Community

I should begin by saying that, when someone is harassed, the only person to blame for it is the person doing the harassing.

There’s usually only going to be one person doing any actual harassment. Most of us aren’t assholes, after all.

That being said, about 90% of the experience of being harassed is watching other people as they witness the harassment while doing nothing to stop it. This is how the bad behavior of assholes is allowed to escalate, and this is also how targets are primed to be victims.

More often than not, the target of harassment is chosen because they’re friendly and polite and don’t push back against the harasser. They know this, but they’re often plagued a lingering sense of self-doubt, as if they have done something to deserve the treatment. The harasser takes advantage of and exacerbates this insecurity, of course, but the target’s sense of self-worth is also eroded by how the community treats the harassment as normal.

You can avoid one asshole, but you can’t avoid everyone in your office or classroom. This means that the target doesn’t just feel uncomfortable around the harasser, but around everyone. This is how a hostile workplace environment is created.

I’ve said this before, but the purpose of American Title IX laws is to protect the university. Because of systemic injustice, protecting the university almost always means protecting the person accused of harassment. If a professor takes steps to confront or report a harasser, they could very well lose their job. From a legal perspective, professors cannot respond to harassment in any way unless the target reports it directly in clear language. Even then, the professor can only relay the complaint to the appropriate office, as they cannot legally take any sort of action to protect the target of harassment. The same goes for workplace supervisors. We can report harassment, but we can’t do anything to address or prevent it.

I think this is why so many people allow harassment to continue – they believe that a higher authority will intervene and handle the situation. Unfortunately, this is almost certainly not going to happen, at least not in the way that it should.

It’s therefore up to a community of peers to address and prevent harassment. This is not ideal, and it has the potential to backfire by becoming a different sort of harassment in turn, but it’s usually the only way to protect the target. No one needs to be a hero. “Protecting the target” usually takes the form of making sure that the harasser is not invited to events where their target is going to be present or making sure that the target doesn’t have to walk to class alone if the harasser is always waiting outside the classroom. It also involves the act of acknowledging of the harassment by pointing it out and making it visible while it’s occurring.

It feels wrong and weird to have to give this talk to grad students, as if we (collectively, as professors) are abjuring responsibility, but it’s better than saying nothing at all. It’s also an important lesson about academia, I think. The institution will not protect any of us, so we have to protect ourselves.

Image: A female theorist dealing with another load of crap

‘Is it a race thing or a lady thing?’ – the new Ghostbusters and the Academy
https://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/is-it-a-race-thing-or-a-lady-thing-the-new-ghostbusters-and-the-academy/

In the original Ghostbusters film academia was the subject of critique for being oversaturated with time, space, funding and equipment. The new Ghostbusters film performs a reversal by its portrayal of the privatised, neoliberal academy: the university is now the space where you have to apply for funding, and you will only receive it if you can demonstrate ‘results’. If you want to do something long-term, creative and out of the ordinary, you have to stay out of sight and hide in the margins. This is shown through Abby’s (Melissa McCarthy) character who does exactly that, although she underestimates how much the margins are increasingly being closed down. When her institution is taken over by a crude cookie-cutter corporate type, the women and their research are immediately kicked out. Abby’s original plan was to save Erin from mainstream academia and show her the beauty of the margins, but they are now even further than initially anticipated. As even the most dubious institutions aim to get in with the top achievers, the margins have to move outside of any institution. You essentially have to sacrifice your career and expose yourself to the risk of your own enterprise.
 

It's so bizarre to me that I had this exact same experience. I left a comfortable and stable position at a top-twenty school, thinking that I would have more intellectual freedom at a university positioned a little more in the margins. The substantially lower-ranked school where I accepted a tenure-track position became more fantastically neoliberal with each passing year, however, and suddenly I was expected to produce more work than anyone else I knew despite being given almost no resources. It was this, basically:

First we see Erin (Kirsten Wiig), a theoretical physicist whose tenure is delayed by increasingly ridiculous requirements that no male colleague would have to perform. Another reference, another grant, another book – something is always missing, while male colleagues with less impressive achievements effortlessly move past. We see how Erin is aware of this, anxious to meet these criteria down to her appearance, but, at the same time, angry at having to perform a disproportional amount of ‘ass-kissing’. What I also like about the Erin vignette is the attention to knowledge policing: what gets validated by Western academia and what doesn’t. Academia rewards particular standards, particular modes of thinking and producing. You need to be similar to others, to cite the canon, to orient your research towards the current funding.

Despite being just as productive and successful as Erin, I was also denied tenure. My situation was simultaneously complicated and not complicated at all, in that it was an all-too-common combination of discrimination, intellectual conservatism, and neoliberal corporatization.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the concept of "the undercommons" (here's a free PDF of the book), the gist of which is to "take what you can from the system and run." I've been fortunate to have a lot of good people in an extensive support network reach out to me since I was denied tenure, and many people have generously offered concrete resources that might help me make it back into the system. I'm grateful, of course, but I suspect that there may no longer be any room in the system for someone like me, who not only does research in and about the margins but also teaches from and to the margins. If the system won't support me, I'm not too terribly interested in giving more of my labor to support the system.

My main concern, at the moment, is how to become a Ghostbuster.

2020 Writing Log, Part 26

- I edited (and partially rewrote) the first half of the old short story I mentioned earlier, “Mount Hiei.” I hope I don’t jinx myself by saying this, but I’m surprised by how entertaining it is. I originally wrote it in 2013, which is back before I started seriously writing fiction. I expected it to be garbage, but it’s not bad!

- I saw an interesting call for anthology submissions from a small press I admire; and, before I could stop myself, I wrote the first few pages of a story called “The Slithery Dee” (after the Shel Silverstein poem). Unless I get another sudden burst of inspiration, however, I’m going to put this story on hold until I’m finished editing “Mount Hiei.” I love writing, but I want to keep everything slow and steady in order to avoid unnecessary stress and burnout.

- I took my It Never Happened zine to two local bookstores, Bindlestiff Books and A Novel Idea. The people I spoke with were super friendly, and I ended up walking out of both stores with more zines than I came in with.

- I finished my story for the Multifandom Drabble fanfic exchange. I can’t even begin to describe how much of a joy it was to write this, and I’m eternally grateful to the person who created the prompt. I hope they enjoy the story!

- I signed up for the Press Start fanfic exchange. This is the first year I’ve been able to participate, and I’m excited. I spent the past two weeks thinking up prompts, and I hope the person I’m paired with is at least a little amused. I just got my own assignment this morning, and I am delighted.

- I edited Chapter 8 of Malice.

- I wrote another page of my Legend of Zelda essay. Progress is slow, but it’s coming along!

- I submitted a short entry on “manga” for a handbook titled Key Terms in Comics Studies. This was a lot of fun, and the editor was a pleasure to work with.

- I completed my Summer 2020 sketchbook for the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project and mailed it in. I have to admit that I’m not super onboard with the trend of people feeling compelled to post photos of portfolio-perfect sketchbooks on Instagram, so I really appreciate this program, which encourages and celebrates messiness, experimentation, and artists of all skill levels.

- Now that the Philadelphia city offices are open again, I was finally able to get a Pennsylvania driver’s license. It took a bit of work, but I'm now officially nonbinary on my state ID. I also registered to vote. Hooray!