APA Newsletters
Spring 2000
Volume 99, Number 2

All academics worry. A vague sense of dread is endemic to, if not emblematic of, our profession. It begins in graduate school, if not before, and extends through tenure to retirement and beyond. (Ours may in fact be the only profession in which all members have the same recurring nightmare: "I’m in front of a class I’m supposed to teach, but I have no notes, can’t remember the topic, and suddenly realize I’ve forgotten my pants.") Some philosophers have gone so far as to canonize anxiety, seeing in it not only a key to human nature but a vehicle of divine revelation. At the very least, we embrace our anxiety as a reassuring constant. Nations may rise and fall, but Angst will be with us always. Worry is something we can count on.

For gay and lesbian philosophers, the anxieties attendant upon writing and publishing our work are no laughing matter, however; they are indicative of the very real risks we run when we produce work that takes up gay issues and puts forward gay concerns and themes in a profession that has been and still is hostile to our presence. Like our nongay colleagues (though perhaps for some very different reasons) we worry about whether we can find a publisher and whether our work will be taken seriously. Unlike many of them, we also worry about how much what we say will cost us—in terms of enrollments, tenure and promotion, our livelihood—and whether we can afford the price. Each of us has to weigh the risks and make a very personal decision about what we publish and what we withhold.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on those decisions and their consequences with regard to my book Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, which came out with Indiana University Press in 1999. In this article, I want to raise some issues that I believe need to be considered as we think about how to support and encourage the work of our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered colleagues.

In early 1994, as I began the book that became Bodies and Pleasures, I was interested in trying to respond to accusations that Michel Foucault’s work is epistemologically incoherent, nihilistic, and politically conservative. I wanted to show that, his critics to the contrary, his genealogical method is nonrelativistic and epistemologically sound. Most of all, I wanted to answer and set aside the criticisms of political theorists who claim that no radical political movement should take Foucault seriously; I wanted to show how Foucault’s work might support and inspire political activism. Accordingly, the book puts forth an interpretation of Foucault’s assertion that bodies and pleasures, rather than sexual desire, ought to be the basis of our struggle to overcome oppressive institutions and cultural assumptions and practices and argues that his late turn to ethics is continuous with his concern about political power. In the process it examines all five of Foucault’s last books (including Discipline and Punish, Herculine Barbin, and the three volumes of The History of Sexuality series) and numerous articles and interviews from the last ten years of his life. But what is distinctive about Bodies and Pleasures is that it does all this not simply as a scholarly exercise but as a way of approaching an ethical question: How can I live a gay life? More specifically, how can I live a gay philosophical life?

My decision to approach Foucault’s work in print from that angle—what I see as a gay angle—was fraught with anxiety. But I also knew it was the right decision. By the spring of 1994 I had already thrown two book manuscripts into the trash. I knew that I could and should write a book on Foucault. I’d been reading Foucault for well over a decade and knew his texts backward and forward; furthermore, I knew that much of the published commentary on his work was misleading if not just plain bad. I knew that what I had to say—if anyone would listen—would really make a difference. But I couldn’t write the book. The book wouldn’t write.

Foucault’s work had always excited me because of what I perceived to be its queer perspective on the world. Foucault rarely mentions homosexuality in his books—even The History of Sexuality series doesn’t focus on homosexuality very much—and he never mentions such phenomena as bisexuality or transsexuality, but it always seemed to me that the issues that did grab his attention were evident and important to him because of his position as a gay man—issues like confession, surveillance, the social establishment and enforcement of subject positions, the power of psychologists and police to define as well as to punish. At least, those issues were evident and important to me because of my position as a lesbian. Foucault’s texts always spoke to the parts of me that are most clearly formed by the institutions of sexuality that shape so much of our world. I read Foucault, always, as a gay person. But in the manuscripts I threw away, I hadn’t been willing to admit to that.

After all, I had reasoned, what Foucault has to say is important for everybody, not just queer people. The philosophical points he makes—about knowledge, political power, ethical practice—are of concern to heterosexual philosophers just as they are to gay ones. My book, therefore, needed to appeal to people who don’t see the world from an outcast sexual position, who don’t know what it’s like to be transgendered, bisexual, or gay. Shouldn’t I just assume a sort of generic philosophical position and speak to generic people? Besides, who would publish a book that did not presume that its audience was straight? And, besides that, what would happen to me, my ideas, and my career if I wrote a book about how a lesbian reads Foucault? Nobody would publish such a book. Even if it got published, nobody would read it. And if somebody did read it—like my dean, for instance, or the members of my university’s then-Baptist board of trustees—I might lose professional capital if not my job.

