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

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Introduction: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University Author(s): Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens Source: Feminist Formations, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University (Winter 2015), pp. vii-xi Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860812 Accessed: 29-07-2021 20:32 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Introduction: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens

The term corporate university - and a host of other terms that have developed to describe this institutional moment, including neoliberal university and aca demic-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

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viii • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 stud' ies' 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 admis-

sions 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 Musseťs "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

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Introduction • ix

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 Fernandez 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: inter sectionality. 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

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X • Feminist Formations 27.3

'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.

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Introduction • xi

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 had directed. 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, 1 55-69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University Author(s): Amber Jamilla Musser Source: Feminist Formations, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University (Winter 2015), pp. 1-20 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860813 Accessed: 29-07-2021 20:38 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860813?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University Amber Jamilla Musser

Identity politics within the institution and within sexuality studies conspire to produce me, a queer Black woman} as a specimen - that is to say , a commodity , static and rare. That this feeling comes from two sources that are often assumed to speak opposing languages - one of liberation and the other of the corporation - is no longer surprising , given 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. Using critical autobiography , it maps out the emotional and physical work that I perform in three different loci: university rhetoric on diversity and inclusion , women's studies' insistence on intersectionality and visible difference , and the dynamics of the classroom.

Keywords: affective labor / diversity and inclusion / performance / teaching / visibility I women's studies

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. 1 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 ©2015 Feminist Formations, Vol. 27 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 1-20

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2 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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. Addition* ally, 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 move* ments 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.

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 3

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. (34) 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 valu-

ation occurs because possession of this visible difference reflects well on the university. Within the context of the university, the presence of minority dif-

ference 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

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4 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 "[exploiting the notion of 'multiculturalismi 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 differenee 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.

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 5

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 Fm Irish Catholic" (2015). As we can see from this example, diversity and inclusion become modes of recognizing the importance of differ-

enee 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 . Boilinger affirmative-action case and President Busies 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

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6 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 rep-

resentation 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 [wjhaťs 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. (76)

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 stud-

ies (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

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 7

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 problem-

atic. 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. (98) 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

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8 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 Asso-

ciation, 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 (79)

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 experi-

ence 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,

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 9

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 intersex tionality 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.

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io • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 [ijntersectionality is now celebrated as "the primary figure of political compie-

tion 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 (45) As women's studies becomes imagined to be interchangeable with intersectional analysis, Nash argues that intersectionality occupies a temporality of the "neverquite-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 intersection-

ality 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 (201 1, 456) argues that "sexuality and class would become largely erased by Black feminist work on multiple marginalization, suggesting that Black women's lived experi-

ences 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

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Amber Jamilla Musser • n

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 differenee 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 epistemologica! 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 (201 1) 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 citizensubjects 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. (3)

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12 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 con-

sider 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 inter' ested 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.

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 13

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. 1 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 histori-

cal 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.

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14 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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).

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 15

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 sexual-

ity 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

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1 6 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 Blacky 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 identifica-

tions. 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

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 17

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 somatoFreudian 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

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i8 • Feminist Formations 27.3

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 inclu-

sion produce a static frame for understanding embodied knowledge. My body performs because it is hailed by these other forces. As a drive toward stabiliza-

tion 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.

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 gener-

ous feedback, and Emily Owens and Jennifer Nash for their editorial work in putting everything together. 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].

Notes 1. The 1999 special issue of differences traces several different iterations of this narrative. It was republished in 2008 as Women's Studies on the Edge , edited by Joan Wallach Scott.

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Amber Jamilla Musser • 19

2. See also Dale M. Bauer, "Academic Housework: Women's Studies and Second Shifting" 3. In this excerpt, Nash draws on Robyn Wiegman's Object Lessons; Maxine Baca Zinn's essay "Patricia Hill Collins: Past and Future Innovations"; Kathy Davis's essay "Intersectionality as Buzzword"; Ange-Marie Hancock's Solidarity Politics for Millennials : A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics; and Leslie McCall's essay "The Complexity of Intersectionality."

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post~Coloniality. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

NC: Duke University Press. Bauer, Dale M. 2002. "Academic Housework: Women's Studies and Second Shifting." In Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change , edited by Robyn Wiegman, 245-57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1991. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241-99. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. "Letter to a Harsh Critic." In Negotiations : 1972-1990, translated bv Martin loughin, 1-12. New York: Columbia University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk . New York: Bantam Classics. Eng, David. 2010. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. "The Evolution of Diversity." The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.youtube

.com/watch?v=jOv4X2Seg64&list=UU6A6aagPLQVQ3nSow899jXg. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Halperin, David M. 2002. "Deviant Teaching." Michigan Feminist Studies 16: 1-30. Holland, Sharon. 2012. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moses, Michele S., and Mitchell J. Chang. 2006. "Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Diversity Rationale." Educational Researcher 35 (1): 6-1 1. Musser, Amber Jamilla. 2014. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. New York: NYU Press. Nash, Jennifer C. 201 1. "'Home Truths' on Intersectionality." Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 23 (2), 445-70.

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Pellegrini, Ann, and Janet Jakobsen. 2003. Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. New York: NYU Press. Reddy, Chandan. 201 1. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State . Durham,

NC: Duke University Press. Scott, Joan Wallach, ed. 2008. Women's Studies on the Edge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Takagi, Dana Y. 1999. "Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America." The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics 20 (1): 96-110. Titley, Gavan, and Alana Lentin. 2008. "More Benetton than Barricades? The Politics of Diversity in Europe." In The Politics of Diversity in Europe , vol. 769, edited by Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin, 9-30. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Wiegman , Robyn. 2000. "On Being Married to the Institution." In Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower?, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Maria

Herrera-Sobek, and Genaro M. Padilla, 71-82. New York: Modern Language Association. Yamane, David. 2002. Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Cur* ricular Color Line in Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Affective Activism: Answering Institutional Productions of Precarity in the Corporate University Author(s): Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio and Maria Maisto Source: Feminist Formations, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University (Winter 2015), pp. 21-48 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860814 Accessed: 29-07-2021 20:20 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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Affective Activism:

Answering Institutional Productions of Precarity in the Corporate University Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto

Given the context in which precarity is unevenly distributed in today's corporate university , it is important for women1 s studies to consider its role in bringing about higher education policy reform . Reporting on the findings of a national survey of chairs and directors of women's studies departments, this article suggests strategies for performing " affective activism" within the university through research and action, guided by feminist theory - including collaborative organic theater, institutional discourse analysis , and the drafting of position statements. Drawing from a range of experiential and discursive primary-source materials, the essay suggests strategies and examples for how institutional norms can be made available for interrogation and transformation. In this work, emotion can provide a lens by which to see the institutional situation of women's studies and its intervention in the new status quo of the corporate university.

Keywords: adjunct faculty / contingency / discourse / gender equity / managerialism / precarity / tenure / women faculty

In the increasingly bottom-line-driven university, precarity is unevenly distributed among disciplines and programs. Consider the recent history of departmental closures in higher education in which programs in liberal arts, humanities, and identity politics suffer funding cuts and closures, while science and technology programs are spared. In 2009 the women's studies program was closed at the University of Guelph; in 2010 the University at Albany suspended five departments in the humanities: the departments of French, Italian, classics,

Russian, and theater art; in 2013 the University of Windsor closed its Centre

©2015 Feminist Formations, Vol. 27 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 21-48

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22 • Feminist Formations 27.3

for Studies in Social Justice; in 2014 the University of South Carolina Upstate closed its Center for Women's and Gender Studies. Such programs become considered a financial drain on the institution and opposed to the "moneymaking" disciplines, which are externally funded by grants and contracts. Closed departments are seen as inessential to the university because they are not monetarily profitable in the so-called marketplace of ideas that constitutes higher education. Holding to the capitalist meritocratic ideology of "that which

performs best will be rewarded most," these closure decisions become framed with the discourse of consistency and fairness; of the University of South Caro-

lina Upstate decision, Chancellor Tom Moore explained to a local newspaper: "Not only is this decision not punitive or a response to external pressure, it is part of an effort to be consistent and systematic across academic affairs in how

we administer and support various programs" (qtd. in Shain 2014; emphasis added). Such statements paint over the structural inequalities in academe with a language of equality, consistency, and fairness. Capitalist ideologies, which are

perilously applied to knowledge production and teaching, become naturalized in the rhetorical gestures of the institution. As precarity is unevenly distributed among disciplines and departments, so

also is the condition of precarity unevenly distributed among academic laborers - that is, faculty and staff. Today, nontenure-track instructors represent more than 70 percent of all faculty, and there is a "continuing (and striking) concentration of women in [this] temporary, nontenured underclass" (Sharff and

Lessinger 2008, 3), with women composing between 51-61 percent of adjunct faculty nationwide. Women are overrepresented among contingent faculty: they are 10-15 percent more likely to be in contingent positions, and earning 27 percent less than their male counterparts while there (Gappa, Austin, and Trice 2007). And Sivagami Subbaraman (2002) reports that the reproduction of these contingent positions "has been highest in those very disciplines that feminism has helped transform and engender: English, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, ethnic studies, etc." (264). These temporary workers are not likely to be granted full-time tenured positions, as "conversion" from contingent status to the tenure track is rare. To call for change is to make visible one's unhappiness, a gesture that risks further marginalization; a call for change, after all, implies that current systems

are no longer acceptable - a notion that challenges or even threatens the very people who enjoy high levels of power and control. The "feminist killjoy" or the "unhappy queer" (monikers that Sara Ahmed uses to demonstrate the tendency to silence and dismiss through typecasting), like the "whining adjunct" (as recently invoked in a Chronicle of Higher Education letter to the editor), is further marginalized because of her unhappiness with the structures that marginalize her.1 She becomes figured as irrational and violent, as possessing an overly emotive positionality.

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 23

In contrast, the "happy adjunct" maintains a cheerful countenance in an oppressive system, which may, on the one hand, allow others to proceed in denial

of complicity and culpability. The happy adjunct's professional survival may rest on her sustained performance of this role, which involves a suppression of discomfort and dissatisfaction. When she expresses rather than suppresses such discomfort and dissatisfaction, the activist adjunct may embody the antithesis

of the administrator's ideal academic laborer - even as hegemonic stereotyping of, and prejudice toward, these roles can work to silence the activist. The happy adjunct can reinforce those in positions of power and authority, or, on the other hand, she can be well-positioned to challenge that power by virtue of herself holding a position of privilege. As a colleague noted to us recently in

conversation, the happy adjunct may be a misunderstood resource for activist work, since this person may feel less vulnerable and hence more bold if politicized and deployed for action. The emotional performance of the adjunct reflects in many ways what has

been said of the emotional expectations of the activist-feminist. "However she speaks," Ahmed (2012, 62) writes, "the one who speaks as a feminist is usually heard as causing the argument." She continues: "[she] is heard as an obstacle to the conversational space before she even says anything. She poses a problem because she keeps exposing a problem" (63). Her words are read as being "already heard" (as in "we Ve heard this all before" or "here she goes again") and, at the same time, disruptive. Her persistence is disruptive, so her persistence is

dismissed. She is a figure who is associated with disruption and her message is difficult - often too difficult for those in positions of power to entertain, much

less engage with enough to be prompted to act in response. The unhappy adjunct and adjunct organizer are likewise seen as problems. She, rather than the underlying context of precarity that has positioned her, becomes the source of shame. How do we counter these stultifying realities so that activist projects can move forward?

We discuss below our own positionality in light of the academic precariat and locate disciplinary precarity in women's studies programs, including how precarity is represented by chairs and directors of these programs. We also discuss how disciplinary organizations' position statements and institutional discourses reinstate precarity, and we situate this discussion within what we consider to be the under-theorized role of affect and emotion in discussions of

precarity. Finally, we talk about an experiment involving an explicit confrontation between affect and emotion and precarious academic employment - an "organic (participatory) theatre" production, which offered an arts approach to activism that is consistent with feminist research and theory.

