An Appreciation: Octavia Butler (1947-2006)

This morning in our monthly telephonic grip session, The Fierceness told me that Octavia Butler died last Friday in a freak and incredibly tragic accident. At this particular moment of danger for our nation’s soul, this is an acute loss of a prescient and innovative voice. Butler was a unique and talented writer of science fiction and near-future fiction genre, and her many works, Kindred, Clay’s Ark, Adulthood Rites, Wild Seed, Lilith’s Brood, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Fledgling, among others, are a refreshing take on a literary genre that can be at times suffocatingly conservative. Her work combined gender, race, and social analysis with a sharp eye towards the interconnected nature of these conditions on the human soul.

I can’t make up my mind as to whether the underreporting of her death is indicative of the ways in which our culture doesn’t take writers seriously anymore, or the general anti-intellectualism that pervades our media culture. In any event, there is some good coverage of her life and career here, here, and here.

I first discovered Butler’s work as a teaching assistant in Professor Big-Shot Science Theorist’s undergrad survey course on science and the humanities, where we read Dawn. Professor Big-Shot was less than impressive, however Butler’s work stayed with me, and by and by, I came to read her Parable series, which although dark and brooding, was remarkably influential on my thinking about society, culture, hope, and despair.

In brief, the Parable series (Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents) follows the life of Lauren Olamina, a complicated and talented 15-year old black girl living in the detritus of California in the year 2024. Civil society and social order has completely broken down, and we follow Lauren as her community is destroyed and she embarks on a quest of survival, spirituality, and the resurrection of the communal in a dystopia ruled by fear, corruption, visceral violence, and corporate and state greed. One of Lauren’s special skills, or talents, is that she is an “empath”: she can feel others pain and pleasure as much as her own. This focus on feeling, literally and figuratively, transforms Lauren’s worldview, and pushes her to imagine alternative solutions to the crises that confront her society, which may soon be our own.

The series spoke to me not only because of its strongly dystopian vision of possible futures for the United States (some of which seem to be coming true as we speak), but also because the central narrator, Lauren, is not a uni-dimensional heroine in the manner of some fiction by writers of colour. Like all of Butler’s narrators, Lauren is achingly human: unsure, wise, reckless, headstrong, afraid, powerful, confused, shortsighted, and visionary. The second book in the series, Parable of the Talents, is written from the perspective of her lost daughter Larkin, and continues with the remarkable unfolding of Lauren’s story as a flawed but brilliant diamond.

Lauren’s quest is not about resolving contradictions and choices through the guise of certainty, but about embracing change, even when such an embrace has unforeseen or violently transformative consequences. Lauren, in a word, attempts, as The Fierceness says, “to build a home and a life in the abyss [of uncertainty].” In fact, Butler underscores the message that choosing certainty over risk and change is the road to a slow death and ultimate destruction.

While reading these novels in the boom years of the late nineties, they seemed more like intellectual exercises in human emotion and survival. Now that we as a republic are faced with the hour of our own potential doom, through a rapaciously criminal administration, the corruption of Congress and the Supreme Court, and the death of popular outrage, we walk the perilous edge of brutal oligarchy and fascism. Butler’s novels offer a primer to survive what may become a long period of national emergency, one that may severely test our ability to maintain humane values, much less the national ideals embodied by our founding documents. We can only hope that we can foster individuals (or become ourselves) like Lauren and her cohort of principled survivors as we face what may lie ahead.

If those of us who take literature seriously can appreciate anything, it is the difficult task of creating embodied and complex narratives and characters that capture elemental aspects of the human condition.

In this regard, Butler was a master. She will be desperately missed.

The Mysteries of the Faith

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Yesterday I had a delightful brunchicito with Prancilla, who always seems so busy on Sunday mornings, by the time I rise for a late bleary-eyed brunch she has run several marathons, saved several children from oncoming buses, and scrubbed her kitchen pots clean! I honestly think if it weren’t for Miss Prancilla, this girl would be in a well-padded booby hatch by now here in Cold City, without the late brunches, shopping outings, and freedom to be a fabulous girl with an equally fabulous girl. Revelatory of the ways in which the academic world turns, Prancilla and I met when we were on the same panel a couple of years ago at an otherwise wet noodle of a conference, and our meandering pathways have led us both through the Bay Area (separately) and now here to Cold City. Sometimes academia feels like three degrees of separation: Your advisor, your doublegoods, and your arch-enemies.

We talked, as I nibbled on Eggs Benedict and Miss Thang inhaled some major carbos with barely a hiccup, about the blog (“I can't believe you wrote about our penis discussion!”), about professional and personal writing, about the profession and about our roles in it, plans for the future, and the potentials and limitations of the academic milieu for our personal and political projects. To paraphrase Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music, when God closes a door, does He really open a window? Or are we all waiting around for our Captain to come and turn us into haimishly dressed folksingers? While Maria may have her comely charms, who doesn’t really want to be the sophisticated yet tragic Baroness instead?


In so many ways, our professional dreams can mimic disastrously the emotional dynamics of the family and institutional hierarchies: of “good” and “bad” girls, of team players and alienated sullens smoking under the bleachers. Since most of us were, in the halcyon light of youth, those very sullens if not smoking then plotting, the university can become our normality, our proof that we are indeed worthy and valuable, even if we didn’t have white teeth, clear complexions, and cheerleader girlfriends and quarterback boyfriends.

Academics, for as rational as we claim to be, often forge intense and completely irrational emotional identifications with our institutions and our jobs therein. This is one reason as to why our institutional politics tend to be so pitched. For many academics, teaching and research and service, the unholy trinity of la vie academique, aren’t just a job description, they are who we are. This critique could be extended, as one of my witty seniors in my thesis seminar did today, to US society in general. As some wag said somewhere else, some other time, we Americans don’t work to live, we live to work. I think this work ethic can be more intense for academics, because we become the living vessels of our training at the head of the classroom or on the journal page or the manuscript frontispiece. This close association of the personal and professional can, under unscrupulous management (deans, presidents, department chairs, students), be devastating when we are shown or choose the door, because the end of the job so often can also mean the end of us as personal and professional beings.

