[feministformations-blog]

Poesía by Alli Warren, in issue 28.2 of Feminist Formations

[feministformations-blog]

Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University

Amber Jamilla Musser 

On a hazy day at the end of August when humidity clings stubbornly to the late summer air, I don a bright sleeveless sheath dress and smile to greet my students. I welcome them to class, describe the course’s objectives, outline what I expect from them, and usually wrap things up with a short exercise. “Write your sexual autobiography,” I tell them. “What sorts of things did you include? These are the types of topics that we will be discussing all semester.” I open my course this way in order to help my students make connections between the personal and the political. I want them to engage with the material intellectually, yet I also want them to feel the myriad ways that knowledge matters.

As their instructor, I am aware that I am standing in for a body of knowledge. I am referring not only to the fact that I select the course’s content, but also to the ways that my body speaks in the classroom and the work that it performs for the university. As a Black queer woman who teaches and researches in sexuality studies, identity politics within the institution and within sexuality studies conspire to produce me as a specimen—that is to say, a commodity, static and rare. I use the word specimen here because it draws attention to the ways that money, science, and desire intersect to confer value on an object. Additionally, these multiple valences allow me to highlight the differences among these processes of objectification. That this feeling comes from sources that are often assumed to speak opposing languages—one of liberation and the other of the corporation—is no longer surprising, given the plethora of incisive critiques of the university and identity politics. Rather than rehearse these arguments, this article teases out the affective currents that underlie these overlapping forms of objectification to show the labors of institutionalization, and the ways that they impinge on the body by looking at university rhetoric on diversity and inclusion, women’s studies’ insistence on intersectionality and visible difference, and the dynamics of the classroom.

Diversity Initiatives and the Commodification of Difference

In conventional narratives of change in the university, the civil rights movements of the 1960s incited student activists, who in turn put pressure on the university to change things. Students occupied buildings, demanded more faculty of color, more financial aid and better advising for minority students, and courses and programs that would shift the canon in order to recognize the powerful shifts in knowledge that were taking place (Yamane 2002). In this narrative, these movements reoriented the university to make it more responsive to the reality of its students and the world in which it existed. These protests marked a pivotal moment when difference was recognized and revolution, rupture, and change seemed possible. Indeed, there are two deeply intertwined visible legacies of this moment: the development of women’s and ethnic studies, and the university’s investment in diversity.

Roderick A. Ferguson (2012) voices deep criticism of this turn toward diversity. Upending the conventional narrative, he argues that the university worked to conceal the deeper systemic ruptures that these protests aimed for—redistribution of economic and material resources, epistemological change, and an overt politicization of knowledge—in favor of incorporating difference into the existing system of power. He writes that “[w]hereas modes of power once disciplined difference in the universalizing names of canonicity, nationality, or economy, other operations of power were emerging that would discipline through a seemingly alternative regard for difference and through a revision of the canon, national identity, and the market” (6). Indeed, Ferguson’s project in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference is to simultaneously trace the university’s framing of minority difference as an asset to the university, and to find moments within these struggles that might be taken up for different revolutionary aims. 

In these narratives, the university’s interest in diversity cuts both ways: on the one hand, it creates a space for the acknowledgment of difference and the accompanying epistemological shifts that grappling with it entails; on the other, in becoming something that the university prizes, diversity works as a tool to discipline subjects—making them more aware, as Ferguson says, of their place within the particular economies of minority difference, and making that difference matter in ways that do not disrupt the prevailing system. He writes that

[t]his new interdisciplinary biopower placed social differences in the realm of calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life. For the American academy, the American state, and an Americanized capital in the sixties and seventies, the question would then become one of incorporating difference for the good rather than disruption of hegemony.

What Ferguson has described is precisely the way that minority difference became fetishized within the university. In this narrative, minority subjects are specimens in that they are valued for their difference. In large part this valuation occurs because possession of this visible difference reflects well on the university. Within the context of the university, the presence of minority difference signals a particular commitment to education, justice, and social good. Lisa Lowe (1996, 41) describes this work as an “educative function of socializing subjects into the state.” Within an economy that prizes acquisition and variety, the minority as specimen operates as a particular commodity; minorities signal a particular investment in the project of diversity, even as representation is not equivalent to an actual epistemological shift.

Because visible difference is important to the university, it takes great pains to invest in it intellectually and socially with a complicated matrix of bodies in-between. As universities moved to incorporate ethnic and women’s studies onto their campuses, ad hoc courses about women and x, or race and x (x being previously predominately male/white parts of the canon), often became formal parts of the university during the 1970s and ’80s, complete with tenure lines and official status as programs (or in some cases departments) with majors and minors.1 As the visible intellectual arms of a university’s project in diversity, women’s studies and ethnic studies hires are also expected to align with the university’s commitment to hiring minority bodies. What this means is that despite the fact that many scholars within women’s studies might see their intellectual work as attempting to disrupt what we think we know about these knowledges, to impart the ability to think critically, challenge sedimented discourses, and continually trouble assumptions not just about women, gender, or sexuality, but about relationality, social structures, and ethics, the university wants to see this work represented in particular bodies.

Programs and departments reinforce this desire for knowledge to come in particular packages. This leads to a proliferation of job ads for race and sexuality, say, hoping to hire scholars of color. This means that people who represent minority difference on an intellectual and embodied level perform much of the university’s work on diversity. This concentration of resources on difference is made even denser by the fact that many of these positions are located in programs that are marginal to the institution. This marginality is felt through funding, resources, few faculty lines, and stretched administrative support, all made more difficult by the recruiting of these faculty members into other administrative positions in the university that speak particularly to issues of diversity—such is the paucity of figureheads for these jobs. This means that there are few people doing the labor of diversity for the institution. Further, within the context of ethnic and women’s studies departments and programs, universities can point to the presence of minority faculty and staff members without necessarily dwelling on the larger issues of access and knowledge production that universities must still address. Lowe (1996, 41) writes that “[e]xploiting the notion of ‘multiculturalism,’ the university can refer to the study of ethnic cultures in its claim to be an institution to which all racial and ethnic minority groups have equal access and in which all are represented, while masking the degree to which the larger institution still fails to address the needs of populations of color.” While the presence of minority students, faculty members, and staff is an important aspect of changing the face of the university, there is more to recognizing difference. When change only happens at the level of representation it highlights the commodification of minority bodies.