While only one of the coauthors of this article (Sue Doe) has enjoyed that rarest of opportunities in moving from a contingent status to a tenured position, all of us have experienced, firsthand, precarious employment in higher education. Sue taught off the tenure track for twenty-five years prior to her

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24 • Feminist Formations 27.3

conversion to the tenure track, and she has made the rhetorics of academic labor her research focus - a fact that makes it unlikely she will ever relocate or renegotiate the terms of her employment. Another coauthor, Maria Maisto, has

been teaching on contingent appointments off and on since 1993; she left her PhD program ABD in 2000 due, in part, to institutional policies that did not stop the clock for family leave. Her experiences as an adjunct in Ohio from 2005

onward led her to co-found and lead the New Faculty Majority (NFM) and its affiliated Foundation. She realizes that her national prominence in the academic

labor movement makes job security complicated, since it can cut off access to other opportunities. Her experience leading a national nonprofit organization dependent on public and foundation support has also given her insight into an economic precarity that is arguably similar to that experienced by department chairs and academic administrators, who find themselves confronting dilemmas created by apparent conflicts between their activist orientation and the structural demands and limitations of their institutional roles. Coauthor Janelle Adsit, as a new PhD, recently completed her first national job search but has taught as an adjunct, as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA), and in a nontenurable academic-support position. She has come early to understand the emotional labor involved in workplace-justice efforts, even as she has consistently recommitted herself to this project. Coauthor Marisa Allison, as a doctoral candidate in sociology with a graduate certificate in women's and gender studies, is approaching the tenure-line job market, but recognizes that the ten years' worth of teaching experience she has in higher education will likely

work against her in attempting to land a tenure-track position. Her research and activist work for her contingent colleagues could also make the job market

a difficult place to navigate. Coauthor Paula Maggios career history has been marked by the versatility and mobility that is demanded off the tenure track:

after a longtime career in the communications field, she earned her master's degree eight years ago and began teaching as an adjunct in three disciplines: English, journalism, and women's studies. She then held a series of full-time temporary positions at a public university near her home, the second of which was within a women's studies program - a position that came to end when Paula

fought the university's denial of her unemployment insurance claim. While her decision to fight the university was guided by feminist theory and praxis,

Paula's case, which ended in the university's favor in the Court of Common Pleas, pitted her against the women's studies' program interim director, who backed the university's argument against her unemployment eligibility. Since then, Paula has been unable to obtain any classes within the women's studies program where she taught for five years and that once employed her full-time.

Our experiences with contingency and activism in higher education cause us to question the ways in which women's studies may be positioned to address

the inequities that condition academic labor. At the same time, we recognize that the discipline's vulnerability may hinder efforts to bring about change. It

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 25

is often the case that the most vulnerable departments and workers are those who become responsible for equality work, for changing the conditions that affect them. As evidenced in the list of department closures above, social justice

centers, women's studies departments, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that take consciousness-raising as an explicit commitment are disproportionately affected by institutional cuts. It is as Ahmed describes in On Being Included (2012, 4): "if . . . equality work is less valued by organizations,

then to become responsible for this work can mean to inhabit institutional spaces that are also less valued." Equality work - working upon the institution you work within - is vulnerable. It is not coincidental that four out of five of us teach in English studies and

composition, which have historically been central sites of both academic labor problems and the contingent faculty movement largely due to their problematic reliance upon nontenure-track faculty for the teaching of writing and their focus

on the role of language in social justice efforts, writ large. Here, however, we ground our work in the context of women's studies, which we believe to be an important site for transformative action in addressing the structural inequalities in higher education.

As the discipline of women's studies continues to critically consider its position in the academy we must reevaluate what we are responsible for and how that responsibility has been allocated. What is women's studies' proximity to the problems of contingency in the academy? Where does the responsibility for the crisis of contingency in higher education lie?2 During the fall 2014 semester, chairs and directors of women's and gender studies departments across the country took part in an NFM Foundation-sponsored Women and Contingency Project designed to answer these questions. The study invited chairs and directors to express their own perceptions of contingency, and to examine the degree to which they, as administrators, have a felt

sense - and actualized evidence - of agency to effect change.3 In what follows, we examine their responses for what they reveal about labor activism work within higher education. We argue that emotion can and often does provide a lens by which to see the institutional situation of women's studies with relation to academic hiring practices, particularly in terms of its potential as a resource for interventions into the corporate university. We follow this discussion with suggestions for how affective work can be done to interrogate and remake uni-

versity policy statements and collaboratively express community experiences within the university. How can we work with the affective realities that work upon us, in a situation characterized by precarity?

Precarity and Women's Studies In describing the current academic milieu we rely upon the term precarity . We use it in part because of its mobility: it is a term that has invited interdisciplinary

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2Ó ♦ Feminist Formations 27.3

thinking: precarity, as a concept, has found a place in scholarship in philosophy, international studies, anthropology, rhetoric, communication, literary studies,

women's studies, and some of the social sciences, among other disciplines. Fol' lowing Stephanie A. Shieldss (2012) essay "Waking Up to Privilege," we conceptualize precarity as being another organizing feature of social relationships that is intersectional and that, with other social identities, becomes mutually reinforcing and naturalizing (30); that is, one's job title, and the level of contingency it represents (as a symbol for a particular contract and a particular status

within institutional structures), is another factor that is constitutive of one's positionality. Contingency intersects with other complex power relationships related to gender, class, race, ethnicity, and so on and creates forms of precarity

that should be examined. A task for women's studies is to continue studying and acting on the complex relationships among forms of contingency that are constellated in terms of gender, class, race, and other identity categories. Precarity has been variously defined, but has come to signify the "multiple

forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails" (Muehlebach 2013, 298) with the growth of neoliberalism.4 While "[p]recarity applies to a specific subjectivity, the lived experience of ambient insecurity" (Horning

2012), it is also a widespread condition, and its increasing prevalence in higher education is an indicator of the ways in which the corporate university reflects larger economic and policy trends.5 We are not of the belief that these interrelated precarities (those of students, staff, and faculty) are part of a zero-sum game, as they are typically explained through a corporate model. For example, we are often told that increasing the

wages of faculty and staff would increase tuition, but we know that tuition has been increasing for years as wages have declined or remained stagnant. Therefore, we see the academic laboř-activist work we do as a part of other interrelated precarities: fighting for a living wage for all workers, making college more affordable and accessible for all, eliminating student loan debt, demanding equal work for equal pay, and so on.

Women's studies' own disciplinary contingency is conditioned by these general trends and at the same time is unique, as it is one of the few disciplines

to be so variously institutionalized: in the form of the autonomous academic department, the multiuse center, the academic-support extension, or as an interdisciplinary unit that is spread across other disciplines. And the diversity

among programs multiplies when one considers institutional contingencies, such as student-body demographics and student experiences, organizational relationships to local publics, donor relations, governmental mandates, previously established mission statements, industry trends, local legacies of hiring practices, outsourcing services once performed by full-time staff with benefits (for example, food service, housekeeping, maintenance, IT, and so on, resulting in an academic community that is a series of outsourced "services"), and many other factors, which are to varying degrees generalized trends and unique local

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto ♦ 27

circumstances. This range of institutional circumstances coincides with a sense of disciplinary instability, expressed by some members of the discipline. More

than a quarter (26.2 percent) of the chairs and directors of the 104 women's studies programs who responded to the Women and Contingency Project survey stated that their department was unstable, and another 23 percent were unsure of its stability within their university.6

Women's studies' unstable relationship to traditional academic situations and practices has sometimes been a source of unfavorable labor conditions, but it has also been a profound resource for theory production and research within the discipline. An history of institutional liminality and transgression of disciplinary boundaries has shaped feminist theory. Women's studies theorists resist aspects of traditional disciplining, refusing to hole up in a closed discourse that excludes nonspecialist readers and prevents cross-disciplinary exchange. Women's studies has seen its location in the university as a unique position from which to think about relationships, and as a way out of some of the inadequacies of traditional academic culture. As Kathleen Blee (2002, 177) writes, "[t]he benefits of operating outside the boundaries of conventional disciplinary frameworks, most of which historically have been antagonistic - or, at least, blind - to gender analysis, are clear." The situation of women's studies allows for the adoption of an inside/outside activist stance. But as Blee goes on

to note, "there are also problems that stem from the complicated relationship of Women's Studies to the academic disciplines" (178) - problems such as an uncertain future and vulnerability to administrative decisions. Because it instigates change at a local level the mission of women's studies necessarily comes with a level of precarity. It cannot be readily folded into

the "business as usual" university that does indeed operate as a business. The discipline therefore operates in a situation wherein the "idealism of Women's Studies can quickly be replaced by the profits of Golf Course Studies," as Diane

Elam (2002, 219) wryly puts it.7 Exposing this precarity, and mobilizing to do something about it, is the continued work of women's studies.

The corporate university's undervaluing of certain forms of knowledge production and disciplinary interests, the persistent labor exploitation, and the concurrent marginalization of and prejudice toward minoritized groups and nontenure-track faculty should, we argue, be among women's studies' most press-

ing concerns. These three interlocking features of corporatization coincide, as they result from a mainstream managerialism that now largely governs academic

decision-making. If we want to address the role that women's studies plays in the activism of contingent faculty we have to start by asking how precarious departments in the corporate university can (and should) advocate for the precariat within this situation. Women's studies can change the corporate academy from the inside. However, we are continually reminded of Audre Lorde's (2007)

admonition that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. In an institutional reality wherein certain forms of labor and certain laborers are

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28 • Feminist Formations 27.3

undermined and undervalued, feminists in positions of power may be called on to, in her words, "stand alone, unpopular, and sometimes reviled" in their spaces of power in order to create and realize our "common cause ... in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish" (112).

What this world looks like in practice remains an open question. While a situation may be improved by autonomous, secure department status and security of employment for faculty, these policies also risk affirming forms of

elitism. Alternative models have been proposed, and the discussion of these should remain open. While the protection of tenure can enable those who have historically been blocked from higher education to be able to speak as scholars and influence/serve students from similar backgrounds, the hierarchical tenure system is also rightly contested. Similarly, additional state support and the goal

of free higher education, as additional proposed solutions to the problem of corporate education, are not without risks to academic freedom as well. Another

solution, also imperfect, would be to limit admission to PhD programs so that we do not have a flooded labor market. Clearly, these questions about how best to combat the damaging effects of corporatized higher education are far from being resolved. It should not go unnoticed that the growth of contingent faculty occurred at the same time as those who have been historically blocked from higher edu-

cation (women, minorities, and the poor) became the majority of students on college and university campuses and as women became the majority of doctoral

degree earners (Schell 1998). What on the one hand could be seen as feelings of entitlement among PhDs for tenure-line jobs, is on the other viewed as a test of the myth of meritocracy of education by those who have been historically denied entrance. Importantly, tenure is not just about job security, but primarily and

initially about academic freedom. The historical structures that have blocked women, minorities, and people in low socioeconomic conditions from higher education have also blocked the scholarship of women, minorities, and people in low socioeconomic conditions (as contingent faculty) from being protected by academic freedom. If those who have been historically denied these positions are able to get through and secure tenured faculty jobs, they risk perpetuating the myth of meritocracy of higher education, ultimately leading others to believe it is personally achievable for anyone when in actuality it is not. At the same time,

there is a belief that one can change higher education from within if one can get to that position of security from which to speak. Yet, our survey data shows

little evidence that this is the case for women's and gender studies chairs and directors, who are largely coming from secure, tenured positions and perceive

themselves to be unable to make substantial systemic changes. Our purpose here is not to resolve these questions; rather, we seek strategies for raising the visibility of these issues and the ways in which they are tied up in affective circulations. By bringing these issues to light in all their complexity, we suggest ways of addressing them through collaborative processes of interrogation.

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 29

And in this consciousness-raising we are all in the uncomfortable position of critically examining our own investments. For instance, Marisa finds that her positionality as a first-generation, poor white college graduate from the Deep South no doubt led her to be invested in believing the meritocratic myth of higher education for much of her life. Her background also led her to understand

how others in similar positions would also feel entitled to the "elite position" (defined as succeeding to those who do not come from positions of academic/ class privilege). Similarly, Janelle has internalized meritocratic myths of success and achievement and is cognizant of her position of privilege as a white woman

from a middle-class background who has been partnered with someone with a stable income and the flexibility to relocate. It is essential that we continue this practice of questioning why any of us (feminist academics) believe we should be in an entitled position within an elitist institution.

Responding to Contingency in Women's Studies There is widespread agreement that the academic working environment is in need of reform. In the survey data collected, women's studies chairs and directors expressed criticism of the progressiveness of their institutions, with

31 percent disagreeing that the working climate for women at their institution was positive, 31 percent disagreeing that their university had progressive

family policies, and 85 percent disagreeing that minority women were wellrepresented at their institution. To rectify these shortcomings and counter the

trend toward corporatization and the resultant marginalization, we, following Judith Gardiner (2002), argue that women's studies today should work "to theorize, imagine, narrate, and to the best of our ability, actively demonstrate noncoercive collectivity, to show the limits of consumer freedom, and to envi-

sion models of feminist equality" (199) that necessitate changes to current hiring and wage-assigning practices. With Gardiner and Robyn Wiegman we prioritize knowledge production as dovetailing with activism. As Wiegman (2012, 20) writes, knowing can be a "means to do justice," and critique can be a means of revealing and undoing structural inequality. Attempts to recognize institutionalized structural inequality through research within disciplines such as women's studies must also be aligned with activist work that actively directs

institutional change. We read feminist methodology as supplying not only techniques for describing and analyzing social relationships, but also providing a repertoire for affective activism.

