It is reflexive and immanent thinking: it takes us someplace, it becomes historical, it gets us through life. Or indeed, it might make life itself into the object on which one’s ambivalence is enacted or avenged.

Berlant divulges (in a rare moment of linear autobiography) that they had done fort-da with their life, describing their experience in Oberlin College.

I was very ill while I was there with anorexia which stemmed from a lot of things, including poverty and rape, and I returned to the game of fort-da with my own existence. I was supporting myself—I put myself through college—and it was all very insecure.^[37]

Is it any wonder that later in life Berlant began to theorize precarity, having lived through it? And what then, what comes after precarity? What happens after you wear yourself out with ambivalence, with fort-da, with relentlessly tracking the environment for new cues, with a frenzy of intellection? Since Adorno at least, dialecticians have no longer known where we were going. For Berlant, the utopian often still lingers as a distant horizon, as something much more fragmentary than The Revolution, as an unreachable object of desire. Supervalent thought leads us in Berlant’s work to one of its blind spots: to exhaustion. One might then ask: who is the subject of exhaustion in an exhausted world? The subject of exhaustion is the subject of reproduction. A subject with a gender.

The nonbinary, the feminine

This brings up a seemingly straightforward question: who is the subject of a Berlantian theory of the subject? The question seems to have a clear general answer: women. Berlant’s work is predominantly about women’s culture and writing, and this feminist methodological choice has a powerful effect. With an eloquent and forceful silence, it displaces men from their historical position as the default subjects and objects of critical inquiry. Nevertheless, Berlant’s work does not idealize women, nor construe their femininity as a singular form. Instead, Berlant is deeply committed to the view that “women” is a historical field without a timeless unity. “Feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence,” Berlant wrote back in 1988. “What we share is a history of oppression by patriarchy in its various alliances with other hegemonic economic, state, racial, and religious practices; what we do not share is our relation to these systems of oppression.”^[38] Berlant then argued that when we refuse to organize feminism around a universal subject of women, it becomes possible to comprehend “the overdetermined and incoherent activity that passes for, or simulates, something like the essence of woman”^[39] (my emphasis).

In 2021, it may be easier to imagine feminism without a universal subject of women than it was in 1988. But I must say, in the face of a new essentialism that pervades many contemporary trans and nonbinary communities — one that sometimes manages to picture even nonbinary gender as an alternative essence of self — it is still powerful to argue that womanhood is already in itself a set of incoherent practices passing as an essence.^[40] “Passing” in trans vernacular is understood as the process of becoming recognizable as a coherent bearer of a binary gender category.^[41] The heterotopian process of passing expresses an entirely understandable longing to dodge symbolic violence, to slip under hegemony’s radar, and to be welcomed warmly by the world. But in its very framing (passing or not), it also tends to construct cishet hegemony itself as much more coherent than it ever is. Whence the continued radicality of Berlant’s early view: that cis women too are only passing as women.

What does this passing look like in practice? Berlant approaches gender in the first instance as a condition of ordinary subjectivity, and unsurprisingly, it turns out that people really like to play fort-da with gender. Berlant’s work is not remarkably sanguine about our collective capacities to transform gender norms, but it is quite optimistic about the clandestine ways that gender enables us to transform, escape and sustain ourselves. Thus Berlant suggests at one point that “gender categories are best seen as spaces of transformation, nodal points that are supposed to pro­duce general social intelligibility while encrusted with constantly chang­ing noncoherent meanings.”^[42] As Berlant’s subsequent work has explored the “overdetermined and incoherent activity” called femininity, it seems to me that the feminine has also led into something nonbinary.

On one level, the nonbinary in Berlant’s analysis of women is purely an emergent rhythm. It is immanent in the patterns of women’s subjectivity. The feminine for Berlant is a space of multiplicity and ambivalence, even if it is permeated by regulatory ideals, foundational fantasies, and aspirations to simplicity. It includes attachments and revulsions, exploitations and egalitarianisms, potential for excess and potential for insufficiency, a permanent flux and a constant repetition. To patriarchal eyes, femininity’s multiplicity has sometimes appeared to be a fatal incoherence, but we could just as well call it ordinary being in the world. In The Female Complaint (2008), Berlant derives a preliminary account of this incoherence from a brief reading of Lydia Davis.

“Generally, the women in [Davis’ book] Almost No Memory lament [their] cramped existence, turning into cedar trees that ‘group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind’; fulfilling their femininity by being reactive to men and children; being emotionally central to intimates while querying the value of the bargains they’ve struck with these ongoing intimacies. Their main fascination is in watching themselves shuttle between emotional generosity and resentment at the demands for emotional service by children and lovers to whom they are attached” (17).

Women’s lives here are cramped because they are dominated by the unworkable contradictions of their seemingly endless emotional labor. This labor is not entirely without symbolic benefits, since it provides the “fulfillment” of being one’s gender role, the slow drips of recognition from the men and children whom one tends, and perhaps even the sheer pleasure (“the sensual spectacle,” 19) of seeing one’s care labor keep the world in motion. Nevertheless, these benefits are not enough to provide stability. The Others only take and never give, or not enough: “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.”^[43] The multiple pressures are overwhelming. The emotional skills that make femininity so rewarding can also sensitize you to everything that is untenable about life in an oppressive system. But even the contradictions of femininity can be partly managed by convention.

The analysis continues: “She feels a failure not because she has not developed emotional competence but because she has overdeveloped it… she keeps from falling apart by shifting between hypervigilance and inattention. This enables her to remain close not to her lover but to the situation of love and the promise of exchange… Over and over in Davis’s work, a woman’s self-consciously writerly eloquence and keen insight lead to descriptions of what does not change despite the woman’s frantic aspirational activity toward making emotional simultaneity… Davis’s point is to show that somehow the accumulation of knowledge leads to an unraveling for the writer/speaker and yet this unraveling, which ought to produce madness, is actually ordinary feminine consciousness. It turns out that even unraveling has its genres” (18).

The unraveling of femininity can thus become a space where we become nonbinary. The capacity to exist in a nonbinary way — to be one thing and also another, to cope with multiplicity more or less gracefully, to process ceaseless demands from the Other while not collapsing, to feel generosity and resentment simultaneously, or conversely to feel affirmed by one’s seeming captivity to the Other — all this is arguably a standard feminine capacity. And femininity, like every gender, is a holding environment: a cultural form that can absorb all kinds of things, indeed a cultural form (more than any other) charged with absorbing all kinds of things. So becoming unraveled or nonbinary (not that these are the same) does not necessarily become an exit from a binary gender location. On the contrary, femininity can readily absorb the unraveling of its own subjects.

But what do people do when they become conscious of the ways that their normativity is a dumpster fire, their gender constituted by unraveling, their dignity tantamount to their capacity to endure structural degradation? Commonly, such subjects turn to other women, who might at least recognize the pain of systematic misrecognition and disrespect. Yet this turn to women’s public spheres might yet again cause you to get enlisted in a type; to experience ambivalence about the conventions of femininity; and to get caught in new forms of repetition. “The circularity of the feminine project will not escape you, therefore: it is a perfect form, a sphere infused with activities of ongoing circuits of attachment that can at the same time look like and feel like a zero” (20). Of course, feeling like a zero, in Berlantian terms, might start to become a familiar consolation. “The sense of treading water or drowning in the present can also mark the pleasure and even the comfort one might derive from the most painful repetition” (244).

Berlant is extremely generous, although necessarily ambivalent, towards women’s conventional practices of solidarity and conviviality. They frequently draw a contrast between feminism and conventional women’s culture, but rather than presuming that the former is a virtuous improvement over the latter, Berlant’s research points to feminism’s limits as an existential rubric. They eventually conclude that “feminism has been a much better resource for critique than for providing accounts of how to live amid affective uncertainty, ambivalence, and incoherence” (234) — a narrative project that I think seems urgent to Berlant, both personally and theoretically. The “female complaint” genres that so interested Berlant are one major way in which conventional women’s culture facilitates survival, by providing categories and narratives that help process the ambivalence of love, care work, and structural subordination. Yet there is no definitive escape from type there, just a refiguring of femininity that makes its ambivalence more bearable.

Misrecognition is an optimism

Berlant’s work is not a new theory of radical politics. On the contrary, it has to be read as a theory of how any radicalism would be radically incomplete without an account of feminity, of reproduction, and of life outside the political. And for those of us who live most of our lives in the capitalist world system, it answers a different question: about how to survive emotionally in the bad world where we spend most of our time. Berlant has occasionally suggested that the core message of U.S. popular culture is “You’re not alone.” One wonders if there is something of a core message in Berlant’s work too. If there were, it might seem at first to be “I’m OK.”^[44] No matter how bad it gets, on Berlant’s view, there is an optimism always implicit in our tendency to develop patterns, rhythms, and styles of being in the world. But this core message would also have to have a qualifier: “I’m OK (even though I’m not).” The ways that we are defined by our stories of negativity and negation do not just go away. “Trauma can never be let go of.” This is not a negation of negative dialectics; it is a nonbinary dialectic, meaning an effort to be transformed by ambivalence and to find optimism in our very bargaining. The imperative of Berlant’s materialist reflexivity is, then, to investigate the real places we come from and then to ask what dialectic of optimism and exhaustion they have left us caught up in.

To theorize emotional survival in late capitalism might almost be a utopian act in itself. But I think Berlant’s project holds some more specific lessons for those of us who want to ditch conventional gender and make something new. It implies that to the extent we are serious about remaking social life, this will be not just about creating new social forms such as labels, identities, or publics, but will also be about learning new ways to inhabit our psyches and attachments. Nonbinary gender often seems like a supervalent thought in search of a genre of conventional identity, one inclined to begin with a heroic narrative of largely individual self-assertion, self-transformation, and recognition struggle. Berlant would not try to prevent our creating new conventions. Surely, we need new conventions. But Berlant might also encourage us to reflect on the limits of that kind of identity project. Their work might provide pathways towards inventing new forms of nonbinary desire, love and bargaining. And it might suggest that any nonbinary gender project might need to take seriously the lessons of conventional femininity. Surely no nonbinary space will survive without habits of care and emotional sustenance, habits which should not disregard the lessons of women’s structural ambivalence about care work.