The university’s social experiments in diversity are similarly fraught. Early experiments during the 1980s and ’90s brought the advent of multiculturalism. These centers, originally conceived as a way to recognize and celebrate difference within the student body so that students might learn from one another, instead became places where difference was highlighted and a certain type of de facto segregation emerged. As a project, multiculturalism was criticized as a tactic to manage rather than engage minority populations because it produced circumscribed spaces for difference to exist without attempting to interrogate it. This naturalized the idea that difference occurred in certain bodies and would manifest in certain ways, without examining social structures or conditions. The language of multiculturalism is tolerance and segregation, which works to maintain the status quo. In their work on tolerance, Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen (2003, 45) critique tolerance as “exclusionary, hierarchical, and ultimately nondemocratic” because it suggests that one must overcome difference rather than work to actually produce commonality. In her critique of the ideology, Sara Ahmed (2000, 103) writes that “[s]uch a positing of originary difference works to fetishize difference: what is concealed is precisely the histories of determination in which differences come to mark out terrains, subjects and bodies.” In Ahmed’s analysis we see that the ideology of multiculturalism cultivated the idea that difference could be set apart from the university’s other concerns. 

Currently, universities have shifted focus away from multiculturalism toward an ethos of diversity and inclusion (Moses and Chang 2006). In this model, diversity encompasses more than racial minorities: it includes sexuality, gender, socioeconomic factors, geography, religion, and so on. This new model is exemplified by The Chronicle of Higher Education’s discussion of “the evolution of diversity” in which Stacy Patton leads a group of deans in conversation by recounting a conversation with a man who argued that diversity meant more than race: “On the surface, I’m a white guy, but I come from a working-class background and I’m Irish Catholic” (2015). As we can see from this example, diversity and inclusion become modes of recognizing the importance of difference in a community while not actually articulating it as separate; it is a way to make everyone different and have everyone learn from one another. The origin point for this rhetoric is usually taken to be the 2003 Grutter v. Bol-linger affirmative-action case and President Bush’s remarks on its outcome: “A college education should teach respect and understanding and goodwill. And these values are strengthened when students live and learn with people from many backgrounds” (Moses and Chang 6). The benefit in university-speak is an enriched educational environment and the idea that the playing field could be level by acknowledging these forms of difference and taking them into account. As practiced by the university, however, it is difficult to separate discussions of inclusivity and diversity from neoliberalism’s prevailing ethos of color-blindness and individualism. The university’s embrace of everyone is meant to erase structural causes of inequality in order to ensure that everyone has the “right to equal opportunity.” Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin (2008, 11) describe this ideology as “promising a tentative yet perhaps final recognition of the inescapability of difference … diversity implies a value-based project of transformation towards the irreducible and irrevocable.” The sleight of hand that wishes right into access also ignores what will happen to these minoritarian subjects—students, faculty, staff—in favor of emphasizing the university’s generosity.

Although diversity has come to describe a process of educating everyone, it still hinges on highlighting those whose difference can be made visible, and making them perform the labor that Ahmed’s (2012) interviews with those subjects deemed “the race person” indicate. Inclusivity means that certain bodies are more desirable because they make visible an impulse toward change, even as they do not necessarily produce any movement beyond this visibility. Their presence confers status because they are rare, desirable, and visible.

My own experience on the academic job market illuminates this desire for visible markers of difference. Aside from the notorious tightening of the job market in the humanities in general and for theorists in particular, I felt simultaneously too visible and invisible during my time looking for an academic position. While women’s studies has historically been friendly to LGBTQ individuals, I wondered if my presentation as a normatively feminine woman rendered me invisible as queer and in this way not necessarily less qualified to teach sexuality studies, but less “useful” as a community member who could not be counted on to necessarily perform the labor of mentoring LGBTQ students or being a visible ally. In smaller departments and programs the burden of representation felt especially acute. If they could not tell I was queer, how could students, many of whom look to faculty members who are “out” for guidance, recognition, or simply empathy? On the other hand, this invisibility meant that they were also worried about what I would be looking for at these places on a personal level. So, there was a lot of energy at campus visits articulating the ways in which a particular campus was friendly for people in a variety of personal circumstances. These conversations were both nice and awkward. I did not want to shut down certain avenues of conversation—for instance, the public schools here are really great—because to do so would be to reveal information about my personal life that could (in theory) lead to discrimination. The wideness of topics also, however, made it difficult to see how I would actually fit in: Would people assume that I was straight, and what could I do about that?

This problem is the counterpart to what Robyn Wiegman (2000) describes as the necessity of queer academics to produce a public persona in line with the presumptive heterosexuality of the institution. She writes that

[w]hat’s important here is not to dismiss the categorical dilemma that the queer academic subject faces, where resisting the normative codes and social forms is to render oneself fully (as opposed to partially) outside what we might call the academy’s social mode of production; to acquiesce, through silence or misleading speech, is to defer but not to escape the problematic of expectation and disclosure.

In Wiegman’s analysis the queer academic can become isolated because the means of establishing affective bonds with colleagues is often along lines of normative kinship. Working through this issue from the lens of making “difference” a priority as it is in diversity work, the onus is placed on maintaining visible difference, but cultural sameness. This means performing all of the labor that Wiegman describes, but doing so “as a queer.”

My own personal narrative becomes complicated according to lines of race. It is difficult to discern what role race plays in marking my queerness invisible, especially given the long historical divide between Black studies and queer studies (which scholars are now working to bridge) and the general invisibility of Black women of color. As a woman of color, however, an identity that is thrust upon me with much vigor once search committees laid eyes on me, there was an entirely different set of issues. Visibility produced the identity, and what came with it were a host of expectations around personal and scholarly allegiances. Complicated relationships to blackness were disallowed and the rhetoric of authenticity appeared. People assumed that I would want to be a faculty liaison to the Black Students Association, that I would want affiliation with African American studies, that what was most important to me was the number of other Black faculty. There were conspiratorial whispers about Black people taking over the institution, as though we were necessarily aligned because of historical patterns of discrimination. In short, people expected my work on race to follow particular identity formations, and I felt as though I was expected to behave and perform in certain ways. As a result I felt caught among not feeling like people thought I was “authentic” enough, feeling pressure to perform authenticity, and feeling torn between disavowing that role and also desperately wanting a job and so wanting to keep that visibility because it marked me as a desirable commodity.