Women's studies has long had the disciplinary task of reeducating the academy about social issues and creating better conditions for the university's most marginalized subjects (and here we invoke more than one meaning of subjects - both the subject positions that individuals are disciplined to occupy, and disciplinary subjects or topic areas of research and thought). The project of reeducation inextricably ties scholarly work in women's studies to political

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3o ♦ Feminist Formations 27.3

activism within and outside of the academy. Academic labor activism is deeply

tied to other activist commitments in women's studies: secure employment cannot be separated from issues like academic freedom, better working condi' tions, and representation for minoritized groups. Forms of subordination and oppression are connected. In responding to the institutional situation of the corporate academy in women's studies, we, with Sherene Razack (1998) and Ann Russo (2008), argue for a "politics of accountability" to recognize how we are implicated in the subordination of minoritized groups. We extend Razack's and Russos conceptualiza-

tions of a politics of accountability to attend to the stratification of academic labor in an era of increased contingency. Cultivating accountability means, in Russos words, "encouraging faculty and students in women's studies to recognize

our structural relationship to one another and our involvement in maintaining .. . systemic hierarchies" (137). A politics of accountability in academic labor activism is vigilant against biases that limit and marginalize nontenuretrack faculty and maintain a "two-tier system": for example, assumptions that

nontenure-line faculty are less serious, less intellectual, or less committed. A politics of accountability interrogates the biases built into the language we use to talk about disciplinarity: the tendency to privilege metaphors of disciplinary

"belonging," for instance, ignore material realities that necessitate transience and cross-disciplinarity and increasingly make long-term "membership" to one disciplinary community the privilege of a select few, as more and more faculty

members are forced to teach outside their "home" disciplines or to leave the academy altogether.

Following Russo, we seek to prompt greater consideration of how hierarchies are systemically sustained within the academy. She reflects "on how demands for more resources in women's studies programs impact the labor of other women and men in the university (e.g., the resulting increased labor of the clerical, operations, and other staff at the university whose voices, labor, and

compensation are not always figured into the equation)," and "how discussions about the status of women in the university often do not include the women and men doing this labor" (136). Implied in Russo's statements is a need for greater

collaboration and dialogue among multiple communities and participants in pursuit of a sea change in academic labor practices. The marginalization of members of the academic community is built into common practices and discourses that circulate within the university. It is the

nature of institutionalization to naturalize, making conventions and assumptions become less visible in their normativity. As Ahmed writes (2012, 21), "[w]hen things become institutional, they recede. To institutionalize x is for X to become routine or ordinary such that x becomes part of the background for those who are part of an institution." Our purpose as activists is to bring the background to the foreground, in this sense. The goal should be that the structural inequalities of the university - and the ways that these structures are

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 31

produced and maintained - come under constant scrutiny by all members of the institution. It becomes important to disrupt these norms. Too often, chairs and directors are constrained by their contexts, unable to do what they might want to do on behalf of others, as the survey data described in this article sug-

gests. Chairs and directors see the necessity of disruption as they respond, by condition of their authority, to that which is truly urgent. Disruptive activist processes, such as those we suggest in what follows, can present chairs/directors with a moment of opportunity, a moment of innovative response to the complex

emerging and urgent needs on the ground. A logical response is an honest one that acknowledges the messiness of academic activism and completely exposes the angst involved in trying to find ethical solutions to these problems. This mode of responding is a constantly reflective praxis.8 The mistake that we as activists sometimes make is projecting the sense that it is "simply" a question of instituting social justice or some other principle - forgetting that in practice it is never as easy as it seems. Therefore, the only honest response is to reject the defensive practice of offering glib, canned excuses and instead openly acknowledge the complex, fraught nature of our work. That is what is disruptive. The activism of critique must be complemented by the activism of example.

The aim is, as Ahmed (2012, 25) argues, to make critical and complex thought about inequality automatic and ubiquitous in academic discourse and decision-making. We argue that an examination of the affective economies of the institution can reveal why this goal is to be hard-won.9 At the same time,

affect can be an important counter-force, prompting action and change. As we elaborate below, both operations - the examination of emotion, and the mobilization of emotion as a counter-force - are key to affective activism.

Accounting for Emotion and Disrupting Emotional Hegemony To examine what hinders this vision of transformative academic activism we look to circulations of affect. Disparate affective economies, which are "social and material, as well as psychic" (Ahmed 2010, 46) and produced by the uneven distribution of precarity and the displacement of responsibility for it, regularly go unnoticed in the academy. Those who do notice express a fatalistic sense of being able to do anything to effect change. In the case of the chairs and directors surveyed in the NFM Foundation study, 64 percent had taken an opportunity to advocate for contingent faculty either in their departments or at their universities. Those who did not report participation in such advocacy work shifted that responsibility upward, stating that "only the dean makes those decisions" and "given our budget situation, I really have no control over working conditions." Two things are clear from this research: that chairs and directors of women's studies overwhelmingly recognize the problem of contingency. Most also feel that they have little power to make real

change, so they place the blame for academic labor conditions further up the

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32 • Feminist Formations 27.3

bureaucratic chain.10 These responses reflect a sense of futility or lack of power

to effect change, given the tenuous location of departments and programs within the marginalized disciplines in the arts and humanities, as well as in some sciences. The corporate university tends to valorize those disciplines that produce external funding. And yet, there is a cost to this funded research, which, like university football, never actually pays the bills. It is the arts and

humanities that "keep the lights on," as many have argued, including Gary Rhoades, Robert Watson, and Chris Newfield.11 Recognizing these often-fatalistic feelings that accompany the recognition of oppressive working conditions is a step toward enacting change. We prioritize

the acknowledgment of such affective operations. As Ruth Leys (201 1, 436) asserts, "we ignore . . . affective intensities and resonances at our peril" because

affect is always working on us materially, psychically, and institutionally. To ignore emotion and affect, she explains, not only leads us to "underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do" (ibid.), but may also prevent action. Knowing the ways in which emotions work can help us, as activists, to do our work more effectively and encourage those in positions of power to want to do more. Accounting for affect and becoming accountable for it (that is, recognizing

affective productions and becoming responsible for intervening in them) are important to the work of the activist. To be clear, the pursuit of these forms of accountability is not a matter of identifying and possessing the "right feeling." Discourses of the right feeling - associated with decorum, status, and normative affective positions - privatize and naturalize emotions, ignoring the ways that they are culturally constructed and therefore contingent. Lauren Berlant (2008) is right to worry that such an ethics grounded in a privileged or "true feeling"

will preclude "the ethical imperative toward social transformation," replacing action with "a passive world of private thoughts, leanings, and gestures projected

out as an intimate public of private individuals inhabiting their own affective changes" (41). Countering this privatizing tendency, a praxis that de-interiorizes emotion makes affect available as a site for change. To recognize that affect is,

as Lisa Langstraat (2002, 306) says, always "imbricated in power relations" is to make emotion operative for activism. The fear of humiliation, for example,

is another unacknowledged feeling: particularly the looming prospect that we could be exposed as hypocritical for advocating for just employment practices when guilty of violating some ourselves, for advocating for social justice in one

sphere and inadvertently supporting unjust practices in another. Confronting this threat of humiliation - that which makes us feel most uncomfortable - is

a disruption that is a necessary piece of reflective praxis. Humiliation, and the fear of it, is perhaps the emotion most susceptible to being privatized and

turned inward. As all emotions are relational and thus imbricated in power relations, humiliation foregrounds issues of status inequality.12 There is a famous expression in the adjunct movement: that no adjunct is more than ten seconds

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 33

away from total humiliation. Bringing these conditions to light is essential to advocating academic labor reform, which extends to all aspects of experience in the academy. Interrogations of prejudice, as another example, also require this de-priva-

tizing approach to emotion. Prejudice is itself an affective position, embedded with feelings of contempt, anger, resentment, or disgust. Prejudice in turn produces emotional effects; thus, to eradicate prejudice is to change emotional relations. The "unhappy" emotions produced by prejudice and exploitation, such as physical pain, make us acutely aware of our conditions; they therefore may be necessary to any intervention in those conditions.13 We should not draw a false equation between "unhappy" and "morally suspect" (Ahmed 2010, 70); however,

unhappy emotions can nevertheless signal the need for change. Ahmed goes so far as to define "consciousness raising" as "raising consciousness of unhappiness" (ibid.). When activists act out their unhappiness they cause a disturbance - the sense of neutrality is disrupted. This disruption

challenges the "emotional hegemony" (Jaggar 1992, 130; Langstraat 2002, 300) that serves to maintain the status quo in naturalized power relations. Following Alison Jaggar, Langstraat defines emotional hegemony as "the processes through which dominant groups struggle to regulate the epistemic potential of emotions, thereby determining which emotional states are valued and which are mistrusted in specific contexts. Emotional hegemony is effective only insofar as it wins our consent by naturalizing that which is saturated with power relations" (ibid.). As Langstraat notes, emotional hegemony functions to win a kind of happy consent, a contentment with the way things are. It thus becomes imperative for equality laborers to find strategies for disrupting these naturalized affective economies. The "vexing" capacities of emotions can be cultivated through activist work. For

Langstraat, cultural constructions of emotionality can undergo interventions to bring about political change (310).14 In the final sections of this article we suggest strategies by which such vexing work can take place. Before embarking on this discussion, however, we pause briefly to address the repeated objections

to emotional appeals and the recurring disregard for emotional realities. Countering Skepticism toward Emotion Equity and conflict-resolution discourses regularly advise practitioners to deal with the ideology, not the emotion. But these recommendations, while perhaps

useful as a conversational style with certain audiences, can serve to privatize, pathologize, or neutralize emotions that are crucial features of any inequitable and vexed system - emotions that are full of the potential to stir things up.15

As feminists, we seek to be vigilant in countering the tendency to hide or dismiss emotion, in refusing the myths that construct emotion as a hindrance

to real change. At the same time, we should resist a corresponding tendency, which Ahmed warns against throughout her books, to fetishize emotion and

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34 * Feminist Formations 27.3

divorce it from the contingent circumstances of its circulation. An emotion can problematically become itself a site of investment, causing subjects to cling to a particular affective identity - for example, a righteous sense of fear that is born from the recurring "besiegement narrative" that Alison Piepmeier identifies in her contribution to the collection Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies (201 1). A besiegement narrative is often not far from discourses regarding activism, of which academic activists should be aware. The temptation to figure the adjunct as, to use the words of this article's reviewer, "always, already, ahistorically, and/

or only wronged" is simplistic and inadequate to the needs of academic labor reform. Instead of reducing the affective situation of the academic laborer, we

must gain resources for attending to the complexity of emotional circulations and emotional identities, which are multidimensional and ambivalent. Subsequently, these mixed feelings and ambivalences are useful, if not necessary, for

sustaining collectivism and material change. Frustration and anger, for example, can themselves become powerful rhetorical moves, translated in discourse or the body's expressiveness. Hence, while affect continues to be constructed as at odds with legitimate persuasion and action, we counter such common constructions, arguing that emotions may

themselves be a primary means of effective persuasion and collective action because they are always-already shaping our allegiances and ways of being. Ann Cvetkovich (2012) argues that "feelings" like the "political depress sion" now dominating the public landscape can be a resource for political action and should be de-pathologized so that they become "a possible resource for political action rather than its antithesis." She does not discount politi' cal depression's association with "inertia and despair," and says that "this is not to convert political depression into a positive experience," but to suggest that "these feelings, moods, and sensibilities become sites of publicity and community formation" (2). Emotions propel activism, triggering and catalyzing advocacy's pursuit of,

and claim to, policy and culture change. As an emergent, evolving, and impassioned component of advocacy, therefore, activism is the fast-and-hot protest

arm of advocacy's slow-and-cool project. Because we make a case here for the essential role of the affective to persuasion, we align our efforts with more of

an activist approach than an advocacy one, as much of our ensuing discussion will show. Because it saturates communication and social relations, emotion becomes an important resource for social justice work. Accounting for emotion and changing the emotional economies that reinforce and result from inequity is key to academic labor activism.

Making Use of Emotion in Activism through Organic Theater We should not leave emotion out. Here, we show, by using examples from a local setting, how emotion can become part of the action because activists intervene

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 35

at the level of discourse and consciousness-raising of the experiences of the precariat. While affect is to some extent beyond our control or decision, as Ahmed

(2004), Cory Holding (2007), and Denise Riley (2005) have articulated, we can also make rhetorical use of emotional resources, knowing that expressions of anger and despair have material effects and can work to bring people together

in collectivized action.