I have been thinking a lot about ambivalence and our profession, in particular the challenges of negotiating the crucial distinctions between oneself and one’s position as a professional intellectual (i.e. a professor). Specifically, is there room in the order of academics for insouciant dissenters who yet still offer the faith something, if not fealty than perspective at the least? This thinking has been part of my process in dealing with my insane and utterly horrible experience at Sadistic College as well as adjusting to my new gig at Cold City U., and more largely my relationship to academic practice in general, which is also one of the reasons I started this weblog.

This collapse of the personal into the professional in academia is an unfortunate historic legacy of our profession as a vocation, dating from the monastic origins of the university as an endeavour linked to religious expression. The joining of job/institution and candidate reminds me (among other things, which is the subject of a forthcoming entry) of a religious order, for joining the order of academicians is full of the Catholic rites of mystery and abjection: a renunciation of worldly and material values, a commitment to a life lived within an intellectual practice (in one case, the belief in God, in another the belief in the realm of ideas, in both an overriding confidence in the truth of the word), and a monastic sobriety that brooks little dissent.


As modernity and technology changed the conditions of society, the university adjusted as well, but has ironically maintained some of its most medieval structures of apprenticeship, training, and subjection in its hierarchal structures. The rub, of course, is we no longer live in medieval societies, and the rigorous training and long period of apprenticing for positions that no longer exist and will never (contrary to eternal claims of rising enrollments) exist again, have informed the turn, finally, in academia to thinking of ourselves as workers, not acolytes. Hence, the move in the late twentieth century, which is accelerating (rockily, unevenly) now, towards unionization and labour organizing in the academy.

As anyone familiar with these issues can attest, this turn has been not only remarkably controversial but also resisted forcefully by entrenched forces in the academy that realise the dangers that the self-conceptional shift away from vocation towards labour poses to their own personal power as potentates in "The Shop." And to be fair, many academics have at the very least honest questions about thinking of ourselves as workers as opposed to practitioners of the academic faith. How does labour organising affect our work with students, via grading, evaluation, and academic freedom in the classroom? How can we approach teaching, research, and intra-institutional and professional evaluation from the standpoint of labour? How does this move affect university and faculty governance, and how we relate to each other as colleagues?

These are legitimate concerns, but they all are to a certain extent grounded in a series of problematic preexisting self-conceptions that remain unquestioned. Primarily, I think, two of the most entrenched forces working against unionization and labour thinking in the academy are snobbery and the mystification of vocation. Academicians think of themselves as white collar, highly educated professionals, with little in common with traditional images of the unionized worker, i.e. blue collar industrial drones. In fact, you hear that a lot around questions of unionization: “We don’t work in factories!”


Well, Mary, we might not be working at the looms, but have you been to a modern university lately? Most public R1s and R2s are proverbial knowledge factories. Tell me what kind of personal interaction and guidance can happen in a lecture of 500 or 1000 students? Or even in “small” seminars of 30 people? If this is not the mass production of brains, I don’t know what is. Even the private colleges and universities that attempt to foster individual relationships between students and faculty through low faculty-student ratios suffer from the increasing consumer-driven attitudes of students and parents which attempt (and depressingly often succeed) in turning professors into overeducated shop girls.


Distance learning initiatives and the rise of for-profit diploma mills also threaten not only the most vulnerable in our bookish clan (adjuncts, contract workers, and graduate student workers) but also the tenure-lined elite. If we do not negotiate this technology carefully, we could all find ourselves in short order to be video images projected on a screen, and without tangible work. This is one good reason why it would pay to start thinking of ourselves as labourers, and not cognoscenti, because these transformations are coming whether we like it or not. It is better no doubt to be prepared rather than caught unawares. But in this case, being prepared means toppling a whole regime of self-conceptions and self-delusions that most likely will not happen anytime soon.

As I have noted before, or all its liberal intentions, the university is a remarkably reactionary place, and comparisons between academics and workers strike many as an untoward leveling. But this critical position, in my mind, speaks to a problematic desire to not be associated with “those kind of people,” although scratch an adjunct or a freeway flyer to get a glimpse of 19th century factory hell in its 21st century academic variation: no benefits, no job security, no academic freedom, and no time to complete any of your own research. We so firmly believe in the Ivory Tower because many of us need to, desperately: we have sacrificed many years, emotional energy, and in some cases a lot of money to rise to the top, to scale Mount Everest and get to the Valley of the Dolls. We have, in other words, a lot invested in our distinction as intellectuals. But that investment in distinction may lead, ironically, to our extinction as a specific knowledge class. As my doublegood girlfriend The Fierceness says from a different, francophone Ville Froide perch, “Knowledge today is too important to be left to the University.”

The social and class snobbery associated with anti-labour feelings in the university is concomitant with a mystification of the profession that together go hand-in-hand to solidify and reaffirm the monastic tradition of the university as sacred practice (and hence, immune or highly resistant to the secular, profane nature of labour).

Vocation is defined as, “an occupation, either professional or voluntary, that is seen more to those who carry it out than simply financial reward. Vocations can be seen as providing a psychological or spiritual need for the worker, and are often assumed to carry some form of altruistic intent. The term can also be used to describe any occupation for which a person is specifically gifted, and usually implies that the worker has a form of ‘calling’ for the task.”

Most of us, for better or for worse, have this relationship in some way to our profession, especially teaching. It is a calling, a talent, a sophistry not understood by outsiders. In short, the traditional formation of the intellectual, dependent on omniscience, specifically on being different from those around us, special, the intellectual elect. To break away from this model, to descend into the quotidian, both threatens the personal investments we have in thinking of ourselves as an elect, and doubly threatens the wizards behind the curtain who rely on this mystification to run the industry that is the university. Does that mean we have to lose the best aspects of vocation: dedication, service, talent, community, and responsibility? No, but it does mean we have to renegotiate the terms of these conditions in the harsh light of the ruins of the university, as Bill Readings put it.


