APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Articles

I don’t have any grand account of what it is to be a feminist philosopher in the academy. I assume that my perceptions of what the academy is like, what academic philosophy is like, and of what each does, are systematically different from the views my male colleagues would give. I also assume that my accounts are systematically inflected (at least) by my class (born middle class), race (white), sexual orientation (heterosexual), and degree of physical ability (currently able-bodied). In addition, my perceptions are doubtless shaped by the idiosyncrasies of my biography and of the particular academic institutions with which I am familiar. Hence, instead of offering an essential definition, I will try to convey something of the texture of my everyday life as a particular would-be feminist philosopher in the academy. My purpose is to invite others to describe their experiences, the better to ground discussion of whether and how feminists with philosophical training can promote feminist goals from positions within the academy.

* * *

I am stretching in the weights room of a modest hotel, chatting with a woman who is attending the same feminist philosophy conference as I am. She has just presented an excellent paper, and she has a tenure-track job at one of the most prestigious research universities in the country. We compare notes on our experiences in academia. She reports: of all the junior female faculty where she works, all but her are on Prozac. I respond, jokingly, "Well, can’t you do something under labor protection laws, if working conditions are so bad?" She replies, taking me half seriously, "Well, there’s nothing you can really point to, it’s just a toxic environment." She swims a mile every day to deal with the stress. She says to me: "At some level, I know I’m not stupid. I am so tired of feeling like a loser, like I am stupid every day."

A student, who has been missing from my class for a month or so, suddenly shows up in my office. She explains that she has been in hiding in another state, to keep her partner’s ex-husband from kidnapping the children. They had had an amicable joint custody arrangement with the ex- for a few years. Indeed, the previous semester, my student wrote a paper arguing that a biological father should have the first right of refusal to the child, if a single mother decides to offer her child up for adoption, on the grounds that not all men are bad fathers. However, it seems that when the husband finally acknowledged that his ex-wife is in a lesbian relationship, he began threatening court action to deprive them of any opportunity to pervert his children. It later transpired that, as a good Christian, he had not been sparing the rod: indeed, he had been beating his daughter black and blue, while telling her that he did it because he loved her. As we walk to class, my student and I discuss how to make up the work she has missed.

I am at the eastern division of the APA, awkward in my part-borrowed interview outfit. I have several prearranged interviews to face. I approach a pair of men who were my fellow graduate students at McGill. When they learn that I have interviews, they become unfriendly, and as I walk away, I hear them muttering about affirmative action. I am reluctantly seeking jobs in the U.S., despite my Canadian doctorate, because of Canada’s vigorously enforced "Canadians first" hiring policy in the universities. I am British. They are both Canadians. They are oblivious to any irony.

In my evening class, one of the older female students sits, week after week, vividly attentive, hunched into herself, silent. She takes enormously detailed notes and submits journals that meticulously reconstruct the arguments of the assigned readings. Her papers are clear and conscientious, yet adopt no critical standpoint. In my office hours, she tells me about the time her husband beat her up really badly and walked out, leaving her unconscious on the floor of their closet. In the next class, we are discussing Catharine MacKinnon’s work on sexuality. She speaks for the first time: "My ex-husband, he ran up huge bills on those, you know, telephone sex lines."

I am out having dinner in a Middle Eastern restaurant with eight of my girlfriends in Montreal. We discuss Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse—since none of us has ready access to feminist theory in our respective graduate programs around the city, we meet outside school to educate ourselves. It is a lively evening, though the male owner of the restaurant sits smoking at the next table, seemingly puzzled by a group of women in public without men. At home, at four in the morning, I am woken by a long-distance telephone call from my brother in England: he wants to know if I am all right. The date is December 7, 1989. Yesterday, 14 women, mostly students enrolled in the Polytechnique—the engineering institute of the Université de Montréal—were shot dead "by a madman," because they were, in his words, and despite one woman’s denial at gunpoint, "feminists." Subsequently, the media comes to lambaste feminists "for making political capital out of the acts of a solitary madman." It is denied that the massacre, by a man, of these women about to enter a male-dominated profession, has any gendered political significance.

In my first semester teaching in the States, I am bicycling to campus. I am nervous, since motorists in this Midwestern town are not used to cyclists and the road margins are very uneven. As I cycle into the parking lot, suddenly I see a huge sports utility vehicle driving straight at me. The driver and his buddy are laughing at me, and I realize that behind the wheel is one of my senior departmental colleagues.

* * *

Let me emphasize that I realize that, as the world goes, even as North America goes, I have a pretty cushy number. I don’t expect to be imprisoned by state officials for my views, nor stoned in the streets for being employed outside the home. I do not work night shift in a laminates factory as do some of my students, and though I work hard, I do have a full-time job with benefits, my position is tenure track, and my course load is only 3-3.