The activist's role necessitates not just the presentation of a message, but also the creation of conditions for making the message heard. She redeploys the message, as she must. But first, since effective activism, as Dorothy Hodgson and Ethel Brooks (2007, 25) posit, "depends on the ability to bridge differences

of lives and locations to build community, alliances, and collaborations," the adjunct activist/organizer must call attention to both complicity and collective despair. She then reappropriates "the power to express, criticize, shape, connect, and affect" (15). We have found through our activist work that feminist methodologies can enable this work at all levels/ranks of academic employment. We have employed feminist theory to assert alternative ways of knowing and of wanting to know,

to seek untold stories. Following Shalumit Reinharz and Lynn Davidman's (1992, 12) feminist methodology, we argue that activists should hold themselves

constrained to no single set of approaches to accomplish this work, but assert instead the necessity of utilizing a range of methods. However, certain methodologies of activism, which arise from feminist thought, are particularly useful in the context of academic equity work. Sue has found organic theater , a practice informed by feminist theory, to be a powerful form of activism within the academy. As defined and developed

by James Walsh and the Romero Theatre Troupe of Denver, organic theater builds on the work of Augusto Boal and Bertok Brecht and is a form of collec-

tivization in which stakeholders and members of a community come together to collaboratively, and sometimes improvisationally, script a short dramatic play that portrays an evocative and discussion-provoking event or issue.16 This theater is a useful tool for activist work in that it allows lived experiences to be rendered visible through the form of dramatic productions and reenactments. For instance, Sue has helped to perform a scene, drawn from life, in which an adjunct instructor is asked by a student to meet privately to discuss extenuating circumstances contributing to a low grade, a request that the adjunct instructor is forced to refuse because she has no office space for such meetings and no time to stay after class, since she has to commute between several campuses where she

holds multiple teaching contracts. Depicting this scene for a seated audience "showing" it on a stage rather than only "telling" about it - is persuasive in exposing the problems that result from the reliance upon undercompensated contingent instructors. Such approaches, due to their embodiment onstage, also resist the reduction of social justice issues to mere "cognitive problems" (Clough and Fine 2007, 265).

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3Ó ♦ Feminist Formations 27.3

Because each scene is embodied in this way, organic theater's persuasion is affectively charged; however, as a rhetorical strategy it resists the manipulations of pathos by staking out space for discussion following each performance.

Each scene is left open to multiple interpretations, asking audience members and actors alike to consider the manifold forces that shape the presented situation. Additionally, various members of a community are invited and welcomed

to depict their experience and perspective as actor-participants, regardless of alignment or affiliation, thus expanding the range of stakeholder voices and complicating too-easy characterizations of the motives of this type of staged performance.

This approach of organic theater is informed by feminist methodologies that elevate the "situation at hand" and lived experience of marginalization as an otherwise "hidden process" and value of the "already-given situation" (Fonow

and Cook 1991, 11). Drawing from feminist theory, organic theater takes the small, local case as an appropriate unit of focus. Such methodological choices counter academic contexts where faculty are largely educated to develop a general distrust of the "n" of one, the individual story or personally experienced

scene. Organic theater allows for the case study, the testimony, the personal story all to be made public as dramatically rendered genres of understanding and forms of meaning-making. At the same time, because performances often involve several actors and a range of stakeholders, the individual story becomes a space for collaborative reconstruction and counter-narratives. Organic theater

is a way of recognizing how precarious employment emerges, evolves, and is experienced, while also calling for change at both the local and national levels. It offers a pedagogy of disruption to business as usual, accelerating change even

in contexts of informed and committed activism; it reminds participants and audience members of the imperfect progress of change efforts and of those who suffer while they wait. In our work as activists we have come to recognize how employment trauma utterly dismantles the narratives of academic success and achievement that are often central to the self-image of persons educated at the graduate level. Such

affronts to personal and professional agency may prompt shame, which can only be reworked if the story is allowed to be told, the emotions articulated, the effects registered. This kind of restorative witnessing relies upon Wendy Hesford's (1999) notion of layered testimony , through which identities are inscribed

and alternative versions of history talk back to the dominant culture and one another. Testimony allows others to witness alternative ways of knowing and being, and confronts the prejudice and conformity insinuated by dominant expectations for autobiographical testimony. There is, therefore, an important role to be played by the re-storying of trauma in the calculus of recovery and healing from trauma in the workplace, and not just for the adjunct. Equally as much, there is a role for the stories of those who are more fully enfranchised

within the academic setting. And as a feature of the feminist methodology at

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 37

work here, storying provides the opportunity for both testifier and witness to

challenge dominant assumptions. From this viewpoint, emotions, including those of disappointment, loss, hurt, grief, and anger, are validated in their own

right. Even conscience and shame can be given their due because presenting a story can move out of a state in which "one's body seems to burn up with the

negation that is perceived" (Ahmed 2010, 103); at the same time, it becomes possible for these emotions to be integrated and transformed after they are first told.

By way of example, an onstage exploration can be undertaken across tiers or levels of employment rank and privilege, thus deepening the conversation by explaining the employment context from multiple perspectives. Those who

might imagine only being demoralized by processes that call out injustices they are complicit in are consciously invited in and given opportunity to offer their perspectives. This approach goes some distance toward answering to fears

of public shaming, which would be a nonmotivator. Instead, an invitational rhetoric opens the door to multiple versions of the same event, thus aligning this approach to feminist methodologies that permit forgiveness and enact reintegration. Emotional dimensions of marginalized employment are hence not

only motivating factors that can lead to change, but legitimate landmarks in and of themselves that warrant representation. As both subject and outcome of a feminist research agenda they also pronounce a hallmark of feminist research to which we have referred: that the doing of research and the making of change

can (and perhaps must) go hand in hand. Sue's work in organic theater has uncovered these possibilities, as it has also exposed several risks of making use of emotion in activism. One of the purposes of doing organic theater work is to draw on Bertolt Brechts (1957, 91) notion of "the alienation effect" in which the performance is not offered to make people feel good or even sympathetic, but rather to make them uncomfortable in the laying bare of issues, the unveiling of injustice and prejudice.17 The act

of challenging the status quo through this medium thus serves a rhetorical purpose: change comes at a price to those who must reconsider their positions of privilege. However, as tenured colleagues have pointed out, when you are on the receiving end of that kind of discomfort it can seem that you are being

called out and humiliated, which would likely cause audiences to become distanced and disengaged from what is being presented. At the same time, the

nontenured adjunct may feel an inflicted shame for having not measured up and disappointed one's self, institution, discipline, and family. Cognizant of the ways that shaming has been a tool of patriarchy, heterosexism, and misogyny, we prioritize the need for practices that remain mindful of the ways that shaming

can foreclose, rather than open up possibilities to move toward greater equal' ity.18 In order to avoid the experience of shame that inflicts violence on another, adjunct activist work should seek a restorative approach, as defined by Ahmed (2010, 107): "Shame may be restorative only when the shamed other can ' show '

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38 • Feminist Formations 27.3

that its failure to measure up to a social ideal is temporary " (emphasis in original).

There must be an opportunity for change, a way of altering what is deemed "shameful" - whether it be the correction of a hidden bias or the acknowledg-

ment of hidden labor. This practice of reflection that moves toward change is key to a practice of accountability that examines ones imbrication in oppressive

systems. As Russo (2008) argues in her discussion of the politics of accountability, "[exploring, naming, and claiming one's privilege is an important part of the process of anti-oppression work" (146), yet identifying one's privilege is not enough: we must actively seek ways of dismantling existing power structures

and enabling realignments. With adjunct activism through theater, at least as Sue has conducted it locally, the goal is to bring together as many layers of university employment

as possible. It is with this idea that we have used the research presented here, on chairs and directors of women's studies departments, to push disciplinary associations like the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) to provide a platform for women's and gender studies (WGS) administrators to share experiences in their advocacy efforts and encourage one another to move toward

stronger activism. (One such platform was during the 2014 annual NWSA conference, in the session "Feminist Perspectives on Contingency in Academia Part

Three: Advocacy and Activism in the Contingent Labor Movement.") When asked via survey what resources disciplinary associations could provide, these administrators indicated that they wanted trainings and materials. When asked

what effective support from NWSA would look like, here is how some of the chairs and directors responded: "Models of strategies that have worked elsewhere." "Best-practices advice. What has worked elsewhere?" "Wow! Any advice, especially from those who have agitated for reform. Perhaps alerts to legislation that could help us create an argument or approach. Also, suggestions for other things we could do to be supportive, particularly when we cannot in the financial ways. I would welcome any/all advice and help!"

From these sentiments we can see that department chairs within women's studies express the wish that disciplinary associations would gather and share best practices and exemplary initiatives implemented in other departments to address the problems of contingency. As we move to consider strategies to support the heads of these programs we should also see the value in creating forums for discussion and reflection, accompanied by discipline-centered accountability structures, which could help institutions find their way toward alleviating inequality.

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 39

Intervening in Institutional Discourse: Exposing Affective Economies In addition to using storying, testimony, and the presentational devices of organic theater, we have found interventions at the level of institutional discourse to be useful to academic activist work. A close examination of written university policies can yield productive discussions in much the same way that organic theater does. These discussions of written university-policy documents

may take place in department or committee meetings, or in open forums like classroom discussions, town hall-type events, campus newspapers, or designated

free-speech zones where discourses may be posted or written on community boards or with sidewalk chalk.

Analysis of institutional discourses reveals how the affective economies of the university are regulated through human-resource policy. Policies and legislation are ways of managing emotion because they shape interpretations of feeling as being either legitimate and normative or marginalized. Judith Butler (2010, 41) holds that "how we interpret what we feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself"; emotion is discursive because it is at least partially

constructed by interpretation. Bearing this in mind, we can reread the genre of the "compensation philosophy statement" by using a new lens - one that emphasizes the emotional realities that coincide with institutional realities. Official university discourses regularly frame the issue of compensation in terms of sustainabilityy without identifying who is being sustained (that is, the institution, the worker, the student, or otherwise) and how evaluations of sustainability are determined. Sustainability becomes a term like diversity that plays out an ideal at the level of language without regard for material realities.

In On Being Included Ahmed (2012, 5) reads institutional discourse as, citing J. L. Austin, performative rather than constative : saying "we are diverse" is not a true or false statement about the inclusion or representation of lived identities of members; claims to diversity are instead a performance of nominal values that

need not be descriptive of actual circumstances. Sustainability, as a construct, functions similarly. Official claims to employ sustainable hiring and compensa-

tion practices operate to perform nominal values unaccompanied by explicit definition or measurable accountability. What counts as sustainable practice is a rhetorical problem. The neoliberal catchphrases of "fiscal responsibility" and "market competitiveness" come to belong to the discourse of sustainability in universities* compensation-philosophy statements. These official documents construct university administrators as prudent, judicious managers of limited funds while remaining silent on the larger budgetary contexts in which pay distributions are decided. As Jagna Wójcicka Sharff and Johanna Lessinger (2008, 3) note, citing National Center for Education Statistics, the increasing reliance upon untenured labor coincides with four other key shifts, which are

rarely acknowledged in institutional explanations of pay:

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4o • Feminist Formations 27.3

1.) The direct capital corporate investment in university research. 2.) A dramatic rise in tuition fees, increasing at more than twice the rate of inflation.

3.) Continuing bitter complaints from colleges and universities about "fiscal agony" despite enrollments that are at an all-time high . . . and tuition

revenues that have doubled over the past decade. 4.) A rapid rise in the administrative costs of US universities (19 percent), as compared to their instructional costs (5 percent) during the 1980s.19

These factors, which govern a university's cash flow, may not be transparent to the laborers who belong to the institution, and they are elided and deemed irrelevant to explanations of faculty compensation that are distributed to faculty members. The budgetary situation of a university is instead glossed in generic, loaded terms of sustainability and equity. We should be wary of the institutional appeal of such terms, which can serve to conceal lived realities. Taking back, or re-appropriating, these shape-shifting terms in academic activism work becomes

a strategy that must be managed carefully so as not to allow activist work to become co-opted or emptied of transformative meaning. Compensation-philosophy statements purport to "reward employees for the skill, responsibility and effort required for their positions as well as individual

performance" while also promoting "internal equity" and "consistency in pay practices across the university."20 These recurring claims to a meritocratic ideal of reward-based pay that is also fair and consistent at once obfuscate the extreme

disparity in pay rates between university administrators and nontenure-track faculty, even as they also naturalize pay scales as being grounded in individual "performance" rather than in structural factors, such as the visibility, power,

and expendability of the position.21 The implication of this prevailing ideology is that poor compensation is a result of individual inadequacy rather than structural inequities. This goes hand in hand with an "increasingly negative view of teachers as chaotic, disordered bodies in need of professional [outcomes-

based] discipline" (Strickland 201 1, 64). These institutional discourses manage emotion in the sense that they justify conditions that regularly produce anxiety, fear, resentment, anger, and despair; in turn, these discourses serve to privatize

emotions, since emotions are not afforded a place in an institutional context that paints itself as doing what is right, sustainable, and fair. As poor compen-

sation is indicated to be the result of individual inadequacy on the part of the employee, so also are negative emotions attributed to the individual rather than

the conditions that set these emotions into circulation. We should continue to seek strategies to intervene in official, managerial languages of "equity" that disguise and defend actual inequities. One such strategy is to bring explicit recognition of institutionalized structural inequalities into official discourse through position statements, such as those issued by NWSA, the American Association of University Professors, and other academic

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 41

organizations and research centers. Doe and Mike Palmquist (2013) argue that work on the local level supported and shaped by interventions at the level of discourse "might ultimately lead to a renewed and potentially more vigorous employment system in which tenure - in a variety of forms - is more widely enjoyed than is currently the case" (23). In their analysis, position statements that counter official discourses "have served an important role within local contexts" (27). Such position statements may ultimately prompt individual universities and colleges to enter the recognition of inequities into institutional self-presentations, causing administrators to take public stances against univer-

sity reliance upon contingent labor; they can also foster critical awareness of the implications and ramifications of policy decisions. At the same time, these

position statements can legitimize contingent faculty members' expressions of the unhappy effects of contingency and under-compensation. Position statements can foreground emotions, shared by contingent faculty members, which

have become hidden behind institutional declarations of fairness and equity in compensation policies. The affective productions of official discourse are multifaceted - at once marginalizing emotions that highlight woeful conditions, and reinforcing affec-

tive attachments that keep professionals in exploitive labor conditions. As, among others, Ahmed (2010) and Berlant (2008) have theorized, "emotion can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination" (Ahmed, 12). We take seriously Subbaraman's (2002) warning to complicate and critically consider the

implications of claims that we, as teachers, "labor not for wages but for love" (261), a notion that affirms "popular conceptions [such] as 'women's choice/ and serve as both a rationale and a justification for structural inequities" (260).