If we continue to uncritically believe in this mythic infrastructure, we arguably risk our future as professionals and intellectuals. Is the solution to pop out of our medieval dreams into some sort of Marxist fantasy of workers' collectives, like a girl in a cake, sui generis? Of course not.



However, we had better start dismantling and examining our histories ourselves, and making sense of what intellectual practice is at this moment, and engaging critically with the issues that confront our profession (including labour and exploitation), and finding our voices somehow, or it will be done for us, and I promise you the results will not be pretty. We cannot rely on God to open our window for us, you and me and Maria and the Baroness all together have to get our proverbial shit together and pull a Faye Dunaway channeling Joan Crawford: “Tear down that BITCH of a bearing wall and put a window where it OUGHT to be.” And as the shit-kicking, lesbian lovin', karate-chopping gals of Faster Pussycat remind us, we can do it in style, chamas!



Or as my old, old and long lost girlfriend Miss Truffles once put it, upon seeing a blonde heiress of Prestigious Eastern U. obliviously bopping along to her Walkman on a dark street at night in front of the WaWa during one of our many crime waves in the fall of 1989, “Honey, (George Michael’s) Faith will not get you over!”

¡Adelante!

Trans Amerique

Taking a break from editing an essay (OK, perhaps a prelude to doing said edits on said piece).

On his recent tour through Cold City, Mr. Gordo and I went to see, one brisk night, Transamerica, a film currently making the rounds on the art house circuit, an impressive turning point in the representation of transgendered people. Firstly, I guess, this turning point is predicated on the fact of visibility, period. In the ever-changing acronymic lexicon of LGBTQAI and XYZ that characterizes our self-identified shorthand, the T, which has been in place for some time, in many ways is transitive and vague. What is this T? Most gay men I know probably think most immediately of the transvestite, the glorious drag queens that are the avatars of our revolution. But in reality, the T has little to do with clothes (the “vestite” in transvestite, no doubt for the cute little bolero vests they tend to wear). Transgender in this LGBTQ universe refers to transgender people, those who have decided for complex reasons to transition to another gender identity, through self-presentation and/or sexual reassignment surgery. One of the most famous was Christine Jorgensen, pictured above in all her fabulous glamour, who transitioned in the 1950s, and was recently the subject of an intriguing New York stage play.

La Question Trans has been a complicated one for the Ls and Gs in the LGBT universe, as I discovered in conversations following my hosting of a National Coming Out Day event last fall. In the audience were many trans people, including many transmen. After the event, one of these transmen came up to me and started making conversation, flirting actually, with me. I had noticed him before the event, and since I have a sharp eye (see Passing, below, and cruising generally, natch) and am familiar with trans culture from so many years in the Bay Area, where there is a large trans community, I remember thinking at the time it was hard to tell whether he was a “real” man or not (Hips and hands are usually some initial clues, but not always). Of course he let me know he was a transman, and as our conversation proceeded, I remember thinking, “Wow, this is interesting.” He was an attractive man, with a beard that was, quite frankly, nicer than mine, an intelligent post-doc, who was making eye contact, smiling, and touching my arm casually but explicitly. I was bemused (after all, I am a married lady), but also pleased. What girl doesn’t like a little attention, especially from a handsome, intelligent man? At some point, another transman friend of his came up and they started discussing the new politics of the penis in transmen culture, and how they didn’t want or necessarily need a dick to be a man, but rather that they were men who wanted to maintain (i.e. keep) their vaginas. Here is where the Burt Bacharach soundtrack playing in my mind abruptly scratched off the surface of the record. This was certainly, um, new.

The next day, during a trip with my doublegood girlfriend Prancilla and his boyfriend C-Zilla to the distant outlet malls on the edge of Cold City, we were consumed in a conversation regarding this penis question, transgenderism, and the new politics of (gay) male identity that transmen presented to us. As we moved in and out of the stores, three gay “biological” men, we talked and argued and debated what this new identity formation meant for sexuality, for sexualized political identities (like, for instance, LGBTQ), and our personal opinions on whether or not a dick was important for our sexual identity (Can you guess our answer?).

Prancilla insisted on some level that transgenderisms of a non-surgical nature were, in his opinion, trendy. A perhaps apocryphal story I had heard a couple of years ago from my lesbian henchwomon and colleague Skanque Huore about half the undergrads at Smith College being on hormones seemed to back this observation up. A piece a couple of years ago on gender identity in the Chron (I later discovered from a contact that most likely the school in question was Oberlin), which I found frankly to be reactionary, was also anecdotal evidence of a new consciousness about gender and gender identities circulating among undergraduates at least at progressive private schools. All of this seemed to auger a very different world from where we came from in the land of the eighties, when including Bisexuals in GLAD week lit up the lesbian hieresses and bohemian fags of the Lesbian and Gay Co-Op at Presigious Eastern U. with controversy and rancour, that included lesbians and gays ripping the "B" off the rechristened BGLAD week posters, and the equally ridiculous response which was for organizers to go around stapling the letter "B" over the tears. Weren't the eighties GREAT!?!

Zilla and I attempted to negotiate around Prancilla’s critical position, recognizing indeed that non-surgical transitions would remain physically indeterminate (the “Crying Game” effect), even as the public expression of gender identity was recognizable (i.e. male or female), and the possible radical implications of this indeterminacy. However, we were also trying to think through what gender meant, to more traditional sexual outlaws like ourselves, and then again how important gender was to gay men in general. Indeed, here is where the dick question reared its ugly head again (pardon the pun). If gay men were distinguished by their attraction to penises, in some form or another, and not just masculinity per se, then what kind of gay man (or man in general) could one be without a penis; moreover, without a penis but with a vagina?