This abbreviated narrative illuminates some of the affective notes that diversity produces, in addition to highlighting the tensions between visibility and invisibility. Inclusivity means making difference visible, but what counts as visibility is dependent on historical variables. In this case the suturing of gender transgression with queerness and blackness with heterosexuality, and the assumption that blackness produces a particular political and social coherence. That Black visibility is produced so unproblematically made me chafe at the invisibility of my queerness, even as the very project of visibility is problematic. My ambivalence in fully taking on blackness and my desire to be read as queer also have to do with longer histories of femme invisibility in any number of situations and my own personal history of racialization as an immigrant. The fact that my own work touches on the malleability of these categories and their constructedness is not an irony lost on me. Despite the fact that I was being approached for my academic work, the ways that my body signals diversity has also been a boon to committees eager to tap into special funds for minority recruitment or fill minority positions on various committees. This desirability and its imagined transparency are part of the commodification of the specimen. In my case, the market demands visible racial difference, which means reward, work, and difficulty in figuring out where my “invisible” sexual difference places me.

The difference in visibilities of race and sexuality is not surprising. Dana Y. Takagi (1999) has written about the need to further incorporate sexuality studies into Asian American studies so as to prevent the disaggregation of these forms of knowledge. In “Maiden Voyage” she argues that the assumption that race is always visible poses particular difficulties for thinking about the intersections of racial identity and sexual identity, writing that

[t]here are numerous ways that being “gay” is not like being “Asian.” … there is a quality of voluntarism in being gay/lesbian that is usually not possible as an Asian American. One has the option to present oneself as “gay” or “lesbian,” or alternatively, to attempt to “pass,” or to stay in “the closet,” that is, to hide one’s sexual preference. However, these same options are not available to most racial minorities in face-to-face interactions with others.

The visibility of race produces a different set of assumptions from the visibility of sexuality; whereas making one’s sexuality visible is assumed to be a matter of agency, one’s racial identity is understood as a matter of external perception. These differences matter when one begins to assess the work of diversity.

Because projects of diversity and inclusion are based on making difference visible, I have to make my queerness apparent. Otherwise, I am continually expected to do work only on behalf of my Blackness—a form of difference that is thought to be easily legible. Although I spoke about it in terms of affective labor vis-à-vis the job market and how one could or should position oneself as a desirable candidate; on the job, it actually just means more labor. Each identity category has its own groups on campus: for example, the Black Students Association, LGBTQ Caucus, Mixed Race Student Group, Association of Female Professors, Leadership Initiative for Faculty of Color, LGBTQ social group for faculty. I used to joke that the women’s groups wanted to get lunch, the Black groups coffee, and the LGBT groups drinks, which was my way of injecting humor into a situation that actually requires a great deal of affective labor, which is the currency of diversity. First, one must ensure that these groups exist so as to signal the university’s commitment to diversity and its acknowledgment through the existence of these groups that people who are considered “diverse” might need particular forms of support and outreach. Then, there is the matter of providing said support (without any actual training except in the “university of life”) to students, staff, and colleagues. This labor is uncompensated except for the fuzzy feeling one might get from being continually told that the “contribution” one is making to the university is through the embodiment of one’s identity. Within the world of women’s studies, Wiegman (2000, drawing on Dale Bauer) refers to this as the “second shift”:

This second shift comes in two primary forms: that of joint appointments, which feature a double burden of teaching and service that is rarely compensated (and more often than not a liability in tenure and advancement); and that of interdisciplinary affiliations, which subordinate the labor that scholars perform in women’s studies programs to the intellectual and institutional priorities of the traditional academic department.2

This is the work a specimen performs for the university. But at what cost? Negative emotions, such as shame, disavowal, or anger, that one might experience at having an ambivalent relationship to a fraught identity category—a relationship that the university is banking on being public because of its push toward visibility—must be negotiated on one’s own time. Positive emotions like pride are turned into material labor (one takes on this administrative duty, one hangs out with these students on one’s own time). All of this is also on top of the general public burden placed on these identity categories through the public’s (including the university’s) policing of behavior and other forms of discrimination.

Yet, at the same time, the university is saving a lot of money by having these bodies take on this extra labor; people may do this out of love, necessity, or obligation—or a combination of the three. These bodies labor in particular ways, making the university a smart economic participant for hiring visible minorities, but this university labor can make it difficult to perform intellectual labor, making retention and promotion difficult. While the visibility of these identities confers privilege and desirability within the university’s neoliberal ethos, the underside is exploitation. Diversity work is still often seen as excessive and outside of the structure of the university, which means that there is additional affective labor that the university assumes minority subjects will perform because of various forms of identification and investments in projects of difference. Diversity and inclusion often mean that it becomes the job of those who have been structurally oppressed to illuminate those oppressions.

The Time Is Now: Intersectionality, Queer of Color Critique, and Diversity

Thinking race, gender, and sexuality together have enabled people to see multiple interlocking structures of oppression, various forms of discrimination and privilege, and new modes of existing in the world. Yet, these intellectual inquiries often become remolded by the project of diversity and inclusion when transferred to the classroom. Here, we see that the legacy of diversity and inclusion also enacts different forms of generational splits whereby what counts as diversity is attached to particular visions of the future and the past. The type of specimen that this reorientation produces is different from the specimen who is rare; rather, this type of specimen is the stagnant. This is the version of the specimen that happens when a part stands in for a whole and a creature is caught and pinned up for display in perpetuity.

One of the first things that I teach in my introduction to women’s studies is intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, sexuality, and so on must be thought together when thinking about forms of oppression. We read Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” (1991) to see the gaps that happen when these variables are thought separately. Students latch onto intersectionality easily and spend much of the remainder of the semester describing anyone’s failure to discuss multiple components of difference as their failure to do intersectional work. They are also eager to point out their own forms of difference—for example, “I am a white lesbian from Chicago”—in order to gesture toward ways of thinking about how these variables play out in their own lives. Intersectionality has become shorthand for “people are complicated and different.” In this formulation we can see the clear link to the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion—intersectionality also includes everyone. In their eagerness to be included in the rubric of intersectionality, however, students often forget to do the accompanying analytic work to show how these different structures actually work together in favor of highlighting the idea that there might be difference afoot. 