Yet I also find myself thinking: it seems vaguely like a betrayal of these texts to look to them for political guidance. They give us no road maps towards radicality, towards unambivalence, or even towards better ways of surviving. “I don’t usually make credo-style speeches,” Berlant declared in 2009, “nor pitch my practice at a level of generality that’s supposed to model a way of being for colleagues.”^[45] What anyone might learn from Berlant’s work is supposed to remain indeterminate; that is perhaps one reason why Berlant has never written a pedagogical introduction to their own thought. “One cannot predict how and when—with intellection as the guardian of the bruised and disappointed self—someone will move toward any number of possible identifications,” Berlant comments in their analysis of Two Girls.^[46] It is, in this sense, a genuinely anarchic project, one that refuses the patriarchal imperative to reproduce oneself in one’s students. It provides no clear direction; it only provides the mimetic force of its own example. At most, it might give us hints for making sense of the directions we are already going.

Here I find myself wondering again: Whose intellection guards whose bruise? And who is getting worn out guarding the bruises anyways? We come back in the end to the question of education, the question of teachers. This is one of Berlant’s lasting contributions to materialist feminism: that we must theorize teaching just as intensely as we ever theorized domestic labor or motherhood. Berlant was my teacher for most of a decade in graduate school, and I found their presence to be world-making for me, even though it was overdetermined, glimpsy, and full of misrecognition. One time, I said (after my quals or some other brutal ritual) that I was grateful that they treated me like a human being in a graduate institution (the University of Chicago) that mostly dehumanized us. They protested, saying something like “What about my intellectual engagement with your work, isn’t that what matters?”

I was momentarily surprised that they could felt like anyone could possibly have underestimated their formidable intellectual presence in the world. But for years afterwards I felt guilty — guilty for having equated their existential presence with their femininity, and for having leaned on their care labor to help me survive the toxic culture of the university, as if that were in any way their job. Now, ironically, it feels like my increasing distance from graduate school (and from the academy) makes it easier for me to read their work, or even to acknowledge their thought in a way that formerly was structurally foreclosed.

The nonbinary reading of Lauren Berlant’s work may itself be a scene of misrecognition. But Berlant would remind us that misrecognition is also an optimism. And maybe that’s what we can learn from Berlant’s struggles with a contradictory existence: not just how to use “they” pronouns, but how to find optimism in the struggle to get by in a bad, incoherent world.

Works cited

Berlant, Lauren. 2016. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times.” Environment and Planning D no. 34 (3):393-419.

—. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.

—. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2009. “Affect is the New Trauma.” Minnesota Review no. 71-72:131-136.

—. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1997. “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy.” In The politics of research, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine, 143-161. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

—. 1997. “Trauma and ineloquence.” Cultural Values no. 5 (1):41-58.

—. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1994. “’68, or Something.” Critical Inquiry no. 21:124-155.

—. 1988. “The Female Complaint.” Social Text no. 19/20:237-259.

Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren, and Jay Prosser. 2011. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography no. 34 (1):180-187.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. 1995. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” PMLA 110:343-349.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hobarek, Andrew. 2001. “Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Minnesota Review no. 52-54:127-140.

Seigworth, Gregory J. 2012. “Reading Lauren Berlant Writing.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies no. 9 (4):346-352.

Tyler, Imogen, and Elena Loizidou. 2000. “The Promise of Lauren Berlant: An Interview.” Cultural Values no. 4 (3):497-511.

[1] “Feminism and the Institutions of intimacy,” 159.

[2] Berlant’s most general formulations of this part of the project appear in blogs and interviews. For example, “I have a really different view of the subject, and this is what I’m trying to write into being. I think it begins and proceeds as a porous and disorganized thing that is constantly impelled (compelled and desiring) to take up positions of clarity in relation to objects, worlds, and situations, but the available clarifying genres of personhood underdescribe the range of practices, knowledges, impulses, and orientations that people have while they’re foregrounding being this or that kind of thing at a particular moment… It’s a new realism of the ordinary subject who is at once durable and diffused” (“Life Writing and Intimate Publics” 187).

Compare also: “a person is a loosely-knotted cluster of impulses, reflections, apprehensions and prehensions moving through ordinary time (imagine a net with head, hands and feet).” (https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/19/combover-approach-2/)

[3] “’68, or Something” 125.

[4] https://thepointmag.com/politics/pleasure-won-conversation-lauren-berlant/

[5] “Citizen Berlant” 134.

[6] ”Citizen Berlant“ 134, ”Institutions of Intimacy” 145.

[7] Berlant does cite at one point Monique Wittig’s image of “the prisonhouse of binary relationality” — the expression is Berlant’s — that forces us to be “intelligible as a gendered subject” (Sex or the Unbearable, 14). The rejection of that intelligibility would arguably be betrayed by rendering it as a new nonbinary gender, but I digress.

[8] As Michael Hardt explains, multiplicity is a Deleuzian technical term for “a notion of difference that does not refer back to (and thus depend on) a primary identity, a difference that can never be corralled into an ultimate unity… this expanding, proliferating set of differences that stand on their own, autonomous” Hardt in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (ix). Deleuze at times envisioned this in quite sweeping terms: “There is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity… multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 23-24).

[9] Cruel Optimism 287n30.

[10] “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” 348.

[11] https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/12/combover-approach-1/

[12] Berlant’s world is not just multiple, then; it is recursively heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of the world can pose its own problems of subjective organization. As Berlant comments, ”So many different kinds of structure organize the estrangements and attachments of the world that how we are to live among and transform their existence both materially and in fantasy is my central question” (Sex, or the Unbearable 116).

[13] “Trauma and Ineloquence.”

[14] Female Complaint 3.

[15] Cruel Optimism 287-288.

[16] Cruel Optimism 138.

[17] Desire/Love 69.

[18] I might also cite their persistent affection for Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis.

[19] Berlant and Edelman: ”Negativity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change” (Sex, or the Unbearable, vii-viii).

[20] Cruel Optimism 48.

[21] Desire/Love 36.

[22] “The Commons” 394.

[23] Cruel Optimism 125.

[24] Impersonality: “The state of the interruption of the personal, and the work of normativity to create conventions of the personal” (Cruel Optimism 159). I would note that Berlant is exceptionally skeptical of the compulsory melodramas of emotional authenticity that organize a certain version of a “personal life.”

[25] Desire/Love 77.

[26] “What if we derived our social theory from scenes of ambivalence, which is to say, the scenes of attachment that are intimate, defined by desire, and overwhelming? We understand why we are overwhelmed by extreme and exhausting threats and actualized violence, as they menace the endurance of the world and of confidence in ongoingness. What’s harder to process is why it is hard to bear the very things we want.” (“The Commons” 395).

[27] Female Complaint 2.

[28] Female Complaint 2.

[29] Tyler and Loizidou, “The Promise of Lauren Berlant,” 511.

[30] Cruel Optimism 5. Compare Jameson: “Briefly, the dialectic may be said to be thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) and reflexive (or conscious of its own thought processes)” (Valences 322).

[31] Cruel Optimism 124.

[32] “Supervalent Thought,” https://supervalentthought.com/2007/12/23/hello-world/

[33] Cruel Optimism 287n21.

[34] Berlant in Sex or the Unbearable 79.

[35] Cruel Optimism 146.

[36] Female Complaint 12-13.

[37] Hobarek and Berlant 133.

[38] “The Female Complaint” (1988) 253.

[39] “The Female Complaint” (1988), 254.

[40] It is interesting to note that Butler’s famous rhetorical question along these lines — “Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?” — only appeared in Gender Trouble two years after this paper came out.

[41] Meanwhile, it is common to acknowledge in U.S. queer cultures that genders are “social constructs,” but this often means in practice that gender identity is considered susceptible to individual gestures of self-definition, through a sort of agentive striving to become what one always already was.

[42] Queen of America 86.

[43] This is the end of the first sentence of The Female Complaint.

[44] Berlant comments at one point that “to desire belonging to the normal world, the world as it appears, is at root a fantasy of a sense of continuity, a sense of being generally okay; it is a desire to be in proximity to okayness, without passing some test to prove it” (Female Complaint 9). It seems to me that without downplaying the violence of belonging, Berlant would urge us not to shame people for having this fantasy.

[45] “Affect is the New Trauma” 135.

[46] Cruel Optimism 145-6.

My first thought about abolition is that it makes an immense difference just what we are trying to abolish. What, for instance, might it mean to “abolish left patriarchy” in academia? Etymologically, patriarchy is rule of the fathers, a regime of male power and patrilineal inheritance. One might thus see abolishing patriarchy as a destruction or cancellation of male power in general, or at least of propertarian gerontocracy and its self-assertions of grandiosity and naturalness.

But if we are ourselves products of a patriarchal academy (which is not only about cishet men; there are queer people who act like patriarchs), then the problem of abolishing patriarchy also becomes a problem of self-abolition. Who abolishes the abolitionists? Is there a form of political selfhood, an evanescent one, that is always en route to self-abolition? And why is it that, coming here to speak as a precarious academic, I feel a bit destabilized, a little obscurely sad, a little overwhelmed with the weight of — what is it? — of being a case of failed reproduction?

Is there any other kind?

Abolition as we have it in the conference invitation seems a bit threatened by the specter of its own excess. And yet it seems to me that abolition — as an effort to end slavery, incarceration, dispossession, capital accumulation, and the racial capitalist societies that produce them — this abolition is always incomplete, threatening to turn back on itself, only ever partial. As others have also evoked. “Proletarian revolu­tions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thorough­ness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts.”

This brings us back to the problem of left patriarchy. Much of second wave feminism emerged historically out of a desire to cancel — to abolish — the massive sexism of the 1960s New Left. And in many quarters, these criticisms of sexism in “the movement” had a real impact. But the abolition of patriarchy in the New Left was, to say the least, never total. An abolition that went unfinished.

Even now in the aftermath of #MeToo, it is bitterly disappointing to see the patriarchy and toxic masculinism that still pervade significant swaths of the supposedly left-radical academic world. Personally, when I was a student, this was at its worst for me in various seminars on Marx, who I was just citing. These seminars always gestured towards general emancipation, but remained extraordinarily patriarchal in their pedagogy and their horizons of discourse. “Maybe Marx is just a guy thing,” one of my professors told me once when I complained. (As if Marxist feminism did not even exist…)

Meanwhile, among my feminist comrades, terms like “manarchism” and “brocialist” are now in fairly widespread circulation. These feminist terms of art pick out a specific contradiction: the contradiction that patriarchal power and masculine violence endure in academic spaces nominally dedicated to liberation and radical social critique. To name this contradiction — which we can call, with Tania Toffanin, left-wing patriarchy — is to deplore it and to want to abolish it. But perhaps we need to talk about how it works before we can cancel it. How does left-wing patriarchy endure, for example in a university department?