Clearly, however, "love," or what Eileen Schell (1998) calls a "psychic income," plays a role in some women's decisions to remain in low-waged academic jobs. However problematic, faculty are motivated affectively by their concern for their students, by beliefs in the transformative potential of education in addressing the historical marginalization of minoritized groups, by the nonmonetary rewards

that are thought to be intrinsic to academic life, including prestige and community, and by hope for a model of a noncorporatized university that values the independent, free life of the mind for the sake of the public good. The "system

has flourished," Subbaraman notes, "because we feminists have bought into the ideological fantasy that we work for pleasure and for love. Given the white, middle-class antecedents of the second wave of the feminist movement that put many white feminists into the academy, this particular state of affairs does not

seem ironic at all" (26o).22 University discourse makes use of these ideologies, reinforcing in various ways the idea that faculty life is intrinsically self-fulfilling and should therefore be an all-consuming lifestyle of knowledge production and

service to the university. The work of the faculty member becomes divorced from wages, which reinforces the ideologies that discipline the "good professor"

to be a tireless and altruistic laborer for the good of the university, which is

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42 • Feminist Formations 27.3

regularly constructed to be representative of the good of all. These ideologies are mobilized to continue the exploitation of the academy's precariat. The idiom of affect theory can prompt academic labor activists to ask questions that may be essential to any possibility for change: What affective bar-

gains do contingent faculty make to maintain their careers in academe? What emotional habitus maintains the status quo? How do institutional discourses reflect and shape this emotional habitus? How can we confront the status quo at the level of institutional discourse and through forums of communication that can be prompted through position-statement drafting and the performance of organic theater?

Conclusion We have suggested the use of strategies like organic theater, position statements,

and analyses of local institutional discourses. Speaking out directly against the evocation of the language of equity within public institutions that gloss over institutional inequities like precarity is part of the work of women's studies. Research can take a dual approach, working both from the inside out and the outside in, in which local efforts are captured and shared as potential approaches

for agency on other campuses, and national efforts are joined and assisted in order to participate in the broader effects.

We should remember that precarity has become a generalized condition in the academy, which should be answered with a widespread response. The adjunct activist agenda has the best interests of all academic faculty and staff in mind. While we know that contingency is not evenly distributed in academe, it is nonetheless true that contingency affects us all. The idea that tenure means security is rapidly being exposed as an unreliable myth. Contingency is an issue that involves members of higher education at large, and women's studies plays an important role in paving the way to a new institutional reality that will no longer rely upon an "underclass" of poorly compensated and undervalued professionals. Janelle Adsit is an assistant professor of English at Humboldt State University in Areata , California , specializing in writing practices. She has previously taught at Siena College , the University at Albany/SUNY, and the San Francisco Art Institute. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in English at Simon Fraser University. She can be reached [email protected]. Sue Doe is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins , where she teaches courses in composition , autoethnographic theory and method , reading and writing connections , research methods, and GTA preparation for writing instruction. She does research in three areas: academic labor , writing across the curriculum , and student-veteran transition in the post-ç/ii era. Coauthor of the faculty development book Concepts and Choices: Meeting the Challenges

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto ♦ 43

in Higher Education (2008), she has published articles in College English and Writing Program Administration, as well as in several book-length collections . Her coauthored collection on student-veterans in the composition classroom, Generation Vet: Composition, Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University, was published in 2014. She can be reached at [email protected].

Marisa Allison is the director of research at the NFM Foundation, a research and advocacy organization for contingent faculty, where she currently directs the Women and Contingency Project. She is a doctoral candidate in public and applied sociology at George Mason University, and has been an adjunct instructor for ten years at numerous institutions in Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her doctoral research investigates the ways that transformations in political economy have affected institutions of higher education and women's work within them. She can be reached at [email protected]. Paula Maggio recently served as the communications director for the NFM Foundation. She is a former adjunct faculty member in the women's studies programs at the University of Akron and Kent State University. She can be reached at akronpm @ sbcglobal.net.

M aria Maisto is an adjunct faculty member in English in northeast Ohio. She co-founded and now leads New Faculty Majority and the NFM Foundation, affiliated nonprofit associations that work to improve the quality of higher education by transforming the working conditions of the majority of the faculty, who work on temporary, precarious appointments. She has written and spoken on the subject of academic contingent employment in the media as well as for academic venues. She can be reached at [email protected]. Notes 1. See Catherine Stukel (2014). 2. These questions are beginning to be acknowledged and addressed from within women's studies: for example, the National Women's Studies Association's 2014 conference featured three roundtables on contingency and women's studies. During one of these sessions, members of the NFM Foundation reported findings from a survey of women's studies programs. 3. The NFM Foundation's Women and Contingency Project seeks to understand the experience of precarity as an experience of women, as well as the long-standing, generalized feminization of certain roles, such as that of the teacher, within the academy.

Because women's centers and women's studies programs have historically undertaken activism work within the academy, researchers from the foundation reached out to these chairs and directors to better understand how and if they advocate for contingent faculty within both their departments and their institutions as a whole. The researchers contacted 586 chairs and directors at institutions throughout the United States,

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44 * Feminist Formations 27.3

receiving 114 responses - a rate of 20 percent, which is acceptable for web-based surveys of this magnitude.

4. In Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2010), Judith Butler articulates how precarity is a basic condition of all life, since all life is dependent on and exposed to the other. Butler reads this generalized condition of precarity as a resource for ethics that can reduce what she calls "precariousness." Butler distinguishes precariousness from precarity in that the former term "is not simply an existential condition of individuals, but rather a social condition from which certain clear political demands and principles emerge" (2010, xxv, 3). For our purposes here, we use precarity and precariousness interchangeably to denote academic working conditions that prevent security and stability, positioning these conditions in a larger context of "dispossession and injury" affecting people in all parts of the globe. 5. Precariat is a term popularized by Guy Standing in his 2014 book of that title and in previous work, to signify an emerging class that experiences conditions that demand to be recognized and addressed. While we do not adopt Standing's arguments, we use precariat and precarity to highlight subjectivities and experiences that are created by contingency.

6. Thus, about half of the respondents indicated that their departments were "stable." While it is difficult to infer much about a collective meaning of stability based on this survey given its limitations, understandings of stability imply a top-down, bureau-

cratic approach to faculty governance (that is, stability assumed to be given and taken from above). One limitation of this research is the possible assumption that if chairs and directors largely felt that adjunct faculty working conditions were poor (which they did), that their department and positions within their institution were stable (which they mostly are), and that they had opportunities to advocate for these faculty members

(which they note that they have had), then they would feel higher levels of autonomy to enact change. Unfortunately, this is not what we found. Over 60 percent of chairs and directors disagreed with the statement, "I have the autonomy to better the working conditions of part-time faculty in my department." The buck does not stop on their desk,

but on the desk of the administrators higher up. 7. As a response to this situation Diane Elam (2002) suggests that, in this context, women's studies has no choice but to find ways of shoring up its financial autonomy, of reducing disciplinary precarity, so that the imperatives of women's studies can continue. She writes that "Women's Studies can continue to be a resistant force within the university . . . but Women's Studies will not be heard if its voice is only a tiny squeak from the margins . . . Women's Studies cannot negotiate from a position of strength without a solid financial commitment on the part of the university" (223). 8. See Maria Maisto (2012). 9. We follow Ahmed in not drawing a sharp distinction between the terms affect and emotion in our discussion here; see her The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004, 40). While some theorists, such as Brian Massumi (2002), define affect, in contrast to emotion, "as a nonsignifying, nonconscious 'intensity' disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-meaning axis to which the more familiar categories of emotion belong" (qtd. in Leys 201 1, 437), we do not find a hard line between nonsignifying and signifying circulations.

10. It should be noted that although they are not the majority, fewer than twenty respondents expressed continued commitment to advocacy for contingent faculty in

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Janelle Adsit, Sue Doe, Marisa Allison, Paula Maggio, and Maria Maisto • 45

their institution. Determining what causes this difference in action would be a logical next research step.

11. See Sue Doe (2010), which references the work of Gary Rhoades, Robert Watson, and Chris Newfield. 12. See Ahmed (2004). 13. See Doe, Maisto, and Adsit (2015). 14. In claiming a space for the "unhappy position" in activist work, we do not mean to affirm a model of the heroic, masculinist, unhappy revolutionary "whose suffering is a gift to the world" (Ahmed 2010, 169). Nonetheless, there may be, Ahmed suggests, a necessity for unhappiness in activist efforts, since happiness signals an acceptance of the status quo. Unhappiness stirs things up. Unhappy emotions are, in this sense, active; they are "creative responses" (217) to conditions and ripe with potential to instigate change. 15. Acts of protest become maligned in terms of emotional abnormality and excess that "gets in the way." "Psychologically reductive accounts that pathologized protest and protesters," Deborah Gould (2010, 19) notes, "did not die out in the nineteenth century but rather continue to circulate widely today." She explains that those "with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo frequently describe social justice activists as driven by emotion (which they pit against reason) and protest activities as irrational and childish, rather than a legitimate mode" of advocacy (ibid.). 16. See Tina Griego (201 1) and Josiah Hesse (2012). 17. The discomfort described above serves a rhetorical function, transcending simple identification with characters in the play in favor of defamiliarizing the familiar and revealing the ideologies and injustices hidden in everyday events - a phenomenon that dramatist and theorist Bertolt Brecht (1957, 91, 95) termed the "alienation effect." 18. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their help in elaborating the concepts under discussion here. 19. What could be added to Sharff and Lessinger's (2008) list is the divestiture of colleges and universities from public retirement funds and contributions to Social Security. Today, more often than not, the faculty employee is an individual intellectual entrepreneur who is expected to take care of her own 401k or 403b. This expectation is untenable for the 75 percent of faculty who teach off the tenure track, many of whom have no access to benefits packages at all, the rest of whom barely make enough to put food on the table, much less to invest in a private retirement savings plan. As a result, many if not most are likely never to retire due to the low amount of investment they can

make. Of course, tenure-track faculty and most other university employees participate in this divestiture from Social Security also, albeit at lower stakes. 20. This section quotes from the University of San Francisco's compensation philosophy as a typical statement of university pay policy. 21. Even the deployment of alternative forms of compensation exacerbates the problem of inequity. When free tickets to fine art exhibits or membership to an on-campus gym become an alternative form of compensation, differences become recognizable because the likelihood of use varies by employment status. The adjunct faculty member who is carrying a full load is less likely to invest in the arts or in wellness activities when

the goal is just to survive, which suggests that some faculty members exist in a kind of "opportunity desert," even as they may be presented with opportunities for self-care that they simply cannot afford to take.