This is also arguably connected intimately to gay male culture’s sometimes thrilling and sometimes problematic fetishization of masculinity and traditional (patriarchal) expressions of masculinity. Back in my singleton days, if I had to read another online personal or chat profile asking for “str8 acting, masculine” guys from nelly queens who thought that they too were just regular dudes, I thought I would hurl! Fantasy is hot, fantasy is good, but when we start to push the boundaries of fantasy to incorporate a series of troublesome associations (pornography, heteronormativity, socially reactionary views on gender non-normative behaviours, also just plain fooling ourselves) and place them onto real men (gay or str8), this is where we lose the thread of what it means to be gay, rather than just MSM (“Men who have Sex with Men,” the public health acronym for what we used to call closet queens).

Something that for me informed these questions was the frisson of being cruised by a transman, I had been attracted to this transman at the lecture, and afterwards was a little freaked out, not necessarily in a bad way, but rather a thinking way. Kissing is fun, petting nice, but when it came down to it, what did it mean to be with a man without a penis? Penises are part of the whole man, and as anyone can tell you, you don’t (if you’re nominally healthy) fall in love with a penis, but with the man attached to the penis (an interesting ordering). But a penis seems, for gay men, as the prelude to a kiss, so to speak. The penis is but one aspect of the masculine infrastructure (body type, voice, facial and body hair, sartorial and manneristic presentation) that we sexualize as well as socialize. In the end, there was no resolution to the conversation that Prancilla, Zilla, and I had, except regardless of what we thought about it, the phenomenon of the gender indeterminacy for those trans folks who choose a non-surgical route was one that challenged us in ways that could be construed as productive, at the very least insofar as they lead us to examine our own lives and desire more closely.


Which leads me back, somewhat waywardly, to Transamerica, a film that has triggered both good and bad reviews. What struck both Mr. Gordo and myself about this film was the non-exploitative nature of the narrative. Transgenderism and the approach to surgical reassignment of the central character, a pre-operative MTF played brilliantly by Felicity Huffman, a “real” (i.e. biological) female actor, is taken seriously after the first scene, which although does not present visually as a joke, is almost taken as such because of the campy association all audiences, str8 and LGBT, give to trannies, vested or gendered. The storyline, about one transgendered person’s pursuit of both the surgery that will make her a woman and the need to tie up the loose ends of her life as a man (an unknown son makes his appearance at the commencement of the film) has a lot in common with classic American road movies, as Huffman’s character Bree and her son Toby (unbeknownst to him for most of the film), played by Kevin Zegers, travel cross-country to reach LA in time for Bree’s reassignment surgery and her psychologist’s permission, dependent on Bree’s open acknowledgement of her fathering of Toby.


What is remarkable is the normality with which this adventure is portrayed. Or rather, the fact of Bree’s transgenderism is secondary to the drama of the familial: how do we make family? What is family? What are the rights and responsibilities of family? And alternatively, how can we survive our families to become ourselves (a classic American story)? The most fraught moment in the film, powerfully portrayed by Huffman and Zegers, is where Bree must tell Toby the truth as Toby makes a sexual move on Bree. Oops! In response, Toby lashes out violently and then disappears. Bree continues with her surgery, now devoid of the previous joy she associated with the event, in an evocative and coldly filmed montage that ends with Bree comforted by her psychologist (played by the fabulous Elizabeth Peña of Lone Star), claiming through visceral tears (snot included!) that “it hurts!”

Change hurts, transformations hurt, shedding one’s skin for another hurts. But also, making and having emotional connections hurts, deeply. But the principles of both change and the need for connections are necessary facts of the connected life, which is Bree’s journey through the film. But also, arguably, our own journeys as well: discovering that being alive means feeling, which means pain as well as joy. I am reminded of E.M. Forster’s admonition to “Only Connect!” This past summer, Mr. Gordo and I, faced by our impending separation and mildly depressed, spent several lovely summer afternoons and evenings with our close friends L and D re-reading out loud and together Howard's End. It was both acutely poignant yet hopeful, as L was expecting her first child, and I think we all relished the opportunity to spend time with one another before we would all be apart and our lives would change forever, meditating on the complicated and brilliant diagnosis of Edwardian society presented by Forster's text. In Transamerica, Bree’s crime is not transgenderism, but rather her failure to fully connect. The film’s message to its viewers as well as to the LGBT community is similar. To live the life we want, the life we seek, we must connect.

The Lost Art of Mentoring

Like the Bionic Woman Doll, Pop Rocks, and Bicentennial memorabilia, Academic Mentoring has seemingly gone the way of the loon. Some of us who are extraordinarily lucky or shrewd enough (see Fine Young Cannibals, below) are taken under the wing of a sympathetic and wise older faculty member and taught the tools and tricks of the trade. The rest of us, like Hollywood starlets, have to claw our way to success or die trying. It seems, in the not-too-distant past, that mentoring wasn’t such a rare commodity. White men taught and then hired the same white men, only younger, and everything went smoothly. An army of identical white men, badly dressed in khakis, button-down shirts, and cordovans marched across American academe, seducing bewitched co-eds and enjoying early tenure without peer review, much less a book. Did mentoring start to break down when the doors of the university opened to the rest of us? Or was it the general increase in American society of unpleasantness and the concomitant rise in social misanthropy? I suppose we could debate this issue all day long, but suffice it to say mentoring in the classic sense has become as rare as a first edition of Beardsley’s Yellow Book, and just as valuable.

Few if any graduate students nowadays are given the proper education on collegiality, institutional politics, developing and using networks, readings signs and symbols, and other arts of self-preservation. Oh, sure, we know how to write books and articles, cite appropriately, teach (more or less), and how to get into cat fights on the seminar room floor. But what good are those skills in negotiating quotidian life as a junior professor? Not much. Sometimes it seems they can even count against you, if you aren't appropriately modest (or alternatively, wondering if this is a moment for self-puffery rather than demuring; always hard to tell). What I lacked was someone, a faculty member, in graduate school teaching me these things. I've had to learn them the old-fashioned way: Miss School of Hard Knocks! Talk about on the job training!