In her elegant discussion of the imbrication of intersectionality and the institutionalization of women’s studies, Jennifer C. Nash (2014) argues that women’s studies has almost become synonymous with intersectionality. She writes that

[i]ntersectionality is now celebrated as “the primary figure of political completion in US identity knowledge domains,” as “part of the gender studies canon,” as “a new raison d’etre for doing feminist theory and analysis,” as “the most cutting-edge approach to the politics of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class,” and as “the most important contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far.”3

As women’s studies becomes imagined to be interchangeable with intersectional analysis, Nash argues that intersectionality occupies a temporality of the “never-quite-there”; it is either feminism’s past or feminism’s future. This temporality of the not-quite-there is part of what my students are experiencing. Although they do not know how to frame it in this way, their responses to intersectionality speak to an acknowledgment that the framework as used (especially in nonlegal cases) is endlessly permeable and open to interpretation. Their difficulty in using it to actually address difference speaks to its position as part of feminism’s past. Students, more often than not, tend to position themselves as the future of a discipline, the future of social justice, the future of life, and as such, in their hurry to absorb the mark of difference that intersectionality confers, they consign Black feminism to the past and my own position as a Black queer woman to the side.

While intersectionality began as a mode of inquiry within Black feminism to draw attention to the force of multiple marginalizations, including race, gender, class, and sexuality, as it gained institutional traction it focused more on the intersection of race and gender than on sexuality and class. Nash (2011, 456) argues that “sexuality and class would become largely erased by Black feminist work on multiple marginalization, suggesting that Black women’s lived experiences were constituted solely by the interplay—or intersection—of race and gender.” This focus on race and gender and the particular figure of the Black woman has had several important consequences. As she notes, it “neglects the heterogeneity of ‘black woman’ as a category,” and equates Black feminism almost exclusively with this intersection, which forecloses “explorations of other intersections to a range of related activist-intellectual projects” (ibid.). That is to say, Black women became the sign of marginalization; they were invoked as a trope to consider the multiplicity of marginalization, but the category’s own multitudes were seldom interrogated. My own invisibility as a queer woman is a symptom of this. This invisibility feels like being pushed to the side, but there are other ways that this version of intersectionality leaves me feeling flattened and stuck by constantly reiterating the notion that Black women are “Other.” In part this othering is due to the erasure of heterogeneity from the category of Black woman, but it is also because of the consolidation of the category of [End Page 10] women of color into a singular entity that becomes emblematic of a series of historical and structural oppressions that mark these racialized bodies as the limit of theory and agency (Holland 2012). Institutionalized intersectionality has produced a vision of the woman of color subject as emblematic of oppression at the hands of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism—a subject defined by both her difference and marginalization, a subject perpetually passé.

At a moment when students are clamoring to claim their own swaths of difference, teaching intersectionality can be difficult: on the one hand, intersectionality is easily envisioned as a useful rubric for understanding interlocking nodes of power and how it works on bodies; and on the other, it seems to veer (especially in our current climate) toward a narcissistic examination of self in favor of structure. Student response easily moves toward finding the things that mark them as special, instead of understanding that these moments of difference are emblematic of structures that produce differential access to things and privilege. In rendering Black femininity visible and as what I have previously described as the “fleshy limit of theory,” queerness becomes further invisibilized (Musser 2014, 176): How could a subject who is so clearly of the past actually be part of the new world order? How could the past be so complicated?

In other classes I talk about queer of color critique—another methodology that brings bodies and difference together intellectually. I draw on its resources to make my students see how to think about race and sexuality as epistemological problems rather than merely matters of individual identification. In this regard, queer of color critique is explicit about the over-focus on sexuality (especially LGBTQ identities) within queer theory. Its theorists argue that the foregrounding of sexuality often occurs to the detriment of thinking critically about race. That is to say, race becomes something that one can just leave at the level of visible representation, whereas sexuality is something that is given more depth. Sexuality has been positioned as the space in which rights are most needed precisely because of this invisibility. Chandan Reddy (2011) argues that sexuality studies enacts certain types of silences, writing that “sexuality names the normative frames that organize our disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiries into our past and into contemporary racial capitalism” (20). From the prism of sexuality studies, the structural violences of race are rendered invisible in favor of a focus on the individual rights of sexual minorities; all issues become a question of individual rights in this disciplining gaze. David Eng’s (2010) discussion of colorblindness and queer liberalism makes the stakes of this even broader. Queer liberalism is, he writes,

a contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian US citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law[,] … relies upon the logic of colorblindness in its assertion that racial difference has given way to an abstract US community of individualism and merit.

Here again we see the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion at work in the idea that acknowledging difference is what it takes to allow for equal opportunity.

Part of the problem that both Reddy and Eng identify is that what we consider sexuality is produced through certain important omissions. Even as most queer studies and sexuality studies courses are oriented around Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) and rehearse arguments about the birth of the sexual sciences and the desire to know, classify, and make visible, actually grappling with race is often out of reach. The History of Sexuality weaves together confession, self-classification, and regimes of racism, thereby gesturing toward the differing visibilities of race and sexuality. But often race is presumed to be a visibly marked difference while sexuality is something that must be revealed. Therefore discussions of race and sexuality often revolve around selecting particular identities, and identifying how these identities operate in the world. We might discuss Black or Asian masculinity, Latina or Black femininities, but whiteness is often not probed as the default, and the structures that produce this seem to many students to be far afield from sexuality studies. Queer of color critique is meant to correct the idea that these particular identities are additive components that they can choose to exclude rather than integral to their understanding of sexuality.

While queer of color critique is intellectually useful, I worry that students use my status as a minority to read race as my own pet project rather than something that they (a predominantly white student body) should be interested in. It is far easier to convince students who are not queer that sexuality is their province too, in large part because of the primacy of sexuality that both Reddy and Eng describe. LGBT rights have been framed as this generation’s civil rights issue in a way that imagines that race is no longer a contemporary issue. Race becomes important enough to consider (particularly in moments of crisis), but not important enough to be understood as a primary structure for understanding the way in which the world works now. This difficulty in talking race, or rather in talking race as a matter of structure and history, produces a different kind of “caught-ness” than my discussions about intersectionality. Often, when students do acknowledge histories of structural racism, they assign that knowledge to the past, failing to grasp the ways in which it might work on contemporary individual bodies. This also leaves me silenced because it is easier to talk about the systematic oppression of x, y, and z and harder to grapple with its actual legacy in the current bodies. Talking about the now implicates them in particular ways, so it can be easier to maintain a temporal gap. In this space between the then and the now I become silenced by structure, which gives voice to deep problems, but not to how they might actually feel.