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46 ' Feminist Formations 27.3

22. Subbaraman (2002) cites Patricia Hill Collins, Bonnie Thorton Dill, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, bell hooks, and Deborah L. King and for their observations that "work as a liberatory principle was true only for white, middle-class U.S. feminists, for whom work was a way to escape the structures of home. For all other women, work has always been integral to their economic survival and, in fact, has little to do with pleasure or love" (260). References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint : The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blee, Kathleen M. 2002. "Contending with Disciplinarity." In Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change , edited by Robyn Wiegman, 177-82. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 1957. "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting." In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic edited and translated by John Willett, 91-99. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Michelle Fine. 2007. "Activism and Pedagogies: Feminist Reflections." Women's Studies Quarterly 35 (3-4): 255-78. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Doe, Sue. 2010. "A Hot Mess or Cool Opportunity? Revising the Aspirational Agenda via New Collective Effort." Forum 14 (1): A7-A12. Bringing Affect into 'Effectiveness' in Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Advocacy." In Contingency , Exploitation, and Solidarity : Labor and Action in English Composition

edited by Karen Fitts, Seth Kahn, William Laiicker, and Amy Lynch-Biniek, 00-00. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Position Statements on the Contingent Faculty." ADE & A DFL Bulletin 153/42 (3)* 23-34. Elam, Diane. 2002. "Taking Account of Women's Studies." In Women's Studies on Its Own : A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Changey edited by Robyn Wiegman, 218-24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fonow, Mary Margaret, and Judith A. Cook. 1991. Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholar-

ship As Lived Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gappa, Judith M., Ann E. Austin, and Andrea G. Trice. 2007. Rethinking Faculty Work. San Francisco: JosseyBass. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2002. "Rethinking Collectivity: Chicago Feminism, Athenian

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Democracy, and the Consumer University." In Women's Studies on Its Own : A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change , edited by Robyn Wiegman, 191-201. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gould, Deborah. 2010. "On Affect and Protest." In Political Emotions , edited by Janet Staiger and Ann Cvetkovich, 18-45. New York: Routledge. Griego, Tina. 201 1. "Romero Theater Troupe Tells History From the Bottom Up." Denver Post.com, 8 September, http://www.denverpost.com/griego/ci_18848926. Hesford, Wendy. 1999. "'Ye Are Witnesses': Autobiography and Commemorative Practices." In Framing Identities: Autobiography and Pedagogy , edited by Wendy Hesford,

71-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hesse, Josiah M. 2012. "Romero Theater Troupe to Defend Auraria Custodians in Activist Play." Westword.com, 8 November, http://www.westword.com/arts/romero

-theater-troupe-to-defend-auraria-custodians-in-activist-play-5780795. Hodgson, Dorothy L., and Ethel Brooks, eds. 2007. "Introduction: Activisms." Women's Studies Quarterly 35 (3-4): 14-25. Holding, Cory. 2007. "Affecting Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 59 (2): 317-29. Horning, Rob. 2012. "Precarity and Affective Resistance.'" The New Inquiry (blog), 14 February, http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/precarity-and-affective -resistance/.

Jaggar, Alison M. 1992. "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemologa" In Women and Reason , edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey and Kathleen Okruhlik, 115-42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Langstraat, Lisa. 2002. "The Point Is There Is No Point: Miasmic Cynicism and Cultural Studies Composition." JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 2 (2): 293-325. Leys, Ruth. 201 1. "The Turn to Affect: A Critique." Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434-72. Lorde, Audre. 2007. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1984). In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches , 1 10-14. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.

Maisto, Maria. 2012. "Taking Heart, Taking Part: New Faculty Majority and the Praxis of Contingent Faculty Activism." In Embracing Non-Tenure Track Faculty: Changing Campuses for the New Faculty Majority , edited by Adrianna Kezar, 190-205. New York: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement , Affect, Sensation . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2013. "On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology." American Anthropologist 115 (2): 297-311. Piepmeier, Alison. 201 1. "Besiegement." In Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies, edited by Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite, and Diane Lichtenstein, 119-35. New York: Routledge. Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race , and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms . Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reinharz, Shalumit, and Lynn Davidman. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press.

Riley, Denise. 2005. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Russo, Ann. 2008. "Women's Studies: Cultivating Accountability as a Practice of

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Solidarity." In The Evolution of American Women's Studies : Reflections on Triumphs ,

Controversies, and Change, edited by Alice E. Ginsberg, 131-52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schell, Eileen E. 1998. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers : Gender , Contingent Labor ,

and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Shain, Andrew. 2014. "USC Upstate Cuts Center Tied to Gay Event, Senate Sidesteps Book Debate." The State.com, 13 May. http://www.thestate.com/news/politics -government/articlei3854i46.html.

Sharff, Jagna Wójcicka, and Johanna Lessinger. 2008. "The Academic Sweatshop: Changes in the Capitalist Infrastructure and the Part-Time Academic." Anthropology of Work Review 15 (1): 2-1 1.

Shields, Stephanie A. 2012. "Waking Up to Privilege: Intersectionality and Opportunity." In Presumed Incompetent : The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia , edited by Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, 29-39. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Standing, Guy. 2014. The Precariati The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Strickland, Donna. 201 1. The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Stukel, Catherine. 2014. "Is That Whining Adjunct Someone We Want Teaching Our Young?" The Chronicle of Higher Education , Letter to the Editor, 25 August, http://

chronicle.com/blogs/letters/is-that-whining-adjunct-someone-we-want-teaching -our-young/.

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The Scholars and the Feminists: The Barnard Sex Conference and the History of the Institutionalization of Feminism Author(s): Rachel Corbman Source: Feminist Formations, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue: Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women's Studies in the Corporate University (Winter 2015), pp. 49-80 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860815 Accessed: 29-07-2021 20:38 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860815?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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The Scholars and the Feminists:

The Barnard Sex Conference and the History of the Institutionalization of Feminism Rachel Corbman

The history of what we now call "academic feminism" did not take place exclusively in colleges and universities. Rather, a range of infrastructure facilitated the production and dissemination of feminist knowledge in the decades following the institutionalization of the first women's studies programs in the United States. This article looks specifically at the infamous 19 82 Barnard Conference on Sexuality to trace the multiple trajectories through which feminism was gradually academicized and institutionalized in the university. This conference is a particularly instructive case study because it already exists as a locus of anxiety in which histories of grassroots activism , feminist thought , and proto-queer theory collide. The article, then, provides an archivally driven account of the conference, from its planning stages through its political fallout, with an eye toward the infrastructural and personal networks that weave inside and outside of the academy. Because knowledge production is a collaborative process, the article argues that we end up with oddly skewed accounts of feminist field formation when inclusion is dependent on proximity to recognizable forms of feminism in the university.

Keywords: academic feminism / anti-pornography movement / Barnard Conference on Sexuality / histories of feminism / pro-sex feminism

In December 1982 Boston-based Gay Community News published a book review contributed by Judith Butler, then a 26-year-old graduate student. Titled "Poli-

tics, Pleasure, Pain: The Controversy Continues," her review focused on The

©2015 Feminist Formations, Vol. 27 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 49-80

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5o • Feminist Formations 27.3

Diary of the Conference on Sexuality that emerged out of Barnard's ninth annual

The Scholar and the Feminist Conference earlier that year. Printed with the intent to serve as an accompanying handbook, the "controversy" began when more than a thousand copies were seized by Barnard in the days leading up to the conference. The administration's claim of the program's obscenity was only

the beginning of trouble for the conference and its participants. In the days that followed, the conference was famously picketed by the Women Against Pornography (WAP) and a voluminous and volatile debate ensued within the feminist press. Butler's short book review is intriguing for a number of reasons in relation

to her resulting career, the shifting historical interpretations of the Barnard conference, and the critical genealogy of feminist and queer knowledge production more broadly. For one, the review's attention to power as the means through which sexuality is constructed is early evidence of the direction that Butler's work would take in the years to come, signaling the strong influence of the intellectual currents of the conference on her as a developing scholar. Furthermore, rather than engaging with the conference as a singular turning point or a watershed moment in the feminist sex wars, Butler intervenes by characterizing it as "diverse and complex," with a commitment to theorize ing "across lines of class, color, ethnicity, sexual preference, sexual roles, and differing physical sizes and abilities" (1).

Depending on how we historicize the Barnard conference, the existence of a book review penned by Butler is alternatively fitting or jarring. On the one

hand, her participation in this critical conversation - nearly a decade before she published Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) -

meshes with a dominant teleology of the development of sexuality studies. It makes sense to symbolically locate Butler at the conference where Gayle Rubin presented "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Politics of Sexuality."1 Three years prior to the conference, in fact, Butler heard a much earlier version of Rubin's paper at New York University's Second Sex Conference. Butler later marked this presentation as occasioning an "important shift" in her thinking, due in part to the fact that it was the first time she saw a copy of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (Butler [199011999, 222; Rubin 201 1, 285). This exchange, then,

seems to bolster a narrative in which the Foucaldian-inspired works of Rubin and especially Butler became foundational texts of a not-yet-codified field of queer theory, which is often read as dramatically diverging from feminist theory.

On the other hand it is quite difficult to imagine Butler - queer theorist in the making - in dialogue with the conference participants if we accept the competing understanding of the conference as only ostensibly an academic event. Although highly theoretical papers like Rubin's "Thinking Sex" or Hortense Spillers's "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" trace their origin to this conference, the Barnard conference is perhaps most often written about as a dramatic clash between a grassroots mobilization of anti-pornography feminists

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Rachel Corbman • 51

versus a network of feminist writers and cultural workers, who were later called

"pro-sex feminists." This interpretation of the conference tends to preserve a sharp conceptual division between feminist scholars and feminist activists, even

as the lives and career trajectories of conference participants individually and collectively thwart this distinction. The two narratives sketched above, which will be further fleshed out in the closing of this article, are strikingly at odds. Implicitly or explicitly, however, both versions share a tendency to project back a more fully formed and structurally distinct concept of feminism in the academy than what historically existed

in the 1970s and early '8os. This obscures the multiple trajectories of institutionalization and gradual academization of a feminist knowledge-production project in the United States, which is only now more or less synonymous with

academic feminism.2 I am here using Robyn Wiegman's (2012) definition of "institutionalization" to refer to "the generative influence of identity knowledges

across the disciplines and to the many courses, conferences, publications, and academic organizations that now comprise their intellectual and organizational formation" (7). This definition is drawn from the opening pages of Object Lessons in which

Wiegman posits her overarching argument. At its core the book argues that there is a "crucial difference" between social movements and their institution-

alized forms as identity-based fields of study in US colleges and universities. For Wiegman, social movements are no less disciplinary than institutionalized domains of study - "just differently so" (17). This article takes up Wiegman's argument that feminist knowledge production is its own distinct project, and it is similarly invested in attending to the ways in which production contexts shape what is possible for feminist intellectual work. Yet, in focusing on feminist

knowledge production during the 1970s and '8os I am struck by how much of the infrastructure that facilitated the formation of a field was not yet formally

attached to universities. For example, although the 1982 Barnard conference was put on by the Women's Center at Barnard, it was primarily funded by a grant from the Helena Rubinstein Foundation and also attracted a large paying audience that included a large proportion of feminists who were not academics.

Furthermore, the conference received a tremendous amount of press coverage from periodicals with no connection to university presses - of which Butler's book review in the radical newspaper Gay Community News is just one example.

Similarly, nonaccredited feminist institutes like Sagaris, grassroots archiving projects like the Lesbian Herstory Archives, feminist bookstores across the country, and informal networks of feminist researchers who worked inside and outside of universities are all, I think, central to the history of the development of feminism as a field of study.3 Is it possible, then, to apply Wiegman's argument to a context in which grassroots and university-bound feminist knowledge

production happened in tandem? Likewise, do we have the vocabulary and critical framework to analyze the means through which a field of study was

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52 • Feminist Formations 27.3

institutionalized in the university that does not retroactively exclude work that happened outside of the university or in precarious relation to it? Because feminist knowledge production was and is a collaborative process, I argue that we end up with oddly skewed histories when networks of feminists are divvied up based on their perceived proximity to early efforts to institutionalize women's studies in colleges and universities. To illustrate, this article offers an

archivally driven analysis of the Barnard conference with an eye toward the infrastructural and personal networks that weave in and out of academia. The conference is particularly instructive as a case study because of the ways in which it represents a literal collision of feminist activism and knowledge production, and more broadly functions as a locus of anxiety as to what different forms of feminism can and should look like. Remarkably, although this conference took place nearly thirty-five years ago it has proven stubbornly resilient as a frequently referenced and yet undertheorized troubling object for feminist historiography. What accounts for this historical weight? In the pages that follow I center this question by tracing the conference from its planning stages through its political

fallout. Finally, I conclude by considering the ways in which the treatment of this event has evolved from the 1980s up to the present.

Planning Committee On September 16, 1981 the planning committee for the ninth annual Scholar and the Feminist Conference convened for its first meeting. This meeting commenced with Jane Gould, the director of the Women's Center, introducing Carole Vance as the academic coordinator of the conference. Gould noted that it had traditionally been the planning committee's responsibility to shape

the conference's theme. However, this year the Women's Center had already "accepted Carole's proposal that we take as our starting point the theme of sexuality."4 Gould had her reservations. She had approached Vance earlier that year about serving as the conference's coordinator. Although interested, Vance

was somewhat adamant on the theme. In the end the women struck a bargain: "If the planning committee was not satisfied with the theme or preferred to have a theme emerge from discussions and readings, as in former years, Carole

said she would accept the group decision and work with us" (Gould 1997, 194). With that, Vance was named the academic coordinator of the Scholar and the Feminist Conference, with the preliminarily official theme of sexuality. She was at the time a relatively recent PhD, having completed her dissertation

in 1979 on female employment and fertility in Barbados. After receiving her doctorate from Columbia University she immediately began work toward a master's degree in public health and was simultaneously a fellow in psychiatric

epidemiology and research associate in sociomedical sciences, all at Columbia. Vance's rigorous and interdisciplinary work on gender, medical anthropology, demography, and sexuality had already captured the attention of a feminist

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Rachel Corbman • 53

audience, perhaps particularly in New York. In 1979 she led a workshop on sexuality and culture at the Second Sex Conference, and her article "Gender Systems, Ideology, and Sex Research" was published the following year in Feminist Studies .