In this business, the hits come left, right, and below the belt. Also, I might add, this girl had her ass kicked at her last job because she was too frank with her (often correct, but still) opinion on matters pertaining to her department. I would like to cultivate a Sphinx-like outer calm, but I’m too much of a chismosa for that. This girl loves her some dish! And as every saucy girl and boy knows, you gots to give to get in the business of information exchange and cultivation. I just wish more people could express themselves in a clear, obvious prose when it counts, as in: “If you don’t do this, I’m gonna see that you lose your job.” Now that’s a statement most girls and boys would pay close attention to, as opposed to something else like, “I think the work has a strong basis, and here are my suggestions…” Sorry, but most of the time I can’t hear dog whistles.

At my last job at Sadistic College, I was done in by my senior mentor/chair, who in the end didn’t mentor at all, but did educate. She was the one who taught me that every banal utterance has an ulterior meaning. She’s the one who taught me to listen for the dog whistle. This person and others makes me think of the tensions between people of colour (Black/Brown/Red/Yellow tensions) and between academic generations and between straight people and LGBT people and between men and women. These social and cultural distinctions and divisions come to bear an inordinate weight in the mentoring relationship, and also become in short order, grace à the social movements of the 1960s, politicized and polemic in ways that perhaps they cannot sustain.

For instance, we inherit a vague vibration from the 1960s: “each one teach one,” “lift as you climb,” “¡Si se puede!” and a host of other slogans about mentoring, support, and achieving success. And some of us still believe, in principle, in these sentiments, because they are a) still important, and b) speak to the power of common experience in organizing sympathies and empathies. But as we move farther from 1965 when formal white supremacy ends in this country, common experience has become more problematic, probed and prodded and dissected on the academic level, and falling apart in mainstream society as constituencies are split along class, race, colour, and sexual lines, among a host of possible divisions. Reason A remains crucial, certainly to anyone looking at rates of retention and graduation for Black and Latino students from K-12 to doctoral and professional education. Fourty years after the Civil Rights Movement, we are still not there. Reason B, however, has become more distant and theoretical than material.

It is also clear that simple sloganeering won’t suffice in an age of increased competition and institutional viciousness as the academia spirals down into the beginning of the death throes of its current incarnation. Or to put it another way, as my girlfriend M says, “It’s never the person of colour that supports you, it’s always the creepy white guy.” This commentary strikes me as sad but also as remarkably prescient. Not because its bad that creepy white guys are now able to offer (perhaps creepy) non-white guys (and gals) support, I mean, Hooray! for creepy white guys, but rather that the fantasies about community support and communal sustenance have gone missing. And many times those of us who still attempt to live by these dictums of solidarity are punished again and again. The signifier of the person of colour (or LGBT, or woman, or whatever) has become completely unhinged from the referent, and now we bring (as we always have, really) qualifications and measurements to bear upon colleagues who do or do not meet our often intensely personal and subjective ideas of what is appropriately raced, sexualized, or gendered behaviour and political persuasion. We tend, as communities in the academy, to viciously police each other in ways that remind many of us depressingly of white supremacist values. Except now the white power structure doesn’t need to do it itself, it’s outsourced that work to people of colour themselves. The slave values we have inherited from our history as a brutalistic and violent white supremacist society we now use with élan and a bit of flair. This is really an old-school remix, but humour me a bit here. Because unlike the old school, Paulo Freire and bell hooks and others of their ilk, I don’t think there is any holistic healing we can achieve, no complete person lying beneath the wreckage and damage, no happy American endings to this drama of terror. The best we can hope to do is to survive, and attempt to do so as humanely and ethically as possible, with ourselves and with others. As Miss Gloria says, Baby, I will survive!

I would like to think that if I decide to stay in the profession, and the profession remains somewhat in its current form for at least awhile, I will become the mentor I wish I had in graduate school, one who advises and warns clearly and explicitly, who can maintain a professional grace, and who can empathize with different experiences and knowledges across racial, gendered, and sexual boundaries. This is who I am. I’m just not sure there’s room for this model in our profession. Vamos a ver… Now, girls, I’ve got to go give an exam!

I'll Get You, My Little Pretty!

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead! Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed!
Wake up! The Wicked Witch is dead! She's gone where the goblins go,
Below — below — below! Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out!
Ding Dong the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!

— The Wizard of Oz

All academia is abuzz with the delicious news of Harvard’s head honchette-in-charge sudden departure! The gossip as to when, why, who, and where is pinging around the blogosphere and web like some sort of crazy pinball, between hand-wringing crowds of those worried over the “influence of political correctness” to those merrily moonwalking on the King’s grave. Scandal at Harvard always makes for interesting dish, even if Harvard itself is rather dead in terms of anything intellectually compelling. Some observers today were crowing “this means the faculty is in charge!” Good grief! Oh, really? Please, Mary! I suspect, along with University Diaries and others, that the story as it is being spun in the Chron and elsewhere is hardly the case. I wonder if we’ll ever get to hear the other penny drop. Would the Harvard Corporation really care if Summers thought women belonged in the kitchen (or drawing room) and people of colour down in the slave shacks? Um, no, not really. Governing boards are never that ethical. I mean, hello, act like you know! UD implies that there is an ugly financial scandal brewing beneath the purportedly ideological departure of Summers, and that strikes me as about right. I guess we’ll see (or not).

And it’s not like Summers is really being fired. Miss Ivy League is sort of like the CIA. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Summers gets a year off to catch up on his beauty rest (and honey, he needs it bad, from the looks of it), then returns to guard his bridge on the Charles. Ah, that’s the life, I suppose. I would love to be able to fuck up but bad, then get a paid leave and return to a cozy little sinecure of nothingness, as I’m sure most of you would. Unfortunately, the world only works that way for some really special people. The rest of us poor slobs just have to suffer!

University presidents, for the most part symbolic figureheads for raising money and “demonstrating leadership” through memos, “initiatives,” and strategic rubber-chicken dinners, can spin off into horrible disasters when they stray from the role they are meant to play. Summers was a proactive president, which in and of itself isn’t bad. Where he seemed to go wrong was in trying to be a unilateral president (sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?). Leadership is, ideally, about negotiation, concession, consensus, and undermining your enemies in ways they don’t expect. Summers was like the proverbial Butch at the MAC counter, misapplying eyeliner and smearing lipstick all over her teeth. But like dear old Mayor Giuliani knew only so well, fascism under the right conditions works, and most people like the control, rigidity and security that fascism provides. Poor Larry just overplayed his hand, and got burned. This is not because his method is anathema to academic life, but rather because he is a piss-poor player.