I have been writing about this lately, and what I found ethnographically, in one left-wing French philosophy department, was not auspicious. It was a historically male-dominated site. There were reports of cishet sexualization, objectification and harassment from certain male professors. There was also a more widespread mode of naturalized male power which we can usefully understand in terms of Rebecca Lentjes’ concept of sonic patriarchy. Lentjes invokes the notion of sonic patriarchy to draw attention to the way that academic patriarchy works through the senses. In neoliberal universities, Lentjes observes, patriarchy is not only a matter of the male gaze, but also of the domination of sound and of what is — and is not — hearable.

In the department I studied, I sometimes had the sense that I all I heard was patriarchy. Patriarchy in this site seemed to be durable because it worked simultaneously on several fronts. It was infrastructural, being grounded in demographic, citational, and institutional domination. It was normative, incorporating a set of masculine norms of conduct (even if these were polyvalent). These norms worked to exclude its Others (women and political conservatives). Far from being static, it was a conflictual system, and in its conflicts, patriarchy became something naturalized, visceral, and inescapable. At the same time, this visceral conflict mobilized many men’s existential desires for their established system to endure, even to flourish. I arrived ultimately at the disturbing thought that, at least in this particular university department in France, left patriarchy does not just automatically reproduce itself; rather, its continuation is actively desired.

The question of desire brings us back to the reflexive question of what it means to abolish left patriarchy, if that is not just an institution outside us but also is part of us. How do we distinguish the work of political transformation (as they call it in South Africa) from the socially determined compusion to rebel against our own patrilineages? How can we engage with a discipline, or imagined discipline (such as “Critical University Studies”), without invoking an intergenerational cycle of gendered melodrama?

Nothing is more indebted to a discipline than a struggle with a discipline. (Nothing is more indebted to “Critical University Studies” than a struggle with Critical University Studies.) And one might argue that nothing is more queer, more antipatriarchal, than to abolish the problem of inheritance. To abolish our own toxic investments, to dedramatize our cravings for recognition, and, then — and then?

I don’t know.

Does abolition bring us answers or only new questions?

You have to be a materialist about desire. It takes a whole set of institutions to produce the desires that sustain left patriarchy. What kind of institutions might produce the desire to cancel it out?

The kind of theory I was taught in college had a big aura. It was a chic kind of theory, a French kind of theory, one entwined with hipster and bohemian aesthetics, with “female effacement” (Johnson 2014:27), with things postmodern or poststructuralist, with American whiteness, and with a barely repressed spirit of commodification and elite competition. In the American university context, this theoretical competition was readily entangled with clumsy masculine ambition and ersatz intersubjectivity, as one can see from a late-1990s satirical song about dating at Swarthmore College.

The song, “Theory Boys,” began:

Comes on the scene in a sharp wool coat
Bright eyes, hair a little too long and big teeth
Wanna strip away the phrases he recites by rote
Wanna find out what’s underneath

Don’t want to talk about anything I think I know
It won’t take long to see I’m hopelessly outclassed
And when you finally get him home
Has he got what it takes to last you?

One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
When they read Foucault for fun
That’s when you know it’s time to run! If they’re so much
Smarter than me, why do they act so dumb?

[Fein 1998]

Let us dwell on “Theory Boys” for a moment, since its lyrics convey a whole theoretical world. The theory boy’s theory was a prestige object, used not in the service of any collective politics, but as part of a masculine bildungsroman which was nothing if not cringeworthy. In the song’s scenario, the theory boy was a bad boyfriend because he not only thought he knew everything, he also sought to make you feel inferior in the face of his knowledge, distilled from obsessive readings of fetishized male philosophers — Foucault and, as another verse notes, Nietzsche. Today one would call him a mansplainer, and his ostensibly subversive cultural knowledge was not to be mistaken for actual thinking. On the contrary, it consisted essentially of rote formulas that may, nevertheless, have channeled genuine existential angst. “Man is mortal, life is pointless, God is dead and stuff,” was the summary of his views offered in the fourth verse by the composer, Elizabeth Fein, who went on to become a psychological anthropologist. The theory boy was a connoisseur of yesterday’s philosophical dissidents in France and Germany, and what he sensed as radical chic was really a palimpsest of yesterday’s academic imperialisms, now eclipsed by the United States’ ascendant academic industries. Meanwhile he protected his expertise by avoiding his interlocutor’s domains of knowledge; he privileged his own verbal prowess over sexual reciprocity with his partner; and he aspired to style by practicing Francophile bobo consumerism, notably, as the third verse notes, by binging on coffee and cigarettes.

Methodologically, the point is that theory was enmeshed in a system of angsty patriarchy and frustrated desire. It was not that the theory boy definitively preferred the literary androgyny of French theory to the embodied femininity of his partner, since being a theory boy was clearly his coy sexual strategy.[1] In the libidinal economy of the song, the theory boy automagically constitutes an object of desire for the woman protagonist. He seems enticing in spite or because of his repulsive and excessive qualities, which give her desire for him a certain masochistic quality. In this, her desire mirrors his: the desire for theory is itself a masochistic desire, because who but a masochist (in this view) would be dumb enough to read Foucault for fun (Kulick 2006)? Just as the girl never gets what she wants from the boy yet can’t quit him, so too, it would seem, does the boy never get real knowledge from Foucault, but can’t stop reading him. The three of them enter into a paraphilic love triangle, where a girl chases a boy who chases a book, which in turn androgynously embodies both the masculinity of philosophical authority and the aesthetic femininity of French culture. Yet all the while, by the song’s account, the theory boy remains oddly trapped in himself, and in his barely intelligible code: “At least he can speak his own language—no-one else knows how.”

We could say that the theory boy’s theory becomes a fetish object, in a libidinally charged though not directly sexual sense. The objects of fetishistic desire (paraphilia), whose inanimacy affords them a welcome stability and predictability, can play a powerful function in stabilizing libidinal economies (Berlant 2012).[2] Fetishes serve at once to comfort and alienate, interfering with easy fantasies of subjective sovereignty. For the fetishist is not self-sufficient, he needs the object; he is not in control, but neither is he obliged to swallow too much intersubjectivity, since his desire can be satisfied by a substitute; and ironically, his very lack of sovereignty can make new things possible.

Now the “theory boy” is obviously a specific social type, and an idealized one at that. He is not a stand-in for Anglophone critical theory at large; he is neither an Angela Davis nor a Herbert Marcuse, neither a Barbara Johnson nor a Sara Ahmed. But in the instabilities which afflict him as he tends his theory fetish, he represents a political dead end whose implications reach far beyond the narrow confines of American elite college culture. If the unfinished global legacies of twentieth century radicalism show anything, it is that dialectical fantasies of a happy merger between revolutionary subject and revolutionary theory have generally proven unrealizable.[3] “Theory” in its post-sixties sense has consequently often been in a bad relationship with politics — as my French interlocutors sometimes complained — and this fraughtness is inseparable from its potential to become an academic fetish object.[4]

Still, it is not my view, either in this case or in general, that theory (itself a highly historically mutable category) is a fetish by nature. It is merely analytically important that, at certain historical moments, it can become one. Meanwhile, no one would mistake Theory Boy for a utopian: he is too dogmatically affirmative about theory for that, and too hostile to other human beings. But his masculinist fetish of theory has the merit of showing a deep connection between patriarchal desire and the forms of objectification that continue to organize the theory universe. This has been only too apparent to women — and no doubt invisible to too many men.

Notes

[1] It is an ideological curiosity that French culture is strongly gendered female in American public culture (whether in terms of fashion and beauty products, of Paris as a love space/object, in terms of France’s military and economic inferiority to Britain and America since the 19th century, or in terms of its artistic and intellectual movements). It is intriguingly compatible with France’s general femininity-for-America that French Theory was often deeply masculine and male-dominated. For more on the ambiguous gendering of French national self-representations, see Cooper (2000), or on gender in French philosophy, Le Doeuff (2003).

[2] As Berlant puts it, “The fetish enables desire to be controlled, to be manageable, to be comprehended, signified, and also screened out by the material form. Moreover, the fetish has no uniqueness nor singularity, like the penis; it can always be possessed, reproduced, replaced, and collected. Thus it encompasses value and valuelessness, and construes desire through aggression and protectiveness” (2012:34).

[3] I think here of the unactualized fate of Firestone’s revolutionary Marxist feminism, or Biko’s subject of Black Consciousness, or even Lukacs’s theory of the revolutionary proletariat (which may not be the Ur-form of this fantasy but certainly traces an extreme version of its failure).

[4] Aijaz Ahmad comments even more pessimistically than me that “It is also arguable… that dominant strains within this ‘theory’, as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mystique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics” (1992:1)

References

• Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
• Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.
• Cooper, Nikki. 2000. (En)Gendering Indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in French colonial discourses. Women’s Studies International Forum 23(6):749-759.
• Le Doeuff, Michèle. 2003. The Sex of Knowing. New York: Routledge.
• Fein, Elizabeth. 2017 [1998]. “Theory Boys.” Swarthmore College Alumni Songbook, 2017 Edition. Pp. 7. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore Folk.
• Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology 47(6):933-952.
• Johnson, Barbara. 2014. A life with Mary Shelley. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

I was not surprised to find out that in the 1970s, sexism and rape culture were major problems among the male-dominated French far left. They remain issues on French campuses today.

But I was nevertheless dismayed by men’s grotesque responses to an early feminist meeting at Vincennes. Men were asked to leave a women-only meeting (accounts differ as to when this request was made). But the men balked at leaving the room, instead attacking the women, insulting their intellects, their politics, their credibility, their sexuality, and their legitimacy.

The male insults were recorded in a subsequent feminist tract, “Verbal abuse at Vincennes,” which was reproduced in Jean-Michel Djian’s Vincennes: Une aventure de la pensée critique.

The context, according to the tract: “On Wednesday June 4 1970 (and not 1870), thirty girls had announced their intention to meet among themselves to talk about their problems.”

I’ve translated many of the insults that emerged.

• There’s no woman problem
• I don’t see anyone I know, no little girl activists
• What group are you with?
• You speak in whose name? In the name of sex?
• The catharsis of lady intellectuals
• They don’t have what it takes to get psychoanalyzed
• You’re little girls with complexes and that’s all you are
• It’s petty bourgeois problems
• It’s no good to compare us to the bourgeois
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
  
• You want to get taken seriously? It’s unreal
• Believe me, your movement won’t get taken seriously, given the attitude you had tonight (silence)
• We’ll leave once you give us a political reason. [Why?] We want to make sure you don’t screw up.
• A woman’s catharsis can only come from a man
• If we don’t support you, your movement is bound to fail
• Big dicks, big dicks
  
• I propose that you remove us by force
• They’re sex-starved, we’ll give them a good lay [C’est des mal baisées, on va bien les baiser]
  
• If you want your equality, let’s screw
• But who’s going to clean up after you?
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
• Lesbians
• She’s naughty
• Just seeing you grouped together pisses me off
• I’m more scared of girls than of riot cops
• You’re a cunt (he gets a slap in the face)
• Big dicks, etc

I’m not sure I have the words to comment right now on what this says about the sexist culture of the French far left in the 1970s. It’s more than depressing, more than awful, more than politically outrageous. Also it’s beyond arrogant and beyond juvenile in its practices of sexist objectification.