There came a point, though, when I had to choose whether to do philosophy or just have a career in it. Philosophy starts where you are, not where some objective, nonpositioned observer is. Foucault calls philosophy an askesis, an exercise in thinking that changes the thinker him or herself. Philosophy is always risky, because in doing philosophical work we work upon ourselves. When you do philosophy, you can’t pretend you’re nobody in particular; you have to be who you are. And then you have to risk becoming somebody new—which for some of us means we have to risk becoming somebody who works second shift at the 7-11. But that’s just how it is.

I faced that fact in 1994, very reluctantly, and started writing again—a book I tentatively entitled Why I Like Foucault, a book that started with the fact that at least where Foucault is concerned I read like a queer and reading like a queer really works. I was writing—the book was actually progressing, coming together, going somewhere!—but because I found myself having to include some very personal material in order to make the points I needed to make, I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to read it . . . ever. For example, the best way for me to illustrate the accuracy and power of Foucault’s claims about the pervasiveness of surveillance was to describe incidents of high school harassment; the best way to demonstrate the truth of his assertions about the power of "the helping professions" was to offer graphic descriptions of the behavior of psychiatric technicians toward me and other gay children in a mental hospital. These parts of the book were very difficult but important for me to write, but they were also absolutely crucial to making the points that needed to be made about the political importance of Foucault’s analyses. Because of those very personal passages and their centrality in the manuscript, though, I dreaded showing my work to people I didn’t know or people I thought might be hostile to me. Consequently, I did not apply for grants or released time, did not give papers at conferences on my work in progress, did not teach courses related to my research, and for over two years I did not solicit help from colleagues, much less "mentors." In other words, professionally speaking, I did everything wrong. But I suspect I’m not the first gay philosopher to work in almost complete isolation with little or no institutional support.

Would institutional support have been forthcoming if only I had asked? I don’t know. But, whereas for my straight colleagues there’s never any harm in asking, for me the risks of exposure in making a request seemed very great. I felt I had to have a near-finished product of very high quality—something that would be beyond all but the most blatantly bigoted reproach—before I could ask anyone for anything. And of course when you work in isolation, it’s hard to know when you’re finished and whether your work is of very high quality or not. It’s hard to maintain perspective. I wonder how many of us have given up in the midst of that kind of isolation and have never declared our work finished or good enough to be shared.

In the end I was not confident or courageous, but I was lucky. After more than two years of writing, I finally showed four chapters to a friend, another lesbian philosopher of my age and professional rank. Her enthusiastic and supportive response was a crucial factor in the decisions I made over the next several months. Because my "other" work—the nongay or not-explicitly-gay philosophical papers I had given and writing I had done over the past ten years—had always been well-received, it was not uncommon for editors to inquire whether I had a project that might interest them. So the next time one asked, with Ellen’s encouragement, I submitted the manuscript.

In all, I showed some or all of my work to three different presses—in every case in response to a personal solicitation from an editor. The first press said I should resubmit once the book was finished; the second sent it out unfinished to readers; and the third said they weren’t interested after all.

The readers’ reports came back in August of 1997, by which time the manuscript was finished—I thought. One report was almost completely positive. The other was positive about the quality of the scholarship but worried about the inclusion of so much autobiographical material. The reader feared that many philosophers would dismiss the scholarship or take it less seriously than it deserved because it was presented as the interpretative work of a particular individual engaged in a struggle to come to terms with some personal issues. In other words, the second reader expressed some of the same fears that I had lived with for three years—which is not surprising when you consider that she is another lesbian philosopher of about my age and professional rank. It is not surprising that the same cautions sound in our respective heads: "If you speak in your own voice you won’t be taken seriously." "Above all, protect your credibility." "Anyway, why would anybody be interested in your personal point of view?" I think I understood at least some of her concern; some of it was simply concern for me, for what would happen to me, my ideas, and my career if I published such a personal book.

But a press’s worries are different from those of scholars; the decision-makers there read her report in a perhaps different spirit than it was intended. A book that scholars might dismiss and nonacademics might find too scholarly? A book that would be hard to market? A risky book? My own editor could hardly have been more supportive throughout the process, but somewhere else in the publishing hierarchy the project got stalled. At my editor’s request, I did some lengthy revisions, cut as much material as I reasonably could, and produced one completely new chapter. Even so, by early 1998 I still had no contract. I wasn’t sure why. It isn’t uncommon these days to see autobiographical material in scholarly books—particularly in feminist writing but also in nonfeminist philosophical works. In some disciplines—such as anthropology—autobiography seems to be almost de rigueur. Was it that my autobiographical material, unlike most, was about being gay and about the kinds of things that have happened to me and other gay people within social institutions like public schools, families, churches, and mental hospitals? I don’t know. And, if the gay content of the autobiography was what was at issue, was that because of antihomosexual sentiment within the press or because of the press’s fears about antihomosexual sentiment within its market, i.e., professional philosophy?

