Tag: laura kipnis

PC Sister v. Marx Bro

Higher Ed.

Distinguished feminist scholar Sara Ahmed recently published a long, thoughtful piece in which she ties together a number of hot academic issues. Her basic claim is that critiques of neoliberalism—those which challenge the increased corporatization of the university, for example—have become a tool of racial and sexual oppression. She makes some good points. Let’s discuss the metanarrative at play though. In short, it’s a certain type of internecine squabble I see a lot in academia. Let’s call it “PC sister v. Marx Bro.”

In one corner we have Ahmed, a self-described “angry queer woman of colour.” This description gives us a good idea of her investments. This PC Sister is concerned with protecting the rights of women within the “hostile institution” which is the university. She goes about this via insistent demands that her subjective truth and that of other harassed/intimidated/excluded subjects be acknowledged. As such, her rhetoric include a good dose of what professor Laura Kipnis would call “melodrama.” Ahmed is suffering… “And so much violence,” she writes, “is not called violence because it is understood as a right and a freedom…We are up against history; walls.” And you damn well better recognize!

In the other corner, we have our Marx Bro. He has a beard and corduroy jacket. He’s into Das Kapital, Gramsci, maybe a little Rosa Luxemburg. For him, it all comes down to political economics, “scientific” analysis of big economic structures. Unlike our PC sister, his rhetoric is resoundingly not rooted in the personal. Asher Wycoff, a “speculative leftist and armchair revolutionary” with a particularly great blog, can stand in for this figure.

A few weeks ago Wycoff wrote a piece touching upon the idea of the student as consumer. Ahmed believes that the “student as consumer” trope, like other economic-based critiques, is being used by figures within the university to marginalize gendered/racialized viewpoints. Wycoff agrees that the views of students must be respected. He reaches this conclusion though using the exact economic logic Ahmed finds so problematic. Students, Wycoff says, are acting like consumers because college, in our current “post-industrial, neoliberal hellscape,” is (in an objective sense, no doubt) a commercial transaction.

I imagine that Ahmed and Wycoff, both being good leftists, share many of the same goals. Their pieces aren’t even necessarily contradictory. It is possible, after all, that economic trends are reshaping the university (Wycoff) and evildoers are referencing those trends to justify their evil deeds (Ahmed). Still though, as a pragmatist, I do get frustrated by the PC Sister v. Marx Bro dynamic.

First, I think we all need to be aware of how we justify our views (both to ourselves and others). As we’ve seen in my very reductive analysis, the PC Sister often relies on the personal, the subjective, a shared sense of wrongedness. The Marx Bro is more likely to resort to the objective, the coolly structural. Ideally, we should have respect for, and be able to leverage, both sources of authority.

Also, I worry that both discourses are too quick to posit enemies, especially within the university. For those who rail against corporatization, it’s usually administrators. For radical feminists, it’s white males clinging to privilege. Sure, administrators and white males are terrible. By attacking them though are we jeopardizing our own social influence? Should academics follow something akin to Ronald Reagan’s “11th Commandment?” It’s something we should consider.

A New (Conservative) Feminism?

Higher Ed.

Like many net-dwellers, I’m fascinated by Laura Kipnis’s ongoing struggles with campus activists / university administration at Northwestern. Is this a case, as one commenter put it, of “feminism eating itself”? Let’s discuss.

First, I will admit, I love Laura Kipnis. (If you want a youngish male to flirt with in a charmingly cerebral way, professor, hit me up!). As I see it, her brand of feminism is one of female empowerment—she views women as active agents, capable of controlling their own lives, sexual and otherwise. This vision informs her rather laissez faire attitude towards professor/student relationships (the topic which sparked the current row). As Kipnis indicates, this vision of feminism is quite different than that practiced by campus activists. These subjects are primarily concerned with female vulnerability. They highlight this perceived vulnerability and often, as the Title IX action against Kipnis indicates, use it as an offensive weapon.

The ideological disparity here is fascinating. And I can’t help but think it stems from a generational gap. Kipnis, I imagine, is a product of the era of high Theory. Following Foucault, she and her cohort view power and agency as fundamentally distributed, residing in discourses and structures, rather than autonomous subjects.¹ Within such a world, power, when exercised on the interpersonal level, can always be resisted. Kipnis illustrates this point vividly in her discussion of a young female writer who is sexually pestered by a “powerful” book editor. To Kipnis, this man is “nebbish, hard to see as threatening.” To the young author though, he is apparently terrifying, an embodiment of male privilege, even when he’s Skyping in his underwear.

So if Kipnis is postmodern what is this younger generation? I don’t know. Certainly their understanding of power seems, from a postmodern perspective, strikingly retrograde: women and students are weak, men and professors and book editors are strong, etc. Like Kipnis, I worry that their rhetoric infantilizes students (and women). Like Kipnis, I suspect helicopter parenting factors in somehow.

I must note though the skill with which these young people, via their Title IX complaint, used the institutional bureaucracy to punish a perceived enemy. If there’s eating going on, they seem be the ones doing the devouring.

1) Admittedly, I have not read any of LK’s many books (though I want to!). This understanding is based solely on her recent Chronicle pieces.