Teach What You Know: How Theory Circulates in the Flesh

When the work of diversity and the project of thinking critically about sexuality actually meet in the classroom I cannot help but participate in the underlying dynamics of class, race, and gender. These moments occur on the affective register, but they have real effects in terms of what knowledge gets transmitted and how. This is not, however, the work of inclusion, but rather the work of having my body teach others about the stakes of interaction and of being objectified. This is another aspect of the life of a specimen: knowledge production through circulation.

Circulation is one mechanism that I use to frame what happens in the classroom when I am teaching women’s studies. I think the discipline has a special responsibility to help students navigate an increasingly complicated social and cultural landscape. While good thinking on questions of gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and location will not necessarily provide immediate solutions to complex social problems, it will help students become ready and willing to relate to the world around them both critically and actively. I see my circulation in the university as a Black, queer woman as important to making students think about difference.

As a teacher I have a tremendous opportunity to facilitate scholarship that is based on empathy, critique, and creativity. Empathy is crucial because it enables students to not only understand perspectives that are distinct from their own, but teaches them to see and appreciate structures of sentiment and logic. This increased awareness challenges students’ previously held views and helps them to understand how collaboration, agreement, or even conflict (on what types of grounds) might be achievable and productive.

Intellectually, I aim to foster careful thought about the cultural and historical borders that permeate our societies. I include an historical analysis of the topic at hand so that students understand the way in which the world around them has been formed—in large part through the work of historical contingency. I blend this with attention to relevant critical texts so that students can get a sense of how to think both philosophically and pragmatically. In my introductory course I have students read selections of The History of Sexuality alongside Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir so that they can read knowledge as emerging from an historical and geographic context, and so that they can consider gender, race, and geography vis-à-vis Foucault. In this way I emphasize the fact that knowledge is grounded in times, places, and bodies. Not only does Foucault emerge as an embodied subject, but students are forced to reflect on their own subject positions. My background in the history and philosophy of science has helped me to see the way in which our knowledge is governed by the techniques that we use to collect it. To that end, I ask students to consider both the theorists and themselves in context so that they understand the classroom as only one mechanism of knowledge gathering and transmission.

That said, I stand in front of the classroom presenting students with a particularly complex set of intersecting identities. In telling students that race, gender, and sexuality need to be thought of as co-extensive, I hope my body is doing the work of preparing them to think about difference critically; in actuality, however, I do not know what it is showing them. As we move from Foucault, to Beauvoir, to Fanon, to Judith Butler I wonder how my sexuality and my race intrude on the conversation. My students have varying levels of awareness of my relationship to the quagmires of inclusivity, diversity, intersectionality, and queer of color critique, but I am attentive to the fact that I am talking about sexuality as a Black queer woman. When we read about the assignation of hypersexuality to Black women’s bodies I wonder what they see. Do they recognize that these paradigms also apply to me, or are they steeped in an ethos of color-blindness where race is ignored? In one version I am offering them a visual representation of the forms of woundedness that we are discussing; in the other these wounds are historical and the ongoing affective labor my body performs is ignored.

It is my hope that knowing me helps them respond with empathy, curiosity, and wonder. That part of what they want to do is to learn from me—learn that people are different and that there are varieties of difference, but that at the base respect matters and knowledge comes in many forms. My difference informs the syllabi that I put together, assignments that I produce, and my form of instruction. I hope that they leave the classroom feeling challenged and open and reoriented toward difference.

There are other moments, however, when my body intrudes in ways that are more legible to me. When we read Audre Lorde or the Combahee River Collective, to think about the importance of thinking about race as tied to sexuality and to enlarge the genealogy of queer studies, my students articulate their frustration that these women seem angry—their anger seems to startle my students. I can only assume that they feel as though this passion is disproportionate to the subject. In part this may be attributable to the difficulty that many undergraduates have in reading historical documents as speaking to particular moments in time that may not be our own. In this scenario my students simply do not fully “get” the harms that racism has caused. But the other side of the coin is that my students are identifying Black female anger as problematic. That this suggestion of anger calls up stereotypes of the angry Black woman is certainly revealing. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) has written extensively on the ways that the trope of the angry Black woman has been used to discredit their emotions as excessive and their critiques as irrational. They are also enacting Ahmed’s (2010) discussion of the affective transferences of the “feminist killjoy.” She describes the unhappiness caused by the angry feminist as producing tension outside of their own bodies: “it is not just that feelings are ‘in tension’ but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity” (67). Anger, Ahmed argues, is felt in the bodies of others and registered as discomfort, but it also causes the uneasy to recognize the subjectivity of the angry agent. It is this turn-around that makes me wonder if what is difficult for these students is understanding Black women as agents; I wonder then if these are the texts that make them aware that I also have agency. Do they understand me and my mode of teaching to be aggressive according to these parameters? Do they not see that the underside of these discourses is vulnerability?

If sometimes I feel vulnerable in this process of knowledge exchange, it is hard for me to figure out just what they feel. While my students are actually very open to gesturing toward race, they do not always know how to really talk about it. They imagine that because they know to list race, gender, and sexuality as variables when discussing what someone is or is not talking about they have dealt with the issue. This is the institutionalization of intersectionality—a checklist, a sense that Black women are the most wounded, and an obligation as someone who is interested in marginalization (as these women, gender, and sexualities students often are) to see what is not there. Sometimes I feel as though my presence forces them to review this checklist even more aggressively than they otherwise would. Perhaps this is one way in which my bodily performance is generative; I feel like the superego who reminds them to think about race. Often, however, the mention of racial difference is not discussed as something that is structuring the present moment and the questions that we are (or not) asking. In general, after the checklist, the conversation becomes a monologue that I conduct and the discussion falls flat.

In this way it feels like a strange extension of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1903) meditations on double consciousness. “What does it feel like to be a problem?” he famously asked in his essay on blackness. Within women’s studies the question is formulated somewhat differently: it is both “What does it feel like to be a problem?” and “What does it feel like to have created the problem?”—the problem having been exacerbated by the intersection of university politics and the norms of women’s studies and disciplinary tendencies of sexuality studies. As much as these discourses hail me, I cannot be entirely “outside.” Agency, especially as a professor/researcher/writer, cannot be passed off into the passive voice, and thus one finds oneself in the peculiar position of being an instrument of one’s own oppression. I wonder if they worry that I will become the angry Black woman and force them to rethink, challenge, and dwell on it and so they mention race to soothe me, but are actually afraid of engaging with it.