The month after this, a feminist statement was published, called “Against male terrorism.” I haven’t been able to find the document, but according to Joëlle Guimier’s new analysis of “The difficult life of women at Vincennes,” the text declared that “In our liberation, men have nothing to lose but their alienation.” That seems like a surprisingly generous reading under the circumstances.

Edit: I originally wrote in this post that the meeting had been advertised as a women-only meeting. One French interlocutor reports that it was initially not unspecified, and only announced as women-only (“non-mixte”) as a result of men’s masculinist conduct during it. I have not been able to resolve the conflicting accounts of this point.

I especially liked its capacious theory of women’s freedom.

STATEMENT BY CHICAGO WOMEN’S LIBERATION

February 1969

During sit-ins and other protests at the University of Chicago over the firing of Professor Marlene Dixon, a radi­cal feminist, for her political ideas:

What does women’s freedom mean? It means freedom of self-determination, self-enrichment, the freedom to live one’s own life, set one’s own goals, the freedom to rejoice in one’s own accomplishments. It means the freedom to be one’s own person in an integrated life of work, love, play, motherhood: the freedoms, rights and privileges of first class citizenship, of equality in relationships of love and work: the right to choose to make decisions or not to: the right to full self-realization and to full participation in the life of the world. That is the freedom we seek in women’s liberation.

To achieve these rights we must struggle as all other oppressed groups must struggle: one only has the rights one fights for. We must come together, understand the common problems, despair, anger, the roots and processes of our oppression: and then together, win our rights to a creative and human life.

At the U of C we see the first large action, the first impor­tant struggle of women’s liberation. This university—all uni­versities—discriminate against women, impede their full intellectual development, deny them places on the faculty, exploit talented women and mistreat women students.

(From Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 531.)

The summary judgment about sexism in all universities is quite striking as well. Clearly, in some ways gender relations in universities have changed immensely since 1969. But at the same time: the themes of the critique still resonate today.

What do I mean, worldmaking?

What I mean is: gender holds up the world. (Is that even a metaphor?) It’s a catastrophic world for some; a liberatory world for others; it’s an ambivalent, precarious, awkward, inconvenient, effervescent world for so many of us. But in any case, inasmuch as the world is being held up at all, it’s held up by gender. NOT ONLY. But in substantial part.

One of the things that this means is that gender is not only a form of constraint, an outside “social norm,” or a harsh repressive apparatus. It is also a productive force (and a force of production); a zone of creativity and improvisation; an architecture for social dramas and a set of dramatic occasions; sometimes it’s a source of joy or, as they say these days, “euphoria.” Gender is what gives social things their color, one could say, or that shows us their depth by organizing the flow of light and of shadows. We’ve tried to bring some new things into the light. And we’ve observed that gender calls out to us (that’s what interpellation is) and it gives us a place to occupy (whether we choose to stay in it or not). We’ve investigated how gender organizes both the work of social reproduction and the social reproduction of work.

Gender as we know it here is not just worldmaking. It’s capitalist worldmaking.

Thus gender organizes the hidden work of social reproduction: childbearing, caretaking, cleaning, raising, educating, celebrating, holding people up. It’s interesting how in writing that sentence, one can say the word women without even uttering it. But of course, it is not only women, and the division of gendered labor is shifting in some important ways. You can end up with two very different images of the world if you study its historicity — that means the way that it becomes historical, the way that it is changing, the directions of its motion — and then if you study a freeze-frame of its structures — the way that everything seems to endure across space and time, the immutable principles of the system. The gender binary sometimes seems immutable, embedded in our infrastructure and even in our unconscious. Yet it seems to be shifting out from under us…

Meanwhile, gender also organizes the social reproduction of work. In a world where it sometimes seems that almost everything is commodified, gender is partly what is there to ensure that the system of commodity exchange and capital accumulation can continue, gender makes sure that we are ready for work, wakes us up on time, organizes our homes… To be able to get up and go to work is, again, to be an object: that’s what we are doing when we work for a wage, selling our labor power and ourselves as commodities.

Gender, then, makes us objects. But not all forms of objectification are equally dehumanizing. To be a mother or father or nonbinary parent is also to be a sort of object for one’s child. A “transformational object,” some psychoanalysts would call the maternal role: an object that serves to let somebody else transform herself into a subject. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be the kind of object that a caregiver is. I’m not saying it is always unalienated or unambivalent or unexploitative. But perhaps without moments of objectification, we would not be subjects either. And gender makes us subjects, organizes selves, is already there inside us. For better or worse, it preshapes our very forms of perception, the cognitive schemas that organize our gaze, our hearing, our sense of touch. And not just the raw sensory impressions themselves, but the conditions of possibility of their use. When are we allowed to look at each other, when are we asked to avert? What are we allowed to hear, or not hear? Who touches, who gets touched?

I’ve been touched by this class even though I’ve been overwhelmed by it. One of the most interesting moments for me in this class was when we talked about emotional labor and being a student. It turns out that even though this is an institution that is structurally affluent, virtually everyone here has done some form of service or care work, most of which is structurally devalorized and much of which is gendered.

People reported being asked to be “eager”, “available,” “polite,” “firm,” “infinitely available,” “neutral,” “eager to help,” “curious,” “not rude,” “vigilant,” “calming,” “nice,” “confident,” “looking fancy,” “efficient,” “authoritative or comforting” (for the EMTs).

I mean. That’s a lot of emotional work.

Meanwhile the kinds of norms that come from the school environment are fundamentally set up to encourage you to identify as the future managers of a neoliberal, precarious economy. Again, here’s what we said about being a student at this university, in 2019, in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States, in the Global North. (We are deeply situated. We are not universal.)

You must be attentive. Get good grades. Be silent. Take notes. Stay awake. Be eager. Care. Be on time. Do the work. Be competitive. Be proactive. Be curious. Participate. Be good at time management. Have “executive function.” Appear overworked. Be young. Like groupwork (which is widely loathed). Treat school as top priority. Everything is a means to an end. Don’t question authority. Accept that the person who grades you is right even if they’re not…

These norms might seem natural to you, or not. As an outsider, I think this list of requirements is utterly overwhelming and bewildering. It asks you to accept multiple forms of domination and discipline. But you are also supposed to stay enterprising, optimistic and productive, and to take on the burden of filling in for any failures in the institution. You’re supposed to be intensely entrepreneurial but docile, you perform agency and enthusiasm but obediently, and your instrumentalism is without bounds.

In an important way, the norms of being a student draw on the sorts of emotional labor that many of you have had to perform in other jobs. But they add to it the possibility of having some power, authority, status, and institutional agency. It also seems to offer you the possibility of leaving behind the sorts of service work that you have previously done so as to aspire to something “better” or at least different (in that omnipresent future that is infinitely deferred).

This whole scenario fills me with existential questions about what I am doing as a teacher. And about what you must be doing as students…

But again, the class is really not about giving you answers or even a settled theory of how gender and social reproduction work. It’s about sensitizing you to questions. Who are we such that we think about gender? (To think about gender is already gendered…) Whose desire animates a space, whose fantasy? (Whose desire animates this classroom? Mine? Yours? No one’s because we are all too exhausted and alienated?) Whose perspective is this? Who is at the center of this scene, who is marginal? Who is working and who is on the slack?

As I speak, I’m working, but I’m not sure from whose perspective I’m speaking. I’ve ended up feeling like the problem with teaching this class is that it is hard to really be present because we are always asked to be instrumental, always asked to be projecting into the future. (That’s true for teachers too: we are also supposed to be always instrumental.) Of course, there’s a reason why we aren’t always present: the present can be a bad place to be. My heart goes out to those of you who are stressed and overwhelmed and struggling with dilemmas, structural and otherwise. I’m sure I don’t know about most of them. I still respect the fact that people are going through things that aren’t going to come out in a classroom, at least this classroom, maybe any classroom.

Teaching, again, is a lot about emotional labor too. And scenes of failed reproduction. I’ve learned a lot about failure as a teacher here. I’ve gone home and felt crushed by having said something that was wrong or inadequate or just bad for our mood. I’ve talked too much and watched people get worn out by the noise of my own voice. I’ve never taught this class before, you know, and so I’ve also learned a lot about which readings work and which don’t, which sequences of ideas work and which ones are too abstract, which assignments produce good results and which ones… produce meh.

At the same time, this class has been the first time I’ve ever been comfortable presenting in a feminine way at work. For all its other problems, I’m grateful to the university environment for that. A class on gender seems like a fitting place for that.

It’s a strange day for me (as a worker) because this might be the last class I ever teach; I don’t have another academic job lined up, and I literally can’t afford to keep being a precarious academic because I have kids to feed and this economy is not working. I sort of love teaching even though I’m still working on not being bad at it. And this isn’t a class about me, but I’m a social symptom too (I encourage you to learn less from what I say than from my obvious contradictions). I think it always matters who the teacher is, and I think teachers owe you some kind of accountability or at least some self-analysis. I owe you that. It’s strange, because next week I’m leaving Cleveland — the work here is done — and literally I may never set foot here again. That’s what precarious academic work looks like right now: a long trail of absences. I wish I had been able to do a better job of teaching this material to you all. But I’m still grateful that I got the chance to try. Good luck with the end of the semester.

THANK YOU.

That’s it, class is over, I know you’re all busy, you’re all free to go now.

What is a vignette? Vigne is vine (in French) and vignette is thus “little vine,” which is certainly an evocative image. But what does a little vine do for ethnographers?

The dictionary is useful here, helping us connect dots of history. Merriam-Webster distinguishes three modern senses of the term:

1. “A picture (such as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper; the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the frame and lettering.“
2. “a short descriptive literary sketch; a brief incident or scene.”
3. “a running ornament (as of vine leaves, tendrils, and grapes) put on or just before a title page or at the beginning or end of a chapter; also : a small decorative design or picture so placed.”