To wit, Sadistic College was and remains under the guidance of an autocratic, egomaniacal, and insecure fascist, and by comparison, for Sadistic College’s governing board, he can do no wrong. Presidents like this can make faculty life miserable, because their influence is so profoundly personal, and their whims become policy faster than you can say “confidentiality agreement.” At institutions like Sadistic College, which in some ways is unique but in others depressingly not, the imposition of a powerful personality in the presidential chair can bend and deform campus life in truly pathological ways. Faculty become infantilized even more than they already are, tenure and promotion devolves into messy familial-like demonstrations of fealty, and the socio-cultural politics of pleasing the patriarch make a mockery of any semblance of professional standards or measurements. The toxic environment of Sadistic College, with its medieval structure of lord and serfs, has arguably destroyed the institution as an independent entity, and when and if the president of Sadistic College eventually goes away (don’t hold your breath), I bet you dollars to donuts that the institution actually folds. After so long under the reign of a neurotic autocrat, how could the board, alumni, or faculty actually govern themselves? And since so many of the donors to Sadistic College have been seduced by the snake oil charms of this particular president (which I must admit the president is fairly skilled at), there goes the geese with their golden eggs.

And there’s that annoying little bottom line again! Keep the money coming in, and you can do whatever you want over there among the ivy-covered brick buildings while we sit in a ziggurat of Mammon pouring over figures. Faculty of color canned constantly? Who cares? How much are we paying out annually in undisclosed settlements to ex-faculty? Tax write-off, the cost of doing business! Not a worry as long as you keep priming the pump! Quotidian life for faculty and staff is miserable? Brownie, you’re doin’ a hell of a job!

But let the children of Harvard celebrate! For a short time, you’re free of the Witch. Glory BE! Just remember though, she’ll be back, and payback is a bitch, girlfriend!

How Do I Look?: The Gay Iconography of the Star

Inspired by a recent post on the incomparable Doris Wells by Mr. Gordo, as well as an offhand email reference (Margo, baby) by GayProf over at Centre of Gravitas (along with his Lynda Carter/Wonder Woman theme: Go [Güera] Latina Power!), I've been thinking lately of the Star, and her (typically it is a her) relationship to gay self-conception. Like most gay men, my life has been influenced by an intense indentification with the Star, whether in film, television, or music. For many of us, I think this is a complex nexus of desire, longing, mentoring, and modeling, shaped by things like race, gender, and sexuality in subtle but powerful ways.


My first Icon wasn't even a star, in the conventional visual sense. In second grade, someone, perhaps my mother, ordered a Scholastic book (remember them: sort of like Amazon for the pre-teen set, along with Dynamite Magazine) for me on Harriet Tubman. I can't remember the exact title of the little, slim volume, something like "Diary of a Runaway Slave." It had a dramatic photo illustration on the cover (in sepia, this I remember) of a shadow of a woman on a hillside, presumably Tubman fleeing for her life. For whatever reasons, the dramatic story of Tubman's escape from slavery and her return to the South as a conductor on the Underground Railroad was profoundly influential, and Tubman became, in short order, this queen's first "Star." And it was along a racial line that would become important later, a "Blatino" cultural identification with Black culture and iconography directly informed by my identity as an anglophone Latino.


In this promising beginning one finds many themes of the Gay Icon: strength, resiliancy, resistance to conventional gender norms. Controversial and complicated women marching to the beat of their own drum. All that is missing is the obvious glamour quotient. That would come later, natch, in the normal way: Classic Hollywood Cinema. My mother, for being so terrified of raising a fegallah son, was remarkably adept at providing said son with the tools of a budding gay sensibility. On sunny, dry Southern California weekends, when I would be desultorily lying around plotting the downfall of my teenage arch-enemies, my mother would call me to the television set to watch, in retrospect, a veritable GLBT Visual Culture 101: All About Eve ("A really good movie!"), Tea and Sympathy ("See? they thought he was gay too."), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? ("Look at how horrible Bette looks!"), The Women ("Really funny!"), Mildred Pierce ("That Vita is a real bitch...") and Now, Voyager ("So sad..."), among others. Um, HELLO! All I can say in regards to this visual education in my tender teenage years is the unconscious mind exerts a powerful influence. Paging Doctor Freud! Code BLUE in the living room! At the very least I was well-prepared for screenings at the Castro Theatre.


But it is in these tender years of hesitancy, hiding, and horror that the young gay man's identification with the Star is set, for in her struggle, cinematic or otherwise, the budding faggot finds a theory of survivance comparable to his own struggle against a hostile world and home life, and comes to focus his energy on the Icon in a displacement of what he would like to do in the high school cafeteria: Tell off those sons-of-bitches who have teased him, spit on him, whispered behind his back and said it to his face ("Faggot!"), swing his fur, and march off on stilleto heels. Moreover, the big Fuck You that the Star gives anyone who has it coming (and those that don't: the tragic but fascinating failing of the Diva's search-and-destroy methodology) is a strange gay version of the American hero: The go-it-alone, independent frontier spirit, just in silken hose and a hat. The movies that my mother made me watch (bless her soul) communicated the value of fragile, human women struggling against all odds to find their voice in rooms full of hostility. And what young homo can't identify with that? Of course, most of us would sleep with those "homophobes," this time with wedding rings on, several years (and drinks) later, but that, children, is a whole 'nother blog entry altogether.