It is in the space of these exchanges, however, where other things happen, and I am not quite sure what to make of them. Occasionally, I feel as though their fear produces a sort of aggression toward me. This is the flipside of the empathy that is cultivated within the women’s studies’ classroom. In being open to thinking through multiple perspectives, disclosure has its own currency and students can use it to produce their own uncomfortable classroom moments in the name of marking the personal as political and staking a claim in our shared intellectual endeavor. Usually, this manifests as a graphic recounting of their sex lives. As I listen to these chronicles numerous things go through my head; I wonder if this is one of the few spaces they feel they have available to talk about sex. More frequently, however, I wonder if they are trying to match the hypersexuality assigned to Black women or assert authority in the classroom by narrating their own relationship to the topic at hand. I experience these moments of sexual assertiveness as violent, mostly because they seem designed to undermine my authority whereby personal reflection takes priority over critical engagement or to use their sexuality as a shield in order to avoid talking about race. While this action gestures toward the historically fraught nature of Black female sexuality, it also speaks to the difficulty of reading Black, female, and queer together. I do not have a parallel wounded narrative for the production of my queerness in the classroom or the effects it has. In part this is because my students’ abilities to read my sexuality depends heavily on their own identifications. I am usually illegible to straight students, and queer students meet me with varying levels of desire and distance. Unlike David M. Halperin (2002), who writes about being perceived as a threatening, indoctrinating figure in the classroom, the dynamics of gender and race have generally produced a silence around my queerness. Race is assumed to be the primary vector of difference that people should use to engage with me while queerness falls by the wayside. Both of these instances of aggression and avoidance signal moments of resistance or misinterpretation of the critical empathy that I attempt to induce, but they are also aspects of what it is to circulate in the classroom.

Making Flesh Matter: Embodiment and Research

The tensions of thinking about diversity and inclusion through teaching and presence also make their way into my own research. At its core I think women’s studies entails the critical exploration of difference in its many forms. The question that I strive to answer in my own work in this field is how to think about difference outside of these strands of objectification. Following the trajectory of this essay, my research projects ask both what it feels like to be a specimen, and if there are ways to exist outside of that frame.

My recent book Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) uses local histories of masochism to illustrate what it feels like to be embedded in power from different perspectives. Power impacts subjects differently, therefore this project seeks to nuance what it means to say that someone is subject to power. What does submission feel like for different bodies? In my work I use masochism to unpack the relationship between sensation and power. I propose moving to sensation as an analytic because it allows us to think about flesh not as something static and essential, but as something that changes, something that is in motion. Here, I want to stress that I am thinking about sensation as something that can be understood as having cultural and individual significance rather than as a singular entity with a particular (vexed or not) relationship to perception. In this way difference becomes a matter of relationships rather than fixed essences unto themselves.

Using sensation as an analytic term allows us to bypass the sometimes problematic particularity of the individual and move toward theorizing the flesh. In part this is because we can decipher affinities between individual experiences and articulate structures of sensation. While avoiding edging toward one or several essences of masochism, these structures of sensation move us closer to theorizing embodiment and difference and what it feels like to exist in the space between agency and subjectlessness. In order to do this we must perform what I term in my book empathetic reading.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) practice of intensive reading, I use empathetic reading to foreground both the corporeality of reading and the “impersonal flows”—the affects and sensations that texts produce—in the reader. Within the context of feminist theory, empathetic reading imagines the body as a site of constraint and possibility in order to draw attention to the ways in which sensation shapes representation. Using sensation as an analytic structure, my book produces a series of unexpected juxtapositions to reveal the ways in which flesh matters when one is talking about power.

One of the things that empathetic reading seeks to highlight is the corporeality behind thinking. I want to be insistent about the fact that thinking comes from bodies, and that this bodily knowledge becomes encoded in the work that we, as scholars, seek to decipher. In addition to adding flesh to interlocutors who frequently lack it, empathetic reading seeks to unlock the sensations that these formations of knowledge produce. In order to do this I do not propose a somato-Freudian excavation of our theorists or thinkers, but rather ask that readers place their own bodies into the picture (via empathy, which I envision as a space of multiplicity, not substitution) in order to attend to the sensations that are called up by the material. I argue that these sensations allow us to understand, in an embodied way, how people experience various structures. Empathetic reading allows us to move between the scale of the personal and the structural. In this way my research aims to disturb the primacy of the visual and to open access to material by forging unexpected embodied affiliations. In the classroom, for example, this means thinking less about the particular authorization that some voices have claimed with respect to woundedness, and more about articulating partial connections and exploring spaces of disconnect. In this way, rather than by continually focusing on prepackaged identity formations, difference and multiplicity become more apparent.

At its core my project is about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and geography, and how this materiality is experienced. Hence it functions as a queer of color critique by exposing the racial and heterosexual assumptions behind liberal capitalism. Just as queer of color critiques aim to destabilize prevailing understandings of historical materialism, my project uses similar tactics of critique to displace the liberal subject with multiple material bodies in order to show how race, gender, and sexuality affect the ways in which power is experienced. In this way it sits alongside other work on identity in critical race theory. As a way to think about affect and the institutionalization of women’s studies, however, I am also hopeful that it brings forth new ways to think about the relationship between bodies and knowledge so that difference can exist without producing various types of specimens and that one does not always speak on behalf of others or as a vision of rarity or as an archaic form.

This multiplicity my scholarship is attempting to enact intersects with the university’s drive toward visibility. If my scholarly projects have to do with understanding multiple modes of inhabitation, projects of diversity and inclusion produce a static frame for understanding embodied knowledge. My body performs because it is hailed by these other forces. As a drive toward stabilization and entrenchment institutionalization uses known entities as building blocks to produce its foundations. Given its relationship with theorizations of identity, the mobilization of race and gender for women’s studies (and the precarious positionality of sexuality studies) is not surprising, nor is the swirl of emotions—fatigue, stasis, vulnerability—that accompany it. Despite that, I maintain hope that displacing visibility will move us away from specimens who are commodified, rare, and static toward a landscape of partial connections, flesh, and critical empathy, which emphasizes relationality rather than the purity of absolute difference.

Amber Jamilla Musser is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Beyond the Feminine Mystique: Femininity and Its Objects. She can be reached at [email protected].

Acknowledgments

This project owes a debt of gratitude to several important readers and friends. Thanks to Stephanie Clare for helping me narrow down the scope of the essay, the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Formations for their attentive and generous feedback, and Emily A. Owens and Jennifer C. Nash for their editorial work in putting everything together.

This essay is part of “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” a special issue of Feminist Formations. Follow this link for the rest of the issue.