Addressing the participants of this first meeting, Vance offered a succinct

and compelling case in support of her proposed theme. First, she positioned the topic of sexuality as timely and appropriate, owing partially to the contem-

poraneous feminist protests against pornography brewing on a national level. In 1981 the feminist anti-pornography movement had been active for about five years. In her introduction to Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography , Laura Lederer (1980) specifically dates the movement as beginning with a series grassroots actions that claimed "pornography as a feminist issue" (16). This sig-

nificantly included a protest against the Rolling Stones and their record label Warner Bros, in March 1976. Outraged by a violently misogynistic billboard for the band's Black and Blue album, feminists in Southern California staged a demonstration that captured the attention of the national press, forcing Warner

to quickly remove the ad. This set the stage for a more extended boycott and letter-writing campaign to impel the record industry to cease depicting sexual

violence against women in album art and advertising. Also in 1976, feminist activism coalesced around Snuff, a commercial film that purported to depict the actual torture, mutilation, and murder of its actress.

In response to this film enough pressure was exerted by prominent feminists and leftwing intellectuals that the New York district attorney was compelled to launch a murder investigation, which determined that "it was nothing more

than conventional trick photography . . . the actress is alive and well" (qtd. in Bronstein 201 1, 87). Not satisfied with this, feminists circulated a petition that aimed to ban the movie on the grounds that its celluloid violence could prompt

actual violence against women - a core argument of the anti-pornography movement.

Concurrent with the ongoing campaign against Warner Bros, and the outrage over Snuff the first feminist organization exclusively dedicated to obliterating pornography was founded in San Francisco in January 1977. The next year, this organization, the Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), held a national conference that coincided with a "Take Back the Night" march. "For the first time in history," Lederer (1980, 15), WAVPM's cofounder and coordinator, explains, "women from across the country gatherfed] to discuss the destructive consequences of pornography, to exchange information and analysis, and to plan strategies for eliminating pornography." It was out of this conference that the aforementioned anthology Take Back

the Night was produced. The conference also helped catalyze New York-based feminists to form their own organization, Women Against Pornography (WAP),

in 1979. The anti-pornography movement quickly amassed a large and thriving body of literature, in no small part due to the concentration of journalists

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54 * Feminist Formations 27.3

and academics in the movement's fray. As early as 1979 there was also a small murmur of feminist dissent against the anti-pornography movement, dating at

least as far back as Ellen Willis's (1979) early critique published in her column for the Village Voice. Deidre English (1980) and Patrick Califia (then known as Pat Califia) (1980) published additional critical articles the next year in Mother Jones and the Advocate , respectively. However, prior to the Barnard Conference on Sexuality, these voices were few and far between. This conference, then, is often thought to mark the beginning of "pro-sex feminism" (as pro-sex feminists were wont to refer to themselves) or "pro-porn feminism" (as anti-pornography feminists dubbed them).

However, although the conference organizers were clearly critical of the anti-pornography movement, the conference was not planned in simple opposition to this. On a much broader level Vance's opening remarks to the planning

committee stressed the importance of taking up sexuality as the conference's theme because sexuality "is the issue of central concern to feminist theory."5 In

light of the ensuing WAP protest, we should note the analytic distance with which Vance approached the anti-pornography movement, in addition to her emphasis on sexuality as a theoretical construct, albeit with personal implications. Throughout the conference's planning stages the meeting minutes suggest that her sense of remove was shared by many of the architects of the conference. In fact, Adrienne Rich's afterword to Take Back the Night and other well-known anti-pornography texts were routinely selected as recommended readings for the committee. Similarly, the minutes include reports from WAP's tours of Times

Square's underbelly, as well as the organization's salacious slideshows, which the conference organizers seemed to agree tended to manipulate viewers "to be disgusted" ( Diary of a Conference on Sexuality 1982, 19). Perhaps most strikingly,

the minutes from December 1, 1981 specifically advertise a WAP panel at New York University (NYU) featuring Andrea Dworkin, John Stoltenberg, Susan Brownmiller, and Alice Walker. This casual infiltration of what was retrospectively drawn as the "enemy camp" is crucial. This was possible precisely because the vast majority of the organizers did not necessarily foresee the controversy that would soon engulf the

conference; indeed, many were completely blindsided. Conference participant and "sometime member of the conference committee" Amber Hollibaugh, for example, recalls crossing the WAP picket line and realizing that up until that moment she had assumed that she shared with these women "an unbreakable sisterhood, a movement, a vision, an anger, a desperately necessary hope of transforming biology and gender" (Hollibaugh 2000, 3; Moira 1982a, 24). How was this possible? In part, this can be attributed to the defining differences between feminist activism and knowledge production, and the different temporalities that char-

acterize each. As conference participant Dorothy Allison (2007) notes, WAP's activist action felt out of place, and time, at a conference that was interested

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Rachel Corbman • 55

in working toward the creation of a body of thought. In contrast to WAP s pragmatic immediate goals, "books and papers and theory have long-term and slow effects" (54). Certainly, this division was also related to the Scholar and the Feminist's status as an academic conference that was principally organized by academics within the context of an increasingly academized discourse, with a set of priorities that were no longer rigidly tied to the grassroots political movement out of which it originally emerged. Yet, a number of factors complicate this argument. First, most feminists who worked in academic settings continued

to think of themselves and their praxis as inherently political. It would also be a mistake to overemphasize the foothold that feminist research claimed in the academy a decade after the institutionalization of the first women's studies

programs. In 1982 many celebrated feminists occupied places on the fringe of their departments, universities, and disciplines, while others traveled both in-

and outside academia over the course of their careers. To quote a colleague of Esther Newton's from SUNY Purchase's anthropology department: "Can you imagine promoting someone who writes this shit" (Newton 2000, 224)? The tenuous position of many feminist practitioners in 1982 and beyond is one source of the still-blurred boundary between feminism in- and outside of the academy. However, this fluidity has the additional effect of obscuring more precise histories of the slow and uneven process through which feminist

knowledge production became more structurally connected to the university. The operative example here is the composition of the planning committee for this conference. Eight months prior to the conference, Vance composed an open invitation to join the conference's planning committee, which was disseminated

"to Barnard College faculty, all the members of previous Scholar and Feminist planning committees, and academics and activists who worked on sexuality" (Rubin 201 1, 200). Her efforts resulted in twenty-five women joining the com-

mittee - the largest and in some ways the most heterogeneous committee in the conference's forty-year history. However, of these twenty-five, upwards of nineteen were graduate students or professors. Admittedly, there was a great deal of professional variance among the com-

mittee members. Seven had backgrounds in English or comparative literature; four in anthropology; two apiece in history and sociology; while one organizer

was trained in French literature and another in psychology. Organizers were also in markedly different stages in their careers. For example, Jan Boney was a first-year doctoral student when she received an invitation to join the planning committee. She remembers feeling initially intimidated by the more advanced

scholars in the group, which included, among others, Ellen DuBois, who was involved in early efforts to institutionalize women's studies - well before Boney even started college.6

Rounding out the committee were visual artists Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson, as well as radical feminist journalist Ellen Willis and activist Frances Doughty. Another nonacademic, Hollibaugh, was also

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56 ♦ Feminist Formations 27.3

present at a number of meetings. She had recently moved to New York City from San Francisco, where she lived what she referred to as a "double life," working as a political organizer for the Left during the day while supporting herself through sex work and menial labor at night (2000, 3). Unlike her colleagues on the conference committee, she never attended college and was, in fact, the first person in her family to graduate from high school. In a personal

essay she quipped that most people with whom she came into contact through her activist work simply assumed that she also was "a graduate student who taught huge classes [and] received a monthly check written by well-to-do parents" (40). This perception was furthered by her growing profile as a writer

and speaker - particularly following the publication of "What We're Rolling Around in Bed With" (1981), which she coauthored with Cherríe Moraga for inclusion in Heresies 12, an issue on sexuality. Despite this, Hollibaugh remained financially strapped. She continued to hold relatively low-paying jobs, although by the time she moved to New York this primarily consisted of posi-

tions secured through her activist credentials. At the time of the conference, for example, she had a movement job at the women's research service WIRE, distributing pamphlets on women in the third world. In other words, although

it is not quite accurate to state that the Barnard conference was exclusively planned by academics, Hollibaugh's experience of her exceptionality perhaps does more to prove the academic composition of the committee as a general rule than dispel it.

The conference committee was also overwhelmingly comprised of white women. Sociologist Dianne Harriford and literary critic Quandra Stadler, both of whom are African American, may well be the lone exceptions on the committee. In addition, Barbara Omolade, a Black feminist scholar, attended at least

one of the meetings. Omolade's relationship to the Scholar and the Feminist Conference dated back to 1979 when the conference organizers asked her to fill

in for Michele Wallace by leading a workshop on Black women and feminism. Omolade agreed and later participated in the planning process of the next few conferences, including the 1982 conference, with the express purpose of challenging the marginality of women of color in academia, as well as the limited role of nonwhite people and groups in the work of white feminists (Omolade [199812007, 387).

Omolade was certainly not alone in her critique. Indeed, prior to the Barnard conference, the single most contentious issue in the air was the marginality

of women of color and, often, the racism endemic to women's studies. In May 1979 Barbara Smith famously took white academic feminists to task in a confer-

ence paper titled "Racism and Women's Studies," which was presented at the first annual National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference held in Lawrence, Kansas. Four months later, Audre Lorde used her allotted time as a respondent at the Second Sex Conference to issue an impassioned plea against the "particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist

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Rachel Corbman • 57

theory at this place and in this time without active input on every level by poor women, by Black women, Third World women, and from lesbians."7

Lorde's comments were published with some revisions as "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1981), while Smith's "Racism and Women's Studies" was published under the same title as her conference paper. Both essays have since been reprinted in scores of feminist anthologies and are now essential readings for introductory courses in feminist theory. The

more immediate impact of these interventions, however, was a proliferation of feminist conferences specifically dedicated to racial difference and racism throughout the late 1970s and early '80s. In 1979-80, for example, the Scholar and the Feminist Conference took as its theme the "Future of Difference" and "Class, Race, Sex: Exploring Contradictions, Affirming Connections." Infamously, the NWSA also designed its 1981 conference around the theme of "Women Respond to Racism."8 These conference activities and controversies had substantial generative effects on the critical development of feminism in general and Black and third world feminism in particular, most directly resulting in a flurry of widely read published work by feminists of color in the early 1980s. Thus, by 1982 it was increasingly difficult to ignore the importance of race

to feminism. White feminists were also increasingly thinking critically about race in their own work, albeit with varying degrees of rigor. However, this did little to combat the structural inequalities that prevented women of color from achieving proportional representation in academia; it also did not provide a solution to the tokenization of a relatively small network of generally interconnected Black and third world feminists, a number of whom are mentioned above. The ascendency of sexuality as the debate de jour for feminists did not fully occlude this discussion of race; rather, contemporaneous feminist discourses on

race and sexuality overlapped in complicated ways, as a growing body of work has begun to consider.9 Arguably, one inadvertent though ultimately productive byproduct of the debate over pornography is the ways in which it complicates histories of feminism that are narrated through racial or sexual divisions among

its practitioners. This historiographie mode tends to rely upon the reification of heterogeneous bodies of thought (for example, the work of Black feminists, third world feminists, feminists of color, or lesbian feminists) into monolithic

categories that are unproblematically imagined to have coherent positions. Careful analysis of the debate over pornography, however, reveals examples of

prominent women of color and white women, lesbian and otherwise and who were adamantly anti-pornography or vice versa, putting serious pressure on any

presumption that epistemological and political positions are fully predicated on personal experience. A second significant consequence of the debate over pornography was the way in which it temporarily foregrounded lesbian sexuality within feminism. Crucially, the emergence of theories of sexuality did not

necessarily ensure that lesbian sexuality would become a central issue. Until

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58 • Feminist Formations 27.3

at least 1981, in fact, lesbianism was perhaps most written about by feminists

as an asexual political choice, largely divorced from sexuality. In this context it is not surprising that Joan Nestle ([198712003) emerged as

an important thinker at the same moment in which lesbianism was realigned with sexuality. Nestle was born in 1940 and raised in the Bronx by her mother. In her late teens she came out as a lesbian within the working-class lesbian bar scene of the 1950s: Because we lived in the underworld of the Sea Colony [a lesbian bar that Nestle frequented], we were surrounded by the nets of the society that hated us and yet wanted our money. Mafia nets, clean-up New York nets, vice-squad nets. We needed the lesbian air of the Sea Colony to breathe the life we could not anywhere else, those of us who wanted to see women dance, make love, wear shirts and pants. Here, and in other bars like this one, we found each other and the space to be a sexually powerful butch-femme community. (26) A femme, Nestle often found her erotic life, which she traced back to her lesbian bar roots, at odds with the ideals of the lesbian feminist-liberation movement

of the late 1960s and early '70s, although she nevertheless participated in this movement. "I hadn't yet learned from feminism how to honor its principles by

valuing my own stigmatized life and those who shared it with me," she noted years later ([1998)2007, 342). Nestle's first presentation at Barnard's annual conference was in 1980, when she and her partner of five years, Deborah Edel, were invited to lead a workshop

on the Lesbian Herstory Archives - a community-based archiving project housed in Nestle's apartment for nearly two decades. Nestle was best known for her work with the archives when she published "Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s" (1981) in Heresies 12 . It is this essay rather

than her lesbian feminist political work that, in her estimation, "marked the beginning of my integrated feminist and lesbian public self' ([1998)2007, 347). In the single most-cited passage from "Butch-Femme Relationships," Nestle combats the assumption that relationships between butches and femmes are inextricably linked to a heterosexual paradigm. These relationships, she writes, are "complex erotic statements . . . filled with a deeply lesbian language of stance, dress, gesture, loving, courage, and autonomy" - an argument that would soon

become the core of WAP's objection to Nestle's participation in the Barnard Conference on Sexuality ([198712003, 92). Nestle received an invitation to speak at what would later be titled the "Politically Correct, Politically Incorrect" workshop at the Barnard conference

early in the planning stages. Other participants included lesbian writer Dorothy Allison, psychologist and the panel's self-described "token straight" Muriel