Why then am I telling such raw and angry stories? They do not fit with any idealized notion of the academy as an ivory tower where detached, rational intellects contemplate the form of the good, welcoming to any devoted seeker after truth. They point rather to the academy as enmeshed with the same axes of privilege and oppression—race, class, and gender—that structure the rest of society. This is hardly an astonishing revelation. Nor is it a surprise that this basic political insight often escapes those, including my younger self, who have been multiply privileged by these structures, for naiveté is one luxury of privilege. Having received my professional training in Anglo-American research institutions, I, too, once conceived of the philosopher as a rational intellect hovering above the fray of politics and history, with delicate detachment unraveling conceptual confusion, deploying the tools of logical analysis in the cause of clarity, objectivity, and access to atemporal truth. I did notice that most of those accredited as philosophers were middle class and male, but I ascribed that to the unfairness of the world outside the academy. Listening to others’ painful stories and finding parallels with some of my own has played a crucial role in changing my views.

I work at a commuter campus of a state university, in a postindustrial, basically blue-collar town. Most of our students are working their way through school, the majority are white women, and many are returning to school after starting their families. In addition to the 3-3 teaching loads, faculty are also expected to do some campus service and to pursue their own research. Each semester I teach two sections of Introductory Ethics, and a smaller, 300-level course, which rotates between various topics, including Feminist Philosophy. During the semester, my time and energy are consumed with teaching and service, although, in some sense, my experiences in teaching are part of my research.

Many of my decisions about teaching are strategic, framed by the facts that most of the students I teach take only one course in philosophy and that many students are fairly socially conservative (popular bumper stickers locally include, "It’s a Child not a Choice" and "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart"). My political goals are small-scale. Given the bland title of my Introduction to Ethics class, it draws a broader range of students than do my classes with "feminism" in the title. One of my goals in this class is to demonstrate that a woman can exert authority over a group of adults, and, moreover, that a woman can use rational argumentation to make her point. Although I have reservations about masculinist models of authority and reason, and I am aware that for some students my race may be more salient than my gender, I believe some women students find it helpful to see a woman model the possibility of appropriating such tools for her own purposes and some men find it chastening. Again, while I have reservations about presenting objectivity as "seeing both sides of the case," still, this presentation of controversial issues adds credibility when I present the Other side in discussing abortion and homosexual rights. Further, keeping my feminism vital requires that I listen carefully to those with whom I disagree, even though this can be exhausting. The point of paying attention is not just to hone my ripostes, but also because it is possible that my interlocutors may have something to teach me.

In my 300-level courses, I attract a narrower sample of students since the course title may include the word "feminist," and classes are smaller. My goals and methods thus are different. I can do more individual mentoring, particularly working to build the confidence of my women students who have returned to school. It is still true that women are being told by men in their lives that they are stupid, and one thing I can do, just because of my position within the academy, is to tell women, authoritatively, that they are not stupid. I do not invite students to disclose their personal stories to me, for I am vividly aware of the limits of my competence. I know I am not a therapist. However, given some topics we discuss—family relationships, male and female gender roles, and so on—students do sometimes tell their stories publicly in the classroom or to me in private. Doing the emotional work of dealing with these stories can be draining, whether the work is that of finding a way for the class to go on after such a narration, or of making myself listen fully to the recounting.

The kinds of service work I do on campus and in the local community again reflect my version of feminism. The details of what I do are fairly banal and some of the committees on which I sit are time-consuming and dull. Sometimes my voice gets lost, because I am female, and the male habit of taking credit for women’s ideas continues to enrage me. However, sometimes small changes do result, which will be of benefit to women.

These days my everyday life at school is characterized by a vertiginous kind of double vision: many interactions have a surface and a shadow meaning. When I brightly encourage my student to "say what she really thinks" in class, knowing her story, I understand something of the risk she is taking, the shadow of her husband’s fist descending. When I attend a faculty presentation about sexual harassment and the law, I know which of my learned colleagues the grapevine warns female students to avoid. I cannot return to understanding the teacher-student relation as an encounter between two disembodied minds, stripped of gender, class, biography, all attributes but reason. Where once I understood the politics of knowledge as the politics of access to the academy, I now think also of the politics of what gets counted as knowledge, whose view of the self-evident has efficacy in the institution.

At the same time, I am struggling to understand how race shapes my interactions with students, colleagues, and staff members. As an Englishwoman in the American Midwest, I initially tried to use students’ perception of my foreignness—I have a marked accent—to show the class something about North American culture, using a collective "you" to refer to the class, and "we" to refer to English people. I discovered that "we" became systematically ambiguous. White students heard that "we" as I intended, as "myself and other English people," yet African American students heard it as "we white people." In this wing of the ivory tower, for some students, my whiteness makes me more foreign than does my nationality.

If I feel so compromised and worn down by the academic life, why not get a "day job" and focus on full-time feminist activism? I have two reasons. First, I like some aspects of academic life. Feminism does not require one to give up all pleasure for the cause. Becoming a tenured academic promises some of the least alienated labor available in a capitalist economy. As an academic, I have contacts with some interesting people and access to useful resources. I enjoy interacting with many of my students and I do have some wonderful colleagues, male and female. Though I am often infuriated, I am rarely bored.