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Introduction — Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University

Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens

Letterpress print by Beck Levy

The term corporate university—and a host of other terms that have developed to describe this institutional moment, including neoliberal university and academic-industrial complex—fails to do justice to what Kathleen Stewart (2007, 4) describes as the “situation we find ourselves in.” The articles in this special issue explore how the corporate university and its attendant formations, including adjunctification, debt, precarity, graduate certificate programs, study abroad programs, or the MA factory, feel, and how they make themselves felt in myriad quotidian ways. This special issue, then, is oriented toward an ethic of specificity and marked by an investment in considering how the contemporary university feels, and how it feels differently for the various bodies that inhabit it.

Our starting point is an investment in women’s studies as an (inter) discipline with a distinctive and fraught relationship to institutionalization’s pleasures, pains, pulls, and perils. We are concerned with how the conditions that mark the contemporary university make themselves known and felt in particular ways in women’s studies’ institutional spaces: the classroom, the faculty meeting, the program or department mission statement, the rigorous pursuit of departmental status, and the feminist scholarly journal. This special issue, “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” invites women’s studies practitioners—graduate students, tenure-track and tenured faculty, contract faculty, and administrators—to act as ethnographers analyzing, documenting, and theorizing this moment in women’s studies’ history—one that might be described as being between precarity and legitimacy. Even as some women’s studies programs and departments gain institutional traction, others fight not only for legitimacy and recognition, but for the necessary resources to stay afloat. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Evelynn Hammonds (2008, 161) remind us that “women’s studies is still institutionally fragile, in the sense that most women’s studies programs are without their own faculty lines and have inadequate budgets and very little control over their curricula because they depend on departmental courses or joint appointments.” Our special issue is interested in the varieties of ways that women’s studies inhabits this in-between space inside and outside of institutional legitimacy. Given our own investment in specificity, the articles in this issue carefully trace how that in-between-ness is felt differently in different institutional spaces (for example, the research university, the small liberal arts college, the regional college, the community college); by practitioners who occupy different institutional spaces (for example, the undergraduate student, the graduate student, the program or departmental administrator, the adjunct lecturer, the tenure-track faculty member, the tenured faculty member); and shaped by gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, disability, and other categories of difference.

To be clear, this issue is not meant to be only an exploration of oppression, violence, and subordination or a triumphant account of feminist resistance to the institutional demands of corporatization. This is the case even as the articles included in this issue are written against the backdrop of academic violence of various kinds—from the physical brutality inflicted on Ersula Ore at Arizona State University to the production of violence masked by neologisms like “unhiring,” as in the case of Steven Salaita. Rather, we are drawn to feminist feelings that are ambivalent, contradictory, and fraught, including our continued attachment to the university even as it is an agent of violence, our pursuits of institutionalization alongside our rigorous critiques of the university, and our pleasures in the interdisciplinary and institutional “travels” of women’s studies’ key analytics like intersectionality and transnationalism. We are interested in questions like: What are the pleasures—feminist pleasures—that attach to the very positions and locations that we incessantly describe as constraining us? How do we understand our attachments to our universities, and to the university itself as a structure? How do we see these pleasures manifested when we become gatekeepers who perform that role zealously, whether as PhD admissions committee members or job-search committee members? What are the hierarchies that we come to enforce and invest in, and how do we understand our investment in hierarchy alongside our teaching strategies, which decenter or upend hierarchy? These are the circuits of ambivalence and contradiction that this special issue seeks to consider, alongside the feminist feelings that these paradoxes engender.

Amber Jamilla Musser’s “Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University” takes women’s studies’ in-between-ness as a point of departure, asking how the university’s investment in diversity and the women’s studies classroom’s investment in so-called difference produce (and reproduce) Black queer female faculty as “specimens,” as desired objects of value, and as “a commodity, static and rare.” Musser’s careful attention to the ways that bodies, particularly Black queer female bodies, are read, interpreted, hailed, vilified, and desired reminds readers how deeply bodies continue to matter in the classroom. Her article also engenders an important shift, asking how the classroom might stage encounters with difference that move beyond objectification and its obsession with the visual, instead producing and representing difference as relational, affective, and sensational.

In “Affective Activism: Answering Institutional Productions of Precarity in the Corporate University,” Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto explore the relationship between women’s studies and contingent faculty labor, arguing that the discipline can and should be at the vanguard of labor activism, as it is intimately related to issues like academic freedom, the democratization of access, and discrimination. The authors offer political strategies for what they term affective activism, including organic theater, position statements, and institutional discourse analysis; these affective strategies respond to precarious labor within women’s studies, and to the discipline’s own precarious location in the university.

Rachel Corbman’s “The Scholars and the Feminists: The Barnard Sex Conference and History of the Institutionalization of Feminism” turns its attention to the (in)famous 1982 Women and Sexuality conference at Barnard College in order to examine the variety of ways that the conference has become central to how US feminists narrate feminist history and politics. Corbman invites readers to consider the conference as part of a moment in feminism’s history when feminism was “not yet formally attached to universities,” and when feminist theorists and practitioners included organizations like the Lesbian Herstory Archives, feminist bookstores, and feminist researchers located both inside and outside of universities. How might we re-narrate feminist history, Corbman asks, when we consider Barnard as a moment that foregrounds the “collision of feminist activism and knowledge production,” and what might this new story illuminate about our present moment and its institutional politics?

Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Gwendolyn Beetham, Cara E. Jones, and Sekile Nzinga-Johnson’s “Women’s Studies and Contingency: Beyond Exploitation and Resistance” archives the conversations initiated at the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2014 conference about contingent faculty labor in women’s studies. These conversations posed critical questions, including: “How do feminists working in a variety of disciplines reconcile their feminist labor politics with the need to grow their programs and departments under the edicts of the corporate university, particularly when relying upon contingent labor to do so?” The article ends with tangible calls for political action within the university on behalf of contingent faculty, including efforts to give such faculty a voice in academic governance.

In “Post-Identitarian and Post-Intersectional Anxiety in the Neoliberal Corporate University,” Tiffany Lethabo King turns critical attention toward what is arguably women’s studies’ most widely circulating (and widely institutionalized) analytic: intersectionality. King asks how the university generally, and women’s studies specifically, produces intersectionality as “a passé analytic and ‘risky’ space destined for relegation to the anachronistic time-space of the ‘post.’” Indeed, King reveals that graduate students’ intellectual socialization includes an introduction to intersectionality as a form of “risky” knowledge, as a dangerous analytic that must be jettisoned and moved beyond. This logic of intersectionality as already in the past, she persuasively shows, “align[s] with the often ‘unspeakable’ anti–Black women racism and misogyny of the corporate university.”

