Table Of ContentIntroduction: 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
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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 par-
ticular 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 Univer-
sity," 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' his-
tory - one that might be described as being between precarity and legitimacy .
Even as some women's studies programs and departments gain institutional trac-
tion, 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 Uni-
versity" 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 affec-
tive 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 Con-
ference 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 read-
ers 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 Exploi-
tation 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 institu-
tionalized) 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 Feel-
ings, 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 acad-
emy, 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 biog-
raphy 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 oth-
erwise - 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 femi-
nist 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 edi-
torial 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
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The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
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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 pro-
duce 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 knowl-
edge. 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 nar-
rative, 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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