I suppose I’ll never know. What happened was that the editor at Indiana solicited supporting statements from one prominent philosopher in my field who vouched for the quality of my work—which he was fortunately willing to do despite having not read the manuscript. Somehow that broke through whatever barriers existed, and a contract was issued in February of 1998. From that point on things went smoothly, if slowly, and the book appeared in July of 1999.

With the book now out less than a year, the question is still open: What will happen to me, my ideas, and my career? It’s too soon for reviews to have appeared, so it remains to be seen how "the profession" will react. I’ve gotten a few very thoughtful and appreciative letters from gay graduate students around the country who’ve found the book in their local Barnes & Noble. My dean sent me a short but positive note after I left a copy with his secretary. None of my colleagues at Richmond has mentioned its existence—which may be the best I can hope for. At any rate, my office has not been firebombed; no crosses have been burned in my front yard; and I haven’t lost my job. (On the contrary, the University of Richmond recently adopted a nondiscrimination policy that included sexual orientation. As a result the Baptist Church withdrew its affiliation, saying it cannot support an institution that would allow homosexuals to hold "leadership positions." But our president stood behind the new policy and has so far stood behind his gay faculty.) I think I’m okay. As for my ideas, well, they are out there on their own now. I wish them well.

Several of my friends also published books this past year, and it seems that almost every one of them has expressed regret about some aspect of their own writing or argumentation. But when I ask myself what I would change about the book now, my answer is: Nothing. It isn’t that I think every word I wrote is correct and every turn of phrase is beautiful. In fact I suspect I’ll come to disagree with some of my own arguments in time; I may well come to wish that I had not embraced liberalism even as a practical approach to political activism quite so easily as I did; I may regret that I knew too little about race to develop my thoughts on that issue more than I did. But the book is not a definitive statement of my philosophical position; it doesn’t pretend to be. The book was a process I underwent during a five-year period of time. It was a path, an event, a way of thinking, a working-through, an exercise, an adventure, something I did in order not to be the person I was before I did it. It was a challenge and an education. If I thought the same things after writing it that I thought before writing it, if I felt the same way about the world in 2000 that I felt in 1994, it would hardly have been worth doing—as a work of philosophy. Foucault says much the same thing about his own books—what’s the point of books if they don’t allow us to stray from ourselves, to get off the track, to defy developmental norms, to experiment with who we are, and to become something new?

Even if I were to lose my job for daring to discuss what it feels like to be gay, to suffer the ridicule of colleagues for violating professional standards by writing from an idiosyncratic point of view, to be laughed or hounded out of the profession—eventualities I certainly don’t expect—I would still be proud of that book and glad I wrote and published it. It is the experience that I cherish regardless of the outcome, the experience and the knowledge that the askesis of writing the book helped me to become a person who wasn’t afraid to write such a book and to let it go out into a world where other people will determine its—and to some extent my—future.

I realize that the story I have offered here is not especially encouraging; it doesn’t do much to reduce anxieties that nonheterosexual philosophers have about publishing work with gay content. I can’t say, "Look, don’t be afraid; the system is fair." I can’t say, "Your anxieties are unfounded; granting agencies and publishers are really open to gay ideas, and your chances of getting and keeping a job as an openly gay philosopher are really pretty good after all." I got very little help, and some of the help I got was more or less accidental. I got invitations to submit manuscripts to editors and support from prominent scholars on the basis of work that was not overtly gay. My job is secure, but only because of the attitudes and goals of particular people who happen to be in key positions at my university at the present moment. And I don’t know what the future will bring.

All I know is that I had to do philosophy rather than build and protect a professional reputation. All I know is that I reached the point where the profession no longer mattered to me as much as the work, the thinking that I needed to do. I was at a crossroads where something had to be risked. At that point it came to me that what had to be risked was my profession, not philosophy. And no doubt if I am to continue to practice philosophy, my profession will have to be risked again and again and again. That’s just how it is.

As we think about how to support and encourage each other in our philosophical undertakings, we have to think about very real dangers and very practical concerns. We have to acknowledge that there are good reasons for our anxiety, and neither the reasons nor the anxiety will likely go away on their own. They both have to be addressed. Heterosexism and homophobia in universities, granting agencies, publishing houses, and professional societies have got to be challenged and fought. Policies and laws have got to be changed. People have got to be protected. But we’ve also got to encourage each other to go ahead and take the risks. Or else those who want to silence us will have their way, and there won’t be any gay philosophers no matter how many gay professionals there are.