Of course what ethnographers have in mind is always sense (2), “a short descriptive literary sketch.” But my view is that the way we actually use and refer to vignettes ends up reproducing some real epistemological problems. And these problems emerge, it seems, from the very etymology of the term, or at least they resonate awfully harmoniously with its semantic history. Everything happens as if we were haunted by these other illustrative senses of this term: the “running ornament of vine leaves” that beautifies a text, the “pictorial part” of a stamp that is distinguished from its frame.

We are not positivists, right? We do not subscribe to an impermeable distinction between theory and data, do we? And we would like to overcome the historically gendered, historically colonial hierarchies that grounded this distinction, would we not? Yet the notion of a vignette tends to reproduce them.

In ethnographic practice, the vignette is a text within a text, a marked text that implicitly sets the ethnographic “data” (the non-positivist term is “experience”) apart from the ensuing “theory” or “analysis.” In vignettes — and too often only in vignettes — we feel allowed to be vivid. Allowed to be writers and storytellers, not merely analysts or theorists. Allowed to feel enmeshed in a scene, allowed to bring our readers along to vicariously experience places they have not been, allowed to allude to our human relations with our ethnographic subjects, allowed to present the world as unstructured and historical.

But it never gets to stay that way. Because the vignette is put to work within a larger text. Here are some examples of how ethnographers use the word vignette in their writing (taken randomly from PDFs on my computer):

• “Another brief vignette will help clarify this point.”
• “All three vignettes point to the fact that…”
• “The weighty tokens of durability noted in the opening vignette…”
• “The essay then provides three ethnographic vignettes from the author’s work in Indonesia…”

The vignette commonly has a double function. It “backs up” someone’s claims, providing “evidence” that is construed as having a sort of weight or force by virtue of its mere existence in the text. In this sense, vignettes provide “proof” or “warrant” — like admissible evidence in a court case. On the other hand, vignettes are full of meanings that are then mined or extracted in the text that follows. It is common to pause after a vignette and say something like, “So just what does this mean?” “What does this tell us?” And then to say something complex that is likely not very obvious to anyone but the author… Like a myth or sacred book, the vignette is prone to invoke a hermeneutic project, crying out for interpretation.

There is a normative discipline around how we use vignettes. Many anthropologists believe that vignettes must exist in a certain proportion: not too much, not too little. I’ve been told more than once, by editors or reviewers, that “this paper needs an opening vignette.” But too many vignettes — that’s a problem too. One time I saw someone give a talk at my graduate program at the University of Chicago, a notoriously theory-focused place. The speaker mainly wanted to tell some stories, but he started out instead by saying: “I wrote a page of theory to introduce my talk, because I thought people wouldn’t be able to accept just stories on their own terms.”

The discipline around vignettes is very weird, though. You can get in trouble for not having enough vignettes, but once you’re in the middle of one, you are in a little zone of freedom. It is easy to write vignettes, in my experience, because they are much less heavily policed than “theoretical” writing. People will attack you for the way you cite other scholars. They rarely dispute the way you describe your field experience.

* * *

In the end, the fact that people like talking about “vignettes” is a sign of their ambivalence, of their inner slippage or incoherence. I think the vignette operates on the logic of what Derrida used to call a “supplement”: it seems optional, at first, but actually is supposed to add some essential piece without which the original thing, claim, point, theory, idea, etc, would somehow fall flat. It never gets to be central — when you’re telling stories, they’re usually not about you, you just become the medium for some sequence of events — but its seeming marginality is sort of a ruse.

But it manages to trivialize the flux of empirical reality at the same time, insisting on the primary of theory by denigrating storytelling. It’s a flat genre of empiricism that lets life happen while keeping it in a cage. It makes phenomenology, experience, and history into decoration. The little vines that decorate the long streams of colorless, authoritative prose.

The “vignette” — this is really what bugs me about it so much — is a story that feels guilty about being a story. No vignette ever graduated from its embryonic state of narrative insufficiency. It is little by nature, born little, destined to remain little. But storytelling need not be marked as little. That every story is finite and non-total is a sign that history is unfinished, not grounds for epistemic guilt.

In its littleness, the vignette is a genre all too well suited for our era. We have short attention spans, we produce too much (and what we write is not well read if it is ever read), and our discipline itself is full of crisis. There is a crisis of gendered violence, as MeToo insists; there is a crisis of coloniality, as #HauTalk insists; there is a crisis of labor, as groups like PrecAnthro observe. And these crises also suggest that we might ask if the notion of vignette does not also have some unexplored gender connotations.

If “theory” is marked masculine (as Lutz famously argued in The Gender of Theory), and if our more “serious” or “academic” writing is the part where we want to be recognized as serious scholars with authority, then the vignette seems to enter that textual economy as the site where our feminine part can come out. The things that vignettes do are historically marked feminine: they decorate; they care about moods; they talk about relationships and process incidents; they provide pleasure and comfort to tired readers; and sooner or later (ugh), they get interrupted by male voices…

I begin to wonder if the notion of the vignette does not work in contemporary ethnography to denigrate the feminine.

I think we could do without it.

Of course our writing does need stories. It needs moods. It needs to process incidents. It needs to provide pleasure and transmit experience.

But it does not need to have a category that sets these functions apart from the rest of our texts and makes them into marked moments, set out against the unmarked, uncomfortable, authoritative, and potentially masculinist prose of theory and analysis.

But everything here is sadly unremarkable, aside from the gender and sexuality parameters. Workplace hierarchies and precarious gigs are ripe for abuse. Harassment is largely about enjoying power and transgressing other people’s boundaries. It exploits ambiguity and hides in plain sight.

These usual truths are all I have. I still think they’re worth hearing.

It’s an older story now, and I left out the names and places.

* * *

I had just graduated from college with an anthropology degree. I was bi and genderqueer, but not as out as I would get later. I was working as a temp receptionist for eleven dollars an hour at a big urban university.

Next to me at the front desk sat a charismatic gay man. I found him cute.

Let’s call him M.

We flirted a little at work. It was a boring place to work. I felt so very awkward in my totally ill-fitting, unfashionable efforts to dress business casual.

Once as we were leaving work at the end of the day, we kissed on the sidewalk.

M. was a bunch older than me and had a permanent job. He wasn’t my boss, but there was an asymmetry. But let’s be clear, the first time, the kiss was welcome. It was very quick. It had a certain energy, an anxiety. Our coworkers could have seen us. That would have been so weird.

We parted ways at the subway.

Maybe a little later there was another one kiss like that. I think there might have been about two okay kisses. I wasn’t taking notes.

But then after the kiss, or two, the office became a miserable space for me.

* * *

It’s hard to explain how miserable it was. Miserable in this nothing is what it seems way. There was the normal part of office life, and then the other part, the part hidden right in front of everyone.

The succinct version doesn’t do it justice. M. started to hit on me constantly at work. It was only barely clandestine. I really didn’t like it, I didn’t respond positively, and I didn’t know how to make him stop.

He sat right beside me at a long counter, facing the public. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he would turn towards me and make these come-hither, sit-on-my-lap gestures. I’m sure he found it sexy and fun. I found it mortifying.

The truth is, I suspect he enjoyed my discomfort, or my powerlessness. I frowned back at him sometimes, or wrinkled my brow. These desperate, little gestures.

Two women worked right alongside us — literally three, five feet from us. But they never noticed anything. There are always moments when someone is looking the other way, when they’re down the hall. You would never think anything like this could happen in such a well-lit, sterile office environment.

This went on for a while.

I would go home at night and feel awful, like something was happening to me that I didn’t really understand; I just knew I felt trapped. I remember that I began to doubt myself a lot — like maybe it was my fault, or I’d asked for it, or I was misunderstanding something.

Sexual violence of this sort is mostly epistemic violence. Somehow your truth has become unhearable; you’re living something that is invisible; your version of the story is beyond subordinate, it might as well be nothing. All of these are pretty classic feelings for workplace harassment situations, I gather.

It was extra awkward to complain, because someone in my extended family had originally helped me get the job, by putting me in touch with her friend, the HR person for that branch of the university, who in turn sent me to the temp agency. I didn’t think much about complaining.

Meanwhile, some harassment scenarios might be unambiguous, but mine was awkward because there was a consensual part before it was non-consensual. That also made it harder to explain to anyone.

* * *

One day in the elevator, M. jumped me once the doors were shut. As he came up close and kissed me, I protested more directly than usual. “No, stop, M!” But it all happened quickly and he didn’t listen. The brief collision with an unwanted body. The elevator doors opened again soon.

Did he tell himself I was just being coy?

I don’t think he thought he was doing anything wrong. Not consciously.

But I also think he knew I didn’t like it, and that was part of the draw. They always say harassment is really about power — getting off mostly on power — but it only makes sense when you see it in person.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t say it was capital t Traumatizing — to get kissed when I really did not want to get kissed — but it left me very rattled. At best, it was a really depressing boundary violation.

* * *

After three weeks on reception duty, I got moved upstairs to a different temp worker task, filing enrollment records.

Though the new work was deathly boring, it was a relief to be away from M.

But somehow, he kept finding excuses to stop by the file room to make sexual overtures. He even showed up and did it once in front of my one friend in the office, a woman.

It was hugely validating to have someone else see how egregious and gross it was. I’d started telling her about it, but I don’t think she really believed me until she saw it herself.

* * *

Anyway, after six weeks there, I quit. I had a new job lined up first.

In the exit interview, I told the temp agency I’d been sexually harassed.

I remember how hard it was to say anything, even then, when nothing professional was at stake. I remember having to get up my nerve. This little moment of hesitation.

The manager was superficially sympathetic. Should we only send women temps to that site, to keep them away from M? he wanted to know. (Which is a heinous cop-out.) Could we contact the employer?

I did let them contact the employer. The university HR person invited me to come describe my experience — to meet her, I had to sneak past M. at the front door of the building. But when I said that the first kiss had been consensual, she seemed really skeptical. I left her office feeling shaken. Frankly, the complaint process made me doubt myself even more.

* * *

My friend told me that M. did get reprimanded after I complained, and he seemed very chastened. This news didn’t really make me feel a lot better.

A month later, M. reportedly still talked about me, saying I kind of miss him* but he hates me.

[*my accepted pronouns at the time.]

He just never really got it, I guess.

Maybe most harassers just never get it. He just thought it was about “hating him” for some random interpersonal reason.

But I still don’t even hate him. I just hate the situation. And the lingering feelings that go with it. The feelings that maybe I am the bad person in the story, the broken one, the unreliable one, the queer subject who wanted something and then not what came next, the one who suffered through becoming an object.

It wasn’t a very bad harassment case. I had an exit. I didn’t suffer professionally. To be honest I don’t think about it most of the time. It was just something that happened.

Something that nevertheless should not have happened.