The racial inflections of the Icon grew in importance, as I left the tender embrace of Classic Hollywood Cinema, with its three-point lighting, elegant costume design and diction, and "white ladies in struggle," and became a young Chicano gay (¡y que!) activist. At this point, other more potent symbols of female resistance came into play, most prominently Pam Grier as the shit-kicking Black SuperMama of the honky's nightmare and the Revolution's wet dream. Etang Inyang, in her saccharine but thought-provoking short Badass Supermama, reveals the complexity of identification with Grier, who offers a powerful image of Black women but one that is compromised by the strange and problematic (i.e. funky) racial and sexual politics of the Blaxploitation genre. Still, Grier's "soldier for the revolution" persona as well as her presentation of glamour, excitement, and danger in some ways recast Black women and women of colour as subjects as opposed to objects, a move paralleled by women of colour feminism. Inyang reminds us that all icons, no matter how "positive" (or alternatively, negative), are complex intersections of desire and repulsion that are irrational as they are compelling. Grier's Icon is one that has grown and developed outside of Blaxploitation (although that remains the touchstone), as demonstrated in the underrated but brilliant Jackie Brown, as well as her delicious work on The L Word. As Grier ages, her new work is a scrim on the older images, and we begin to see a powerful woman in the full complexity of life through a filmic and iconographic pentimiento. Still fabulously shit-kicking, I might add.


Several years ago Daniel Harris, in his volume The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, would examine "Camp" sensibility and its relation to the female Star Icon. Originally published in Salmagundi, his essay, which at points is quite funny, traces the rise of the Star as an object of gay identification, and (for Harris) its subsequent fall into burlesque. Unlike Harris, I don't feel that the Star has either outlived her usefulness or become a mockery. One could argue that, contra Harris, even as the Star degrades in front of our eyes, loses her glamour, and becomes a hideous warning rather than an inspiring icon (Harris focuses on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mommie Dearest in his discussion), she retains what made her attractive in the first place: humanity and fragility. The foibles of the Diva, out of control, losing her looks, and beginning her slow descent into madness and the Love Boat players, can serve to remind post-Stonewall gay men of the illusive qualities of utopia, and the attendant challenges of the move out of Peter Pan Land, although one can argue that the HIV crisis has aided this critical process considerably.

Harris joins others (like Andrew Sullivan) in arguing that old, pre-Stonewall paradigms of gayness are irrelevant in our post-AIDS new gay reality of homonormativity (although admittedly Harris is less of a proponent for this position than Sullivan). I think that this perspective is not only short-sighted, but ahistorical. If anything post-Stonewall gay struggle should demonstrate to us, the debates around gay sexuality and its place in our socio-cultural milieu have gotten more, not less, intense. And while I am quite happy some gay teens can attempt to lead normal lives, I still feel most gay youth, certainly working-class youth, remain vulnerable to the same process of terror many men of my generation went through, and therefore, the Icon will remain a powerful and central idea for gay men, even if the actual icon herself shifts and changes.


I am reminded of the character of Huma ("Smoke") in Almodovar's Todo Sobre Mi Madre, itself a recasting of the iconographic classic All About Eve. On her dressing stand is a picture of Bette Davis enveloped in smoke (the image above), older but still powerful in her visual presence. Huma, played by the incomparably fabulous Marisa Paredes, relates in another scene of her identification with Davis as a young woman, learning how to smoke and changing her name to match the iconographic quality of Davis, cigarettes, and feminine empowerment. In some ways, we could read Almodovar here as referencing those other, non-biological mothers so crucial to those of us who needed, and may still need, mothering of an unconventional sort. "All about my mother" speaks not only to our real mothers (complex enough) but to those other women (and men) who have mothered us, guided us, and provided succor when there was none. And to these Icons and real people, the paradigmatic mothers of our elegant refusals and resistance, I honour you!

Fine Young Cannibals

Mr. Gordo has departed and arrived safely back in Big Eastern City, after what was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend, even if my budget is busted until next payday. We had a small cocktail with local friends on Friday and an absolutely sublime meal last night at one of Cold City's hidden gems of a restaurant. I would tell you the menu but that is just pushing it a little bit too far. Suffice it to say, it was to die!

One of the interesting things of being with Mr. Gordo is that we are both intellectuals but of different stripes: he is a poet (with all that may entail: fragility, sensitivity, three-dimensional perception) while I think of myself as more analytical: straight-forward, talk-and-taking no shit practical girl, eyes fixed on the how as much as if not more than the why. These are of course in some ways gross generalizations, but the paradigm speaks to me, at least at this moment. We make sense.

I bring this up because our simultaneous blogging has led to some productive thought patterns and directions in our discussions of the various topics we address, and seek to address, in these public forums as well as in our private time together. And over the weekend, as we were (again) discussing the profession and the endless back-and-forth ambivalence I have about it (which should be pretty clear to careful readers of this blog), a thought bubble came to me in regards to something I posted in Part Two of my writing on Job Searching and Committees in Academia.

It has, in my experience, been rather unfortunately true that the most disappointing intellectual colleagues have achieved the most prominent professional success: Ford Fellowships, this and that visiting plum postdoc, tenure-track negotiations that resemble a champers-with-whiskey-chaser fueled auction where Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour are engaged in a bidding war over Jackie O's knickers. Whereas, those colleagues who I have felt, over the years, had some sort of real intellectual promise, in the sense of engaging the world and expanding the realm of human knowledge, have either been driven out of the profession altogether or are parked at mid-level institutions where the work load generally keeps their light hidden under the collective bushel of exhaustion, worry, and struggle.

Now, obviously, this is disturbing in a kind of global way, but only if we truly believe in the university as it desires to be situated historically and contemporarily: that is, as the avatar of excellence. The late Bill Readings pretty much eviscerated this position almost ten years ago, but it remains a powerful locus of our social and cultural desires, both for academics (nobility and peons alike) as well as the general public, even in their increasing distaste for the university, especially in the USA. In any event, most discussions of this sort are fighting in concert with or against this idea of excellence, of the university as an agora of intellectual truth. And at root in these debates, if they can even be called that, is the naive idea of meritocracy that is deeply seductive to many Americans because it speaks to our desire to think of ourselves as a just and fair society. I'm not terribly interested in all of that because, quite frankly, I think the whole pot is bullshit. What I am interested in is thinking of the personal and professional desires and drives of the gifted networkers: the fine young cannibals.