Dimon, and Mirtha Quintanales, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Ohio State University (Moira 1982b, 22). "We are delighted that you have agreed to lead a workshop at the Scholar and the Feminist IX Conference," Vance wrote

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Rachel Corbman • 59

Nestle on January 22, 1982. "We are looking forward to working with you, as we look forward to an intellectually exciting and adventurous conference"10 It was "adventurous" indeed. The night before the conference Nestle received "a swirl of phone calls" alerting her to the amassing protest that was coalescing around the conference ([199812007, 348). Earlier that week, beginning on Monday, individual members of WAP began to make telephone calls to known acquaintances and friends associated with Barnard's Women's Center to voice objections to the conference. Accounts vary, but the overall thrust of the calls suggested either that the conference committee had been "taken over by sadomasochists," or that the committee demonstrated a lack of judgment in inviting speakers who were "sex deviants."11 Panicking, the president of Barnard, Ellen Futter, met with Gould of the Women's Center and ultimately decided to confiscate 1,500 copies of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality. This seventy-

two-page handbook was intended to function as a conference program, as well as an artifact that documented the planning process, replete with "minutes and

bibliographies from committee members; the conference concept paper; and abstracts and suggested readings from workshops" (Vance 1984, 432). When Butler received a reprint of the confiscated program several months after the conference, she reports searching "in vain to find the feminist sins in

this interesting compilation of reflections on women's sexuality" (1982, 1). To her great disappointment she could find none. Although Butler was clearly being flippant, her assessment is not far off. While some of the graphics are intentionally provocative, the overall effect of the handbook seems within the limits of appropriateness for an academic publication on feminism and sexuality. In fact, Gould had seen page proofs of the diary a few weeks before the conference, at which point she simply noted that she thought it was going to be an "impressive

publication" (qtd. in Witherell 1982, 2). The administration's official rationale for the confiscation was never particularly clear. In Futter's only published interview on the subject, she contends

vaguely that the diary, as a whole, "made it seem as if the college had taken a particular position, whereas the conference in contrast was clearly an airing of ideas and a discussion of issues" (qtd. in McVay and Witherell 1982, 1). As far as Vance could discern, the real issue was less the diary itself and more the college's concern as to what WAP's reaction to it would be. "The people at the Women's Center," she explained, "were afraid that WAP would see the graphics and go nuts and that WAP would read the criticism of them and go nuts."12 Furthermore, because WAP tended to receive ample media attention, Barnard was worried that bad press might jeopardize their funding from the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. "One of our initial considerations was that we didn't want to jeopardize our relationship with the foundation," Barnard's Vice

President of Public Affairs explained (Witherell 1982, 2). In the end the confiscation of the program halted neither WAP's protest nor preserved the college's relationship with the Helena Rubinstein Foundation,

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6o • Feminist Formations 27.3

which ceased funding the conference after 1982; instead, the confiscation further contributed to the chaos. In subsequent accounts contributed by conference

participants, this confiscation has come to occupy a central place. It has been suggested that in the absence of the diary, anti-pornography feminists were able to construct a "phantom conference" that they circulated their objections

to throughout the feminist press (Vance 1984, 434). "The conference's reputation," Rubin (201 1, 201) writes, "bears almost no relationship to the substance of the event."

April 24, 1982 April 24, 1982 was a bright and sunny day with temperatures in the mid-6os and "the coming of spring" in the air (Nestle [1998)2007, 348). Yet, Nestle approached Barnard's campus with a sense of trepidation. This tension is captured quite vividly in a series of conference photographs taken by Morgan Gwenwald, a photographer and volunteer at the Lesbian Herstory Archives who had moved to New York in 1979 along with her "off-and-on" lover Dorothy Allison (Allison 2007, 23). One of Gwenwald's most striking shots of the conference documents her own crossing of the picket line at Barnard's gate. A protester is pictured in the foreground of the image wearing a WAP T-shirt

with "For a Feminist Sexuality . . . Against S/M" across the front and back. Although leaflets can be spotted in the protester's hand, she appears to make no particular effort to distribute one to Gwenwald.

Perhaps Gwenwald would not yet have known the exact contents of the pictured leaflets; perhaps also the protester depicted did not know who Gwen-

wald was. However, we now know that the leaflets in question argued that the conference constituted a backlash against radical feminism in its support of sexual institutions that oppress women. These leaflets were signed not just by WAP, but also Los Angeles's WAVAW and New York Radical Feminists (NYRF), "although the last two groups appear to have taken a minor role, if any, in drafting it" (Vance 1984, 433). The latter's involvement is particularly dubious. NYRF was founded in 1969 as something of a splinter group from both the Feminists and Redstockings, the latter having broken away from New

York Radical Women. Counted among its early members was Ellen Willis, one of the first critics of the anti-pornography movement. Lisa Orlando, another former member of NYRF, voiced her skepticism regarding NYRF's apparent endorsement in an article for the Gay Community News . "As a former member,

I thought [NYRF] no longer existed," she wrote (1982, 16) There was, however, a symbolic importance in attaching the NYRF's name, which underscored the question of who had the right to claim women's liberationist history and by extension inherit the rightful title of the radical feminists of the 1980s. In the WAP leaflet the deeply personal stakes of this question were manifested in attacks against individual participants whose

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Rachel Corbman • 6i

Figuře i (above): A WAP protestor at the gates of

Barnard. Photograph by Morgan Gwenwald. Figure 2 (left): Joan Nestle and Gayle Rubin outside the conference. Photograph by Morgan Gwenwald.

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Ó2 ♦ Feminist Formations 27.3

Figure 3: Judith Butler at the Lesbian Sex Mafia speakout. Photograph by Morgan Gwenwald.

sexual practices or political stances were perceived as objectionable by the organization. Specifically, the leaflet was structured into four bullet points that

singled out and condemned the participation of various speakers. A somewhat idiosyncratic selection, the overarching similarity is that all of the feminists mentioned or alluded to in the leaflet had a contentious relationship with antipornography organizations prior to the conference; most, in fact, had published critical articles between 1979 and 1981. 13 In particular, the leaflet named Dorothy

Allison, who had recently founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM), in addition to several unnamed "women who champion butch-femme sex roles, while denying that these roles have any relation to the male-female sex roles that are the psychological foundation of patriarchy."14 One of these women, the leaflet noted, "has been selected to give the closing address" - undoubtedly a reference

to Hollibaugh.15 Nestle is nearly unanimously assumed to be one of the other

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Rachel Corbman • 63

unnamed women. "When I walked into the conference, I was told by my lover [Edel] that I and three others were on a hit list," she commented. "The leaflet almost broke my heart" (qtd. in Dejanikus 1982, 19). In addition, the leaflet also went after Willis and Brett Harvey, then the publicity director of the Feminist Press. Specifically, it objected to their involve-

ment with No More Nice Girls - a reproductive-rights group with no official stance on pornography that the leaflet characterized as "a group of women who publish in the Village Voice and who contend that pornography is liberating."16 Finally, the leaflet criticized the participation of Rubin, then a graduate student

in anthropology, on account of her involvement with Samois, a lesbian S/M organization whose extended and often explosive confrontations with WAVPM in San Francisco are regarded as the "the first volleys exchanged in the feminist sex wars" (Bronstein 201 1, 141). The work of Califia was also quoted and attacked on the same grounds, despite the fact that Califia was not even slated to present

at the conference. "Pornography, S/M, and butch/femme," Vance (1984, 434) concisely summarizes, were "the anti-pornographer's counterpart to the New Right's unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll."

While WAP spokesperson Dorchen Leidholdt is said to have provided significant logistical support for the demonstration, for the most part these flyer-peddling protesters were not the who's who of the WAP. Indeed, Gwenwald's photographs at the gate of the conference depict women whose names are not remembered by us today. This absence is compounded further by the dearth of conference accounts contributed by WAP s more prolific members and

supporters. For example, Karla Jay (2000) barely mentions the WAP, let alone the conference, in her memoir. The conference also does not make an appearance in either Andrea Dworkin's (2002) memoir or Martin Duberman's (201 1) biography of Barbara Deming. There are, however, a handful of exceptions to this dominant trend. For example, Dolores Alexander (2005) briefly discusses the Barnard conference in an oral history conducted by Kelly Anderson, describing it as a "pro-pornography" conference in which participants praised "strange kinds of sexuality" (47). Similarly, Susan Brownmiller's In Our Time : Memoir of a Revolution (1999) dedicates a couple of pages to the conflict. Writ-

ten more than a decade after the conference, Brownmiller lambasts the event with unwavering vitriol as a "somewhat nervous, somewhat giddy, occasionally tearful exposition of the pleasures of s/m starring the Heresies contributors [Hol-

libaugh, Moraga, Nestle] and augmented by Dorothy Allison, Esther Newton, and Gayle Rubin" - a description that is very much at odds with the analysis that follows (Brownmiller, 2000, 331).

Inside the Gymnasium Approximately 750 attendees mingled inside LeFrak Gymnasium in Barnard Hall waiting for the conference to begin, which was scheduled for 9:45. Already

behind schedule, bleachers had to be set up to accommodate the sold-out

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64 • Feminist Formations 27.3

crowd. Finally, at 10:20, Futter and Vance made their opening remarks. Even while sharing the stage with Barnard's president a hint of reproach simmered behind Vance's introductory statement. There has been a "difference of opinion

about the diary," she informed the crowd, emphasizing "difference" with an unmistakable edge to her voice.17

Throughout the morning's plenary panel these "differences of opinions" between the organizers and the administration - and for that matter between the organizers and WAP - were referenced only rarely. Yet, just their presence

was jarring within the context of a tightly organized scholarly panel. Alice Echols, for one, peppered her critique of the recent history of feminist sexual

politics with a handful of references to the demonstration outside. In her account of the emerging hostility toward "sexual minorities," she concluded by candidly addressing her audience: "I suppose you know that from walking into the conference today."18

Similarly, Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois snuck a reference to the contemporaneous "feminist attack on pornography and sexual 'perversion' in our time" into the conclusion of their coauthored paper on the currents of sexual politics in nineteenth-century America.19 Significantly, of the three papers that

comprised the plenary panel, neither Gordon and DuBois's coauthored work nor Hortense Spillers's early analysis of language, sexuality, and power for Black

women was directly engaged with the contemporaneous feminist debate about pornography. However, despite the anti-pornography movement's mere tangential relevance to the bulk of presented papers, during the question-and-answer

session all of the panelists were subjected to questions about pornography and "the exclusion of radical feminists and lesbian feminists who challenged the predominant sexuality" (Douglas and Henry 1982, 3). By one published account, a third of the questions posed to the panelists over the course of the thirty-minute question-and-answer session were leveled by self-identified members of WAP or the anti-pornography movement more

generally. This included Leidholdt and two unnamed women, who all used the forum to make slight variations on the same point: "Why [they were] against pornography" (ibid.). In and of itself it is remarkable that the rich variety and intellectual rigor of this trio of papers was reduced to a single monolithic stance dualistically opposed to the anti-pornography movement. What is more incredible still is that this opposition was accepted as common-enough knowledge that

even Ann Ferguson, a feminist philosopher who was not a member of WAP, commented on the "imbalance" of the panel and suggested that failing to have a respondent from the anti-pornography movement was a "serious mistake" (ibid.). As the day progressed the ease with which this reduction occurred may well have been furthered by the fact that the majority of the conference's content was held concurrently, which molded not just the experience of each individual

attendee, but also the ensuing press coverage. Of the eighteen concurrent afternoon workshops, Rubin's "Concepts of a Radical Politics of Sex" was the

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Rachel Corbman • 65

most heavily attended, with estimates suggesting that anywhere between a fifth

to a quarter of conference-goers elected to attend this panel. Also on hand were Phyllis Kriegal of Ne