* * *

Why didn’t you protest more directly? someone might ask. But harassment is about constituting you as an object. And this process can be woefully effective.

When you end up spending so much time putting yourself in question, dealing with the confusions in your own psyche, it can feel like there’s no space to put anyone else in question.

And if you don’t know what harassment is, it’s hard to understand at first that it’s happening to you.

I wish I had been taught something about harassment beforehand. I wish everyone was taught that.

But would any amount of training really have prepared me?

I’m still not sure.

I just know how much I admire the courage of those who protest more successfully than I did.

This was written in 2018, but with some edits in 2020 to slightly improve the analysis.

Anyway, halfway through the volume, I find a compendium of sexist comments made to women graduate students at the University of Chicago. I thought it would be worth reproducing here, since I haven’t seen this text before and I think it’s good to have this sort of discourse out in circulation. While the general lines of this sort of sexist thought are pathetically familiar, the horror is always in the particulars.

THE HALLS OF ACADEME

The Women’s Caucus, Political Science Department, University of Chicago

Several of our professors have made these comments—some of them in jest— without realizing how damaging comments like these are to a woman’s image of herself as a scholar:

“I know you’re competent and your thesis advisor knows you’re competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you’re doing.”

“The admissions committee didn’t do their job. There’s not one good-looking girl in the entering class.”

“Have you thought about journalism? I know a lot of women journalists who do very well.”

“No pretty girls ever come to talk to me.”

“Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the only decent book I’ve ever read written by a woman.”

“Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook.”

“They’ve been sending me too many women advisees. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“I hear I’m supposed to stop looking at you as a sex object.”

“We expect women who come here to be competent, good students but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original.”

Student: “No, I wouldn’t stop teaching if I had children. I plan to work all my life.”
Professor: “But of course you’ll stop work when you have children. You’ll have to.”
Professor to student looking for a job: “You have no busi­ness looking for work with a child that age.”

Some people would say things are better now than they used to be. Well, are they?

A dozen women students showed up, no men. The class has 60 enrolled students, about 90% women overall. I was warned by my colleagues that only the truly committed students were likely to show up at the last lecture. The warning was sound.

I often come to the last day of a class with a written lecture, but this time it seemed to me that what I wanted to do was exemplify ethnographic analysis. So I started by telling two enigmatic stories from when I was an undergraduate student.

Here was the first:

Back in 2003, I was riding my bike through a desolate tiny town in the foothills of the Catskill mountains, looking for a place to stay the night. A group of kids was on the sidewalk, and they started talking to me as I rode past.
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
“What’s your name?”
“Eli!” I may have said; I’m not sure.
“Can I ride your bike?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
Then they asked a more surprising question:
“Are you gay?”
I just kept going.

The second story was even stranger.

I left work early on a hot summer day and went for a walk in a little river valley. After walking for a while, I sat down in a secluded spot, and covered my shoulders with a blanket to keep off the sunburn, because I was very pale.
Out of the woods, several kids appeared suddenly, shouting, trailed by a young dad who seemed to have little authority over them.
Frustrated by the lost solitude, I pulled the blanket up higher to cover my head and waited, hoping the kids would go away.
But instead they were intrigued.
“Who are you?” they asked. I didn’t answer.
“Maybe it’s an alien!” they shouted. “Maybe the aliens left it there!”
I laughed quietly at these remarks.
“Let’s throw a rock at it!” they shouted.
I said to myself: No one in their right mind would throw a rock at a total stranger under a blanket.
A rock hit me in the shoulder. Then I came out from under the blanket and stared angrily at the children. They stopped bothering me and eventually wandered off.

These stories seem to me mainly to testify to the weirdness and aggression that can emerge when people try to make sense of strangers, of the Other, of things they don’t understand. So we talked some about that in my class.

Afterwards, I asked my student to respond to a writing prompt: “What’s a question you wish someone would ask you?”

A lot of them seemed to interpret this as a Big Question, and pondered for a few minutes before writing anything. Afterwards, I read their responses out loud, letting people stay anonymous, which they preferred.

There was an odd feeling of shared vulnerability that I hadn’t really experienced before in a classroom. “If you’re an ethnographer and you can get people to share things like this with you, you’re doing something right,” I told them by way of a conclusion.

I hope to write more about that essay in the near future, and its remarkable comments on pedagogical erotics and transference.

But in the meantime, as a sort of tiny case study, it’s also useful to consider specific cases of philosophical or theoretical masculinism. I recently wrote a bit about Derrida and a bit about latter-day Marxist theory. Today I have a few tidbits that I found in David Macey’s 2004 biography of Michel Foucault:

•  While teaching in Clerment-Ferrand in the early 1960s, Foucault “cause[d] a scandal when he appointed [his partner Daniel] Defert to an assistantship in preference to a better-qualified woman candidate” (p. 64).
• When Foucault travelled abroad in 1973, “he was not happy when he had to attend formal receptions where he had to be polite to women in long evening gowns” (109). (I presume that Macey is trying to voice his subject’s own attitude, and not merely showing his own biases.)
• Describing Foucault’s general outlook in the early 1970s: “Feminism was of little interest to Foucault and had little impact on him, although he did publicly support the right to abortion and contraception. He has often [been] criticized for his masculinist stance and it is true that neither the book on madness nor that of prisons looks at gender or takes account of the fact that women and men tend to be committed to both prisons and psychiatric hospitals for very different reasons” (103).

I wouldn’t have expected the more specific anecdotes to be widespread knowledge, but I find it strange that although several of my teachers last decade liked to assign Foucault (especially History of Sexuality), I don’t recall the question of his general relationship to feminism or to women ever coming up. Partly that’s because many of my “theory” teachers were male. Not unrelatedly, that’s also because Foucault is so often read “as theory,” that is, as a decontextualized author removed from his social and biographical context.

Some might attribute this to a generic, timeless “masculine gaze” at work in what we call theory. But that masculine gaze is itself an evolving product of history; Le Doeuff singles out Rousseau’s awful comments about women as a turning point for the worse. So while I do think there’s a lot to be said about the generic or detemporalizing quality of theoretical masculinism, it’s equally important not to dehistoricize Foucault’s attitude towards women, and rather to situate it as carefully as possible in the specific forms of masculinism that characterized his institutional world.

Along these lines, Le Doeuff points out that homosociality among philosophers is partly the product of a pedagogical dynamic that leads teachers to have a fantasmatic desire to produce “heirs”.

One often sees the ‘masters’ (teaching either in a preparatory class or in a university) choosing ‘followers’, that is to say transmitting a flattering image of themselves to some of their pupils. This attitude is part of an important process of over-stimulations which organise the future take-over, and which indicate, often precociously, those who are going to feel ‘called’ (and in fact are) to play a so-called leading role in the philosophical enterprise. The teachers’ sexist and socio-cultural prejudices take on a considerable importance in this period of philosophical apprenticeship. Many women are aware of the unconscious injustice of numerous teachers; young men who have been selected ‘followers’, often, moreover, for obscure reasons, while women constantly have to fight for recognition. Incidentally, the personal involvement of teachers in this search for an heir apparent needs to be analysed. Perhaps this too is a question of an avatar, this time ‘from man to man’, of lack which torments the master and which, in the ‘man to woman’ case leads to a search for female admirers. This sexist distribution of favouritism certainly has to be denounced, but the mere existence of this type of behaviour must be criticised first. Besides, it would be useful to investigate the precise moment in the school or university course at which the teachers’ sexist prejudices are at their most effective as an instrument of selection. My impression is that it occurs later than the selection based on socio-cultural criteria. [English trans., p.9]

I wonder if anyone has ever done the study that Le Doeuff proposes — a study of the moment of sexism’s maximum efficacy in a larger sequence of social exclusions.

She was born in Morocco (and has had to think plenty about eluding the “diversity” pigeonhole); I’ve long been struck by her charisma as a public speaker (which isn’t to say that her political projects have always been unproblematic, needless to say).

In any case, I came across a recent interview in which she makes an interesting comment on the cultural value of education in France:

I’ll transcribe:

— Vous êtes la première femme ministre nationale de l’Education dans la République. On a un problème avec les femmes en politique!

— Ça va mieux quand même! Non mais je commence toujours par faire un diagnostique qui se veut relativement positif, parce que sinon, c’est déprimant et jsuis pas là (?) pour être décliniste. Je fais pas partie des gens — et il y en a plein dans le paysage politique actuel — qui croient que c’était mieux autrefois. Euh non. Par exemple sur la question que vous m’êtes posée, autrefois, les femmes, elles étaient nulle part. Le fait qu’il a fallu attendre 2014 pour avoir une femme Ministre de l’Education, ce sur quoi ça en dit long, c’est en fait comment dans notre pays on perçoit l’éducation. On perçoit l’éducation comme un vrai levier de pouvoir. Et c’est pour ça qu’on n’y a pas mis de femmes. Parce que, malgré tout, on continue à donner le vrai pouvoir aux hommes.

— Vous pensez que c’est pour ça ? Vraiment ?

— Ouais, oui fondamentalement je pense que c’est ça. Même si je pense que parfois ça s’est joué inconsciemment.

In English this comes out to:

— You are the first woman National Minister of Education in the Republic. We have a problem with women in politics!

— Oh, but it’s getting better. No I mean, I always start out with a relatively positive assessment, because otherwise, it’s depressing, and I’m not here to be a defeatist. I’m not one of those people — and there are lots of them in the current political landscape — who believe that formerly it was better. Uh no. For example, with the question you’ve asked me, formerly, women, they were nowhere. And the fact that we had to wait until 2014 to have a woman Minister of Education, it speaks volumes about how our country perceives education. We perceive education as a real instrument of power. And that’s why they didn’t put women there. Because, in spite of everything, they continue to give the real power to the men.

— You think that’s what it is? Really?

— Yeah, yes, basically I think it’s that. Even if I think that sometimes it works unconsciously.

So basically, Vallaud-Belkacem’s view is that it’s because we respect the power of education that we haven’t had a woman minister of education before. Within the familiar patriarchal logic that she evokes, women are by definition low-status, so they must be kept out of roles that are high-status; masculine exclusivity thereby becomes a sign of societal esteem.

The comparative question that immediately comes to my mind is: What’s the gender history of the U.S. equivalent role, the federal Secretary of Education? It turns out (I didn’t know this) that the U.S. Department of Education was created by Carter in 1979-80, and that the very first Secretary of Education was a woman, Shirley Hufstedler. The job was then monopolized by men from 1981-2005; after which there have been two women in office, Margaret Spellings in George W. Bush’s second term and Betsy DeVos under Trump. Nevertheless, neither GWB nor Trump put education at the center of their political or ideological projects (though No Child Left Behind was admittedly a large educational intervention early in GWB’s term).