In “Sexual Divestments from Empire: Women’s Studies, Institutional Feelings, and the ‘Odious Machine,’” Anna M. Agathangelou, Dana M. Olwan, Tamara Lea Spira, and Heather M. Turcotte offer a critical genealogy of women’s studies as a discipline, arguing that feminist critiques of sexual empire “have long laid the foundations for the most radical visions of sexual and gender revolution—movements generated through global militant anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, Black, and antiracist struggles of the mid-to-late-twentieth century.” Yet, the authors argue that these intimate collaborations have often been erased from feminist theory and history as women’s studies has become institutionalized. The article, then, is a response to the “institutional amnesia that comes with problematic promises of inclusion.”

Moya Bailey and Shannon Miller’s “When Margins Become Centered: Black Queer Women in Front and Outside of the Classroom” is a critical rupture in the silence surrounding Black queer women’s pedagogical experiences. Bailey and Miller instead embrace ethics of transparency, honesty, and collaboration to construct a rich experiential and ethnographic archive documenting the experiences of queer Black women laboring in various locations in the academy, particularly the experiences of queer Black women teaching in women’s studies—a space that promises critical attention to difference, inclusivity, and an ethic of anti-subordination, yet can reproduce its own violent hierarchies.

Susanne Gannon, Giedre Kligyte, Jan McLean, Maud Perrier, Elaine Swan, Ilaria Vanni, and Honni van Rijswijk develop collective biography as both a method and political strategy to explore the emotional and affective life of academic labor for women in universities. Their article “Uneven Relationalities, Collective Biography, and Sisterly Affect in Neoliberal Universities” explores “academic ties” as ways of countering neoliberal policies, and collective biography as a strategy that might produce more ethical ways of being in academic spaces.

“Practicing Institutional Feelings: A Roundtable” features the critical voices of thirteen graduate students engaged in feminist and queer scholarship and research, some in graduate women’s studies programs and departments and others in allied disciplines. They provide critical accounts of how institutional forms of feminism transform daily practices of teaching and research, and how women’s studies’ institutional forms shape their investments in the field itself. They also engage in imaginative work, offering their dreams—utopian or otherwise—of what academic life might look and feel like beyond graduate school and into, away from, or beside the tenure-track ranks.

The issue’s closing article, Merri Lisa Johnson’s “Lez Be Honest: Queer Feelings about Women’s Studies at a Public Regional University in the South-eastern United States,” examines the legislative battle to close the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, a center that Johnson directs. In the midst of accusations that the center was “too lesbian,” she explores questions about the discipline of women’s studies itself, particularly its continued inattention to “the question of where lesbians stand in this discipline.”

The labor of producing this special issue was marked by a kind of feminist pleasure that remains under-theorized and under-celebrated in academic life: collaboration. We were supported by Sandra K. Soto, who offered her encouragement and wisdom at every stage of this project; Brooke Lober, Liz Kinnamon, and the Feminist Formations staff shepherded it through the editorial process; and a cadre of smart readers generously devoted their time to reviewing manuscripts. If this project was made possible by the everyday act of collaborating—e-mails sent, Skype dates scheduled, dropboxes managed—it was also made possible by our enduring friendship. As feminist colleagues who exchange work; as friends who e-mail one another every morning to ask “How is the writing going?”; as colleagues who cheer for one another as we (to use our favorite writing metaphor) attempt to “move the ball a few yards”—we see collaboration not simply as intellectually productive, but as a practice that is emotionally and personally sustaining. This special issue, then, is a tribute to the pleasures, possibilities, and everyday practice of feminist friendship.

References

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, and Evelynn M. Hammonds. 2008. “Whither Black Women’s Studies: Interview.” In Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, 155–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

About the cover art

“22nd & I” Beck Levy 2015

Beck Levy describes “22nd & I” as a letterpress print using polymer plates and a reduction woodcut. Its subject is a small house at the intersection of 22nd and I Street NW in Washington, DC, in the heart of George Washington University’s campus. This little house is the Women’s Studies department. It is surrounded by towering buildings, a Whole Foods, and newly built dorms, on a block in a state of perpetual construction, in a university in a state of rapacious expansion. The block itself neighbors powerful institutions—the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the White House. The scale and style of the house are out of tune with its bland, expensive surroundings. The department it contains is out of tune with its pro-austerity, neoliberal, institutional neighbors. The house looks and feels precarious. It looks and feels uneasy, uncanny. Yet it is also a refuge and a source of strength for many students and workers in a school that has come to epitomize the corporate university. It is part of yet also in opposition to.

Beck Levy is an interdisciplinary artist living in Oakland, CA. She publishes letterpress prints and book art under the name Astropress and is the associate editor of Antigravity Magazine. In her free time, Beck plays music, reads science fiction, and sends postcards back to her beloved hometown, Washington, DC.

This is the introduction to “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” a special issue of Feminist Formations. Follow this link for the rest of the issue.

[feministformations-blog]

“In this poem for Tony Robinson, a Black teen killed by a white cop in my neighborhood, I am attempting to capture the many kinds of violence that we undergo in a “world gone siren”—a world of unceasing brutality against Black and brown people, and a world of obliterating discourses that attempt to justify, claim authority about, and contain the meanings of such ruthless violations. In our world gone siren, we suffer the violence of discourses of power—their failure on a moral, human level—and we suffer our own understanding that we must make poems and speeches from human lives. And we must. I saw the scene of Odysseus and the rowers and the lure of siren calls and felt the need to inhabit all the positions in this scene—hear the calls, be unwilling to submit to them (Odysseus with open ears, tied to the mast), be the sirens ourselves (callers, writers, singers of sounds), and be the deaf rowers, our ears stopped with wax (diligent workers claiming our right of survival, asserting dignity, inured to the wail). The poem is dedicated to some of the activists and workers in my town who are living this urgent complexity.”

Feminist Chicana poet Dana Maya grew up in Colorado and spent extensive periods in Veracruz, Mexico. She did graduate studies in Chican@ literature and culture and queer theory at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she has taught writing at Madison College. She currently works at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is active in political and public-writing projects, such as the Spontaneous Writing Booth. She is at work on a poetic memoir of her family that traverses nations, classes, genders, races, and mental illness. She can be reached at [email protected].