In short, a cursory comparison seems to confirm Vallaud-Belkacem’s intuition. The United States has had several women Secretaries of Education and simultaneously it values education less as a zone of national politics than France does. This value difference is, however, also partly an organizational artifact, since in France but not in the U.S., public education is directly part of the state apparatus. It seems to make sense that since public education is somewhat decentralized in the U.S. context, the national education bureaucracy would be diminished in symbolic value.

(An aside for French analysts — obviously my claim is not that this political difference is entirely determined by gender, just that the gender difference here is symptomatic. Obviously, the French far right is doing pretty well this year with a woman candidate.)

In any event, I have long been struck by the usually-unmarked masculinity of Marxist theory, in both the United States and France. To draw on my personal experience in the academy, I might mention dominant male figures like Terry Turner, an activist Marxist-structuralist anthropologist who taught me an introduction to Marx’s work in college, or Moishe Postone, who has long led an intimidating Marx seminar at the University of Chicago. In these sorts of seminars, you’re not likely to hear much about gender, and the presumption of universal reason usually seems to lodge just a little too comfortably in the figure of the male teacher. It’s the usual critical theory paradox: ostensibly emancipatory ideas get drenched in the conventional authority of male power.

Now of course I’m not saying that there are no important women Marxist theory people — Nicole Pepperell’s work comes to mind, or Kathi Weeks’ recent The Problem With Work. A little farther back, the 1970s socialist-feminist theory world was one of the most important moments in Marxist theory, with books like The Dialectic of Sex and The Politics of Housework. (Though it is not always clear that most male Marxists have read those books…) And I emphasize that I’m not necessarily singling out the Marxist theory part of the academy as being the worst possible case of masculine power. (Though that would be a depressing comparative analysis which I haven’t undertaken.)

But.

The masculinism of Marxist theory continues in the present. And it is a problem.  A not-just-historical problem.

As a case in point, consider this new essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism” by a political philosopher, Samuel Freeman. Freeman’s essay is a review of three books about the Frankfurt School, all three written by men (Stuart Jeffries, the German Stefan Müller-Doohm, and Peter Gordon). The reviewer is a man. Every single person mentioned in the review is male, except for Hannah Arendt in a footnote. And a quick look at Freeman’s five other book reviews in the New York Review of Books shows that he has only ever deigned to write about fellow male authors.

Gender avalanche. Is that a thing?

Perhaps I should note that Freeman himself is not a Marxist. I hadn’t heard of him before I read this review, but he seems to be a Rawlsian, to judge by his book publications. Rawls’ work, not incidentally, got denounced by at least one card-carrying Marxist philosopher as “an ideological rationalization of mid-twentieth century American welfare state liberalism” — and not surprisingly, Freeman’s seemingly favorite member of the Frankfurt School is Habermas. This on the grounds that “as John Rawls said to me, he is also the first major German philosopher since Kant to endorse and conscientiously defend liberalism and constitutional democracy.”

Freeman predictably goes on to write — in a non-class-conscious way that is entirely out of keeping with this topic — that “We may sometimes lament capitalist excesses and be bothered by the emptiness of consumerism, but few of us condemn capitalism as a moral corruption of the self that prevents us from realizing true human values or from knowing the truth about ourselves and our social relations.” It is only in the last paragraph that he concedes that the current Trump-Republican program might push us back towards thinking about a Frankfurt School-esque analysis of authoritarianism and capitalism.

OK, so Freeman isn’t “really a Marxist” (the gist of his essay is essentially “Marx + Frankfurt School for Dummies,” incidentally, with a strong liberal bias). It would nevertheless be pointless to draw too strict a line between the “official Marxists” and people like Freeman who seem to want to become public spokesmen for Marxism, as the latter role is already a form of participation in the marxian universe of discourse. And it’s that entire social universe of Marxist/marxian theory that is way less feminist and more masculine than it should be.

In Freeman’s defense… Actually, I’m having a hard time thinking of much to say in Freeman’s defense. It’s 2017. Nothing about feminism is really settled (and philosophy qua discipline has immense problems with sexism and sexual violence) but I find it a lamentable commentary on Freeman that he didn’t seem to notice the blatant masculinism of his own discourse, or of the Marxist tradition he is commenting on. And it’s a sad commentary on the New York Review of Books, moreover, that their editorial process evidently does not preclude publishing texts like this.

Total self-consciousness is manifestly impossible. That doesn’t make minimal self-consciousness an unreasonable standard to insist on, whatever one’s gender.

The actual data (from 2011) is quite revealing as well: women are 57.6% of French public university undergraduates and Master’s students, 48% of doctoral students, 42.4% of junior faculty (maîtres.ses de conférences), only 22.5% of senior faculty (professeur.es des universités), and only 14.8% of university presidents. (French University presidents are elected from among the permanent faculty, so it makes more sense to put them on this scale than you might think.)

I’m fond of this form of demographic analysis. By themselves, gender ratios (and other relative demographics) don’t always tell you that much, but when you can show that there is a clear trend across a hierarchy (e.g., women are progressively filtered out at higher levels), a series of gender balances suddenly becomes a clear illustration of a much broader process of gendered discrimination.

Incidentally, the page in question is generally devoted to anti-sexist “advice for academic men” (borrowed loosely from this English original text), some of which is so painfully obvious as to make one despair that it actually needs saying. For instance, “don’t reduce women to their appearance,” “share the administrative work,” and “listen to women.”

In 1992, Jacques Derrida gave Osvaldo Muñoz an interview which concluded with a traditional ‘Proust questionnaire’. If this text, meant for the daily El País, was in the end not published, this is perhaps because Derrida deemed it a bit too revealing:

What are the depths of misery for you?: To lose my memory.

Where would you like to live?: In a place to which I can always return, in other words from which I can leave.

For what fault do you have the most indulgence?: Keeping a secret which one should not keep.

Favourite hero in a novel: Bartleby.

Your favourite heroines in real life?: I’m keeping that a secret.

Your favourite quality in a man?: To be able to confess that he is afraid.

Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought.

Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.

Your favourite occupation: Listening.

Who would you like to have been?: Another who would remember me a bit.

My main character trait?: A certain lack of seriousness.

My dream of happiness?: To continue dreaming.

What would be my greatest misfortune?: Dying after the people I love.

What I would like to be: A poet.

What I hate more than anything?: Complacency and vulgarity.

The reform I most admire: Everything to do with the difference between the sexes.

The natural gift I would like to have: Musical genius.

How I would like to die: Taken completely by surprise.

My motto: Prefer to say yes.

[From Derrida: A Biography, p. 418]

One could say many things about this. But for now, I mainly want to observe that I am struck by the open sexism of admiring “thought” as a woman’s virtue while singling out “vulnerability” (in essence) as his preferred “quality in a man.” Of course, one of Peeters’ interviewees remarks that “In spite of his love of women and his closeness to feminism, he still had a bit of a misogynistic side, like many men of his generation.”

In cartoon fashion, with computer-generated, half-robotic voices, the video shows what happens when a young woman student comes to her professor’s office. She is there to ask for a letter of recommendation to graduate school in English literature, and the professor tries to talk her out of it, citing a host of practical and experiential reasons why it is “not a good idea” to go to graduate school. But the professor discovers at each turn that the student is incapable of hearing her objections. Rather than reconsidering her decision, the student takes every opportunity to voice her ardent desire for a clichéd “life of the mind.”

Professor: So you said you want to meet with me today.
Student: Yes. I am going to grad school in English.
Professor: No. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Student: Yes. I am going to be a college professor.
Professor: Do you see where I am teaching? We’re in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. Do you want to move to the middle of nowhere to teach?
Student: I got an A on my Hamlet paper. I have brilliant thoughts about the theme of death in literature.
Professor: In all of literature? What field do you intend to specialize in?
Student: All of it. I’m going to be a college professor. I’m going to write smart things about death in literature.
Professor: Do you know how many admissions committees are going to laugh at your application?

We begin with a familiar enough institutional situation. The student has a plan for her academic future, for which she needs her professor’s help. The professor dislikes the plan, and tries to switch scripts to a different, more advisory encounter, where her superior expert knowledge and her moral authority might trump her student’s wishes. The student, in turn, responds to her professor’s discouragement the only way she can. She does not dispute the facts, since she has no resources for doing so; nor does she dispute the professor’s moral authority, since the very premise of this encounter is that she admires and covets her professor’s elevated role. Instead, when the student’s affirmative “Yes” meets an immediate “No” from above, she responds by gazing steadily back at the professor and flatly contradicting her in turn, standing by her image of an academic future, reiterating her desire. Neither party wants to change her views. They are immediately at a standoff.

An academic viewer of the video is, I suspect, likely to spontaneously see the student as embodying youthful naivety. After all, her beliefs about academia are plainly absurd. Her claim to have “brilliant thoughts about the theme of death in literature,” for instance, only reveals her woeful ignorance of the importance of academic specialization and expertise in graduate study. The professor, by contrast, displays some first-hand knowledge of graduate student life, of things that make admissions committees “laugh at your application.” She comes across as the voice of blunt institutional realism. The pleasure here for young American academics, I suspect, has much to do with getting to see naivety put in its place, laughing at the ridiculousness of the student’s reasoning. Academic viewers get the chance to identify with the seeming voice of knowledge, confirmed in their awareness of all the reasons why academic life is complex and terrible.

It would, however, be deeply inadequate to interpret the video as an encounter between the naive, typical young student and the older, wiser professor. I would argue that in fact the scholarly point of view is not embodied by the character, the representation of the professor, but rather is embedded in the gaze of the viewer, the structure of the situation. Instead of describing a confrontation between two subject, as it may seem to do at first glance, the video stages a conflict that occurs within the subjectivities of today’s academic humanists. Consider the penultimate soliloquy of the video:

Professor: You will have a career where people will constantly demand that you justify to them why you exist, and you will begin to question the nature of your own existence. You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation.

It is apparent that neither the professor nor the student has much individuality; they are spokespeople for social types, the everywomen of today’s humanistic disciplines. But what becomes clear as the video progresses is that these two figures are less two separate characters than two distinct moments in a single academic lifecourse. They represent two moments in a shared social destiny that functions through mimesis and overidentification of the young with the old. This structural identity between young and old, I would argue, is made clear poetically by the increasingly ambiguous use of you, which eventually comes to designate both the professor and the student. “You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation”: you in this context refers at once to the student in the future, to the professor in the present, and perhaps to the viewer as well, whose split subjectivity is only concealed by momentary overidentification with the character of the professor.

The scene reminds us that recognition and overidentification always work in more than one direction. The work of phantasmatic overidentication is obvious in the case of the student, who comes into the office wanting to become the person she imagines her teacher already is, a person who (in the student’s words) is “going to write smart things,” who “will inspire students to think critically about literature,” who has “potential as a literary scholar.” But what becomes clear from this later speech is that the professor recognizes herself in the student as well, indeed recognizes herself only too clearly, as she despairingly tries to warn the student of the probable existential costs of a hopeless scholarly career, a “complete waste” of a life.

Again, it is inadequate to understand this encounter as a moment of mutual misrecognition between two subjects, because what we have here is not a depiction of two selves meeting, but a structural diagram of academics’ split subjectivity. Consider: the student is not the incarnation of a non-academic come to mount an attack on the professoriate, she is something much more uncanny — a projection of the cruel optimism and attachment buried within the academic self. Her uncanny identity with the professor is precisely the source of the professor’s discomfort. Indeed, one might speculate that part of the attraction of the video, for an academic viewer, is that it allows academics to externalize and objectify their own painful attachment to their degraded profession, and then to experience the vicarious pleasures of disavowal via the professor’s increasingly bitter attacks on the student. Faced with her student’s refusal to listen, the professor eventually resorts to incredulous insults: “I cannot respect you,” “You cannot seriously be this stupid!” When we recall that the professor deeply identifies with her student, we realize that these statements are actually disavowed self-criticism. They amount to exclaiming, “How can I be this stupid?” and “I cannot respect myself!”

This disavowed self-criticism is a symptom of the professor’s internal and external contradictions. She says that academic work is impossible, a “complete waste” with “no health benefits,” “slave labor for the university.” But she herself remains deeply committed to it, being a consummate professional, as we will see confirmed in a moment. This initially seems mysterious, because everything she has to say about academia is negative. Why stick around if she hates it, we might wonder? One might respond that her negativity is merely the product of experience; certainly, as I noted earlier, she has a more materialist, more institutional understanding of academic life than the student does. She notes that “less than half of PhDs get a tenure-track position,” asking “Who in the world will be willing to follow you to Alaska so you can teach at Juneau Community College?” In the final analysis, though, what first seems to be an institutional, materialist perspective actually encodes a phantasmatic and ideological relationship to the milieu.

Professor: Oh my god. Life is not a movie script. Humanities in higher education is under attack. SUNY-Albany just cut their French and Italian programs. The Tea Party may take control of Congress. They believe all college professors are radical Marxists and they are scheming up ways to have us all fired.

It becomes apparent here that the professor’s views of academic life are themselves deeply exasperated and exaggerated, skewed by class anger and a prevailing discourse on professional vulnerability. Her overarching reading of her institutional situation, that “humanities in higher education are under attack,” is itself a totalizing and excessive metanarrative. As we have seen earlier, humanities enrollments have been relatively stable for some time across the United States, and while it is true that a handful of humanities programs have been closed, there has never been any objective danger of “all professors getting fired.” One can get a sense of the generalizing ideology at work by comparing the claim that “humanities in higher education is under attack” (in general) with its supporting evidence: that one university out of 7559 has cut its French and Italian programs. The professor perceives a global menace, but in reality, her disciplinary location would likely involve a much more diverse set of local threats, stabilities, ambiguities, and ongoing institutional work, like the work of advising that we are witnessing.

Indeed, as far as one can judge from the scene, this professor’s job may be bad, but she keeps doing it all the same. The worst risk for her is not getting fired, in the end, but having to confront her own alienation from her work and from her ideals. Not surprisingly, this alienation seems to become palpable for her at the moment of encountering an Other who wants to become her. Her response then exaggerates external menace and hostility, as if to camouflage and rationalize her internal ambivalence about her job. If her professional ambivalence is externalized in one direction onto the student, it is also externalized in another direction onto the institution, as if the situation, not the subject, was what was bad and compromised.

In the last scene of this video, there is a sort of ideological climax:

Professor: …You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation.
Student: So will you write me a recommendation?
Professor: Yes. Give me the forms. I will have it for you by Monday.
Student: Thank you. I find you very inspiring.
Professor: Please get the frack out of my office. (She blinks.)

For the character of the professor, this is the ideological moment of the whole encounter, the moment where she can no longer fend off ideological interpellation, where she believes she sees through all the false premises and promises of an academic life, but fulfills her role in academic reproduction anyway. In this moment, her own repressed attachment to the structural optimism that organizes academic careers becomes apparent through the very form of her machinic, compulsive relation to her own praxis, as she reverts to type (though, in this story, she was always already her type). Asked if she will write a recommendation, she finally becomes pragmatic, efficient. “I will have it for you by Monday,” she says. The student then thanks her and calls her inspiring: this looks like a ritual false compliment, but in the last analysis is just an accurate statement of the reality of the student’s fantasy, since structurally, she does find her professor very inspiring. And the coda that follows, where the professor cannot prevent herself from venting her bitterness at the student – “Please get the frack out of my office” – is the moment that confirms the futility of academic self-consciousness. Her curse is an impotent gesture of rebellion that relieves frustration, but changes nothing.

The professor, in sum, inhabits something like the cynical stance that Peter Sloterdijk calls enlightened false consciousness, a state of “[knowing] oneself to be without illusions and yet dragged down by the ‘power of things’ ” (1984:193). The student on the other hand is in just the opposite position: she inhabits ideology wishfully, and she voices a sort of dream logic, where her wish (to become an academic) becomes feasible merely by being pictured. Hers is a logic which is impervious both to rational counter-argument and to emotional appeals, a logic which depends on overidentifying with her idealized image of the professor while ignoring any unwelcome features of this Other. As I suggested earlier, the form of this wishful subjectivity is a logic of sheer repetition, which only knows how to affirm its fantasy, over and over, mechanically.

There is a dialectic here between fantasy and institution; each is the condition of the other. The student’s intolerable affirmativeness is coupled to an insistent instrumentalism. She wants to be a college professor; and for that, she needs her letter of recommendation. And in the end, she will get it. On one level, all that we see here is a standard institutional negotiation about the terms of her instrumental request for a letter. But, as we have seen, the professor tries – and fails – to resist this instrumental request on the grounds of her own reasoned analysis of the situation. On a second level, then, the video illustrates the impotence of intellectual argument and critical knowledge in the face of fantasy; all the intellectual arguments fail, one after the next, to make the fantasy even budge.

Yet there is a telling irony about these fantasies: far from being deeply original, deeply individual inventions, they themselves are sheer institutional products. Just what is the common denominator of the student’s stated passions for “thinking critically about literature,” for “working hard,” for collaborative learning,” for “inspiring students,” for having “potential as a scholar,” for wanting a “life of the mind”? Nothing if not that they are all bits of American liberal arts marketing rhetoric; they are identical to the vague platitudes that humanistic scholars generally produce when asked to give a public rationalization of liberal education. And so in fact we are confronted here with a doubly uncanny image. Not only is the repressed ambivalence of the humanities professor revealed here by the presence of the naive student who wants to become her, but also the deep, sustaining fantasies about the goodness and value of humanistic scholarship turn out to be structurally inauthentic, the internal echoes of our own academic marketing discourse. In short, the student is uncanny because she is someone who appears to truly believe the platitudes about critical thinking, etc., that we put in our mission statements, someone who demonstrates that our fantasies about the fundamental worth of scholarship are fantasies that come from outside.

In the end, like all successful ideological projects, the video works to make the real into the tolerable, to mediate objective social and subjective contradictions by translating them into enjoyable fictions with easy objects for our displaced ambivalence. In order to do this, as I have tried to show, it inadvertently dramatizes our professional repressions of our own ambivalence, our disavowal of our naive and comical optimism about the life of the mind; and it must re-enact many of the dynamics of projection, identification, disavowal, and disgust that are at work in contemporary precarious academic subjectivity. In the end, what one identifies with as a young academic humanist is perhaps the wretched, inescapable impossibility of the situation.

The political moral of this story is quietist: it suggests that there is nothing in the end to do but live through the worst of the absurdities we are offered, continuing to do our jobs after incredulity has set in. It is in this sense a perfect illustration of the fact that today’s “crisis of the humanities” is less a matter of outright disappearance than of progressive alienation, downclassing and internal stratification.

A poster for a film that was apparently about the exploitation of women. I saw it across the canal from our interview.

One time I was interviewing a feminist activist, a friend of mine who had been in France a few years, who originally came from Brazil. At one point, we talked about the connection between her relationship with her boyfriend and her politics. It was interesting and sad.

Un des points difficiles était le féminisme, elle dit.
– Il dit que je suis devenue obsédée par l’oppression des femmes, que je la vois partout, que je ne vois que ça, que je ne pense qu’à ça.
– C’est ridicule ça, je dis.
– Enfin, elle continue, je suis de plus en plus deçue qu’il réagit comme ça… L’oppression des femmes est partout.
– Il est militant comme toi ?
– Ben il n’est pas militant mais il est de gauche et nous sommes d’accords sur plein de questions…

Feminism had become a major issue for them, she told me.
“He says that I’ve become obsessed by the oppression of women, that I say it everywhere, that I can’t see anything else, that I don’t think about anything else.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I say.
“In the end,” she continues, “I’m more and more disappointed that that’s how he reacts… The oppression of women is everywhere.”
“Is he an activist like you?” I ask.
“Well, he’s not an activist, but he’s on the left, and we agree about a lot…”

He had gone back to Brazil before her, and she said she was going to see him, but that she wasn’t sure what would happen. I need to rediscover myself, she said, to be independent. We are absolutely dependent.

We talked a while longer about activism at Paris 8, but she eventually had to hurry to get to an NPA meeting in Paris.

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 (relative) 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.

Alongside the structural sexism of this whole outlook, there’s something slightly poignant about the fact that what this man 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. 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 men 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.

Structure here is the man’s incapacity to see shoe-shining as not abject. Structure is this unexplained incapacity to shift contexts. Since shoeshining used to be something just done among men, accepted as an odd form of masculine care labor a bit like a pedicure. Shoeshining started to feel bad to him when it was an uncompensated service to a woman.

Someone in the comments section of the article asked if she (I think she) could drop her shoes off outside the man’s office door. But she was joking.

Jokes show us that something real is at stake.

Masculine consciousness here is so deeply about shame and managing shame. As if what underlay this whole system of masculine values was a systemic fear of women and a phobic hatred of being in their shoes. Over which humanistic values are overlaid, like upholstery for a lethal structure.