The Fine Young Cannibal (FYC) is someone you may know well. You may in fact be a FYC yourself. I first met Fine Young Cannibals in graduate school (the people I knew and/or disliked in college were just nuts, in the old-fashioned sense), which was quite a sentimental education in the distaste of the contemporary academy for anything which remotely upsets the apple cart. The FYC is a striver, a bit like Hoggart's "Scholarship Boy" paradigm, or perhaps the doctoral version. That is to say, a student who is not actually intellectually gifted, but has an innate sensibility of mimicry: a verisimilitude of, in Hoggart's model, the desires and habits of the teacher. We may think more broadly of the doctoral version of Hoggart's model as someone who has an innate sense of timing and camoflage. In short, a line and an attitude.

And in fact, most FYCs have in fact worked some singular, and invariably ludicrous, idea down to the nubbin. Two examples quickly come to mind, of young professionals, colleagues if you will, in my field. One, an unctuous character of little intellectual gift but a remarkable networker, has worked and reworked the same essay in various forms since about 1994, through several grants and at least two tenure-track positions. The book was published last year, with, surprise surprise! excellent blurbs from figures in the field and, ready, hold on to your hat Mary, the same essay, worked and reworked, of course, DOWN TO THE NUBBIN! This FYC was recently awarded tenure, but not without detractors in the department spreading the real story: politically it would have been impossible to deny it even though Unctuous remains completely undistinguished in terms of teaching, service, or indeed research, if you count research as more than one essay worked and reworked over several years off on grants. I guess that counts for something (ya think?)...

In the second example, another colleague bien-située. On the strength of one essay, innumerable connections, and a certain politics, this one has, like the first, traipsed from grant to grant, across several contract and now tenure-track posts, eyes firmly fixed on some elusive goal of success ("to get back to California" was the way it was put the last time I bothered to pay attention). This one had the annoying habit of refering to any well-known scholar or cultural producer they had met once as "my friend."

Now, both of these people are fairly horrible, ceaselessly networking and ass kissing to the extent that they will walk away from you in conversation when a fragrant opportunity passes by. Loathsome behaviour, to be sure. But, what is the secret to their success, you ask? Well, in the niche economy of the academy, there is always an ego to be stroked, always a politics to be represented, always a micro-phenomenon to be engorged with meaning. And politics are key here, or rather the representational politics of positionality, which is to say a rather uncritical reliance on identity.

As academics of colour, we come into the university compromised. Anyone who has earned a PhD can be safely assumed to be completely and totally assimilated into the American hegemon. That doesn't mean there's not room for criticality, but it does mean that simple Gramscian notions of organic intellectualism are fantasy projections. Let's be real, shall we? All of which is to say, the tensions of representation, history, and background lie heavily upon our shoulders. Some of us choose to shrug, others choose to ingratiate, and yet others turn the representational burden to their advantage. The FYC is a strange hybrid of the last two. Early in their careers, they uncannily recognize the political dimensions of being in the academy, and work tirelessly to secure themselves a place, above and beyond the normal quotidian bootlicking required of doctoral candidates. In this sense, the FYC is extraordinary. They could network Truman Capote into the ground.

But the crunch time is always the work, the inevitable return to work. And here is where things fall apart, at least intellectually, for the FYC. Because the work itself is usually an empty signifier, a void where thinking should be, a string of political terms and identity markers that lack meaning in the real working world where you and I and most other people live, slogans missing a movement. In the end, however, this is a minor inconvenience for the FYC, as work for the most part no longer matters in the academy. What uncomfortably reveals their inadequacies can be dismissed out of hand as reactionary, or conservative, or neo-conservative, or whatever terminology that Radically Chic BoBo academics are using nowadays, for you see, I wouldn't know. In my job, I actually work (you know, teaching, advising, admin, trying to get my own shit done on the side without the philanthrophy of the Ford Foundation, thankyouveryfuckingmuch), so I have little time to keep up with the ever-changing terminology of paranoia and oneupmanship that characterizes the lives of "activist-scholars" making $15,000 more than I am at Research One universities and who seemingly have a lot of time to think about these things between bitching about their white students and planning their next mochachinolatte adventure.

In conversation with Mr. Gordo, I discovered the elusive hypothetical key to the success of the Fine Young Cannibal. It is that, consciously or unconsciously, they recognize their lack, that is, their lack of intellectual talent, and therefore work all the harder on the infrastructure (i.e network) which will secure their sinecures. I thought this was an interesting thought, and goes a bit towards explaining the annoying ability of FYCs to succeed in spite of all odds against them (stupidity, for one, seems a pretty big obstacle, but Goddess knows the academy will surprise you again and again).

The late Lora Romero published an excellent proto-analysis of the Fine Young Cannibal paradigm in her brilliant essay "'When Something Goes Queer': Familiarity, Formalism, and Minority Intellectuals in the 1980s" (Yale Journal of Criticism 6 [1993]). Romero was interested in what happens when scholars of colour, whose contemporary presence was largely predicated on the existence of communal social movements outside of the academy, have to make sense of their role without the social movements which gave their presence legitimacy. Well, Romero critically dices and slices some of the most precious pretensions of the theoretical 1980s, critically tracing how scholars of colour now reenact traditional intellectual formations while retaining a sense of political distinction (i.e. radicality). I am parsing and paraphrasing here, and I urge you to consult the original essay, as it is mind-blowingly stunning. But I think a lot of Romero's criticism and how she connects the depoliticization of the scholar of colour (through professionalism) with a revived symbolic politics of resistance (ringing any Cultural Studies bells, dear?).

All in all, the Fine Young Cannibal, at least its coloured variant, is indicative of this situation of disconnection and justification. Their success depends on associations of radicality and resistance which are, I would argue, pretty empty when you're teaching at R1s or private universities. Come on down to my world, with my classes full of immigrants and suspicious white students, come on down to teaching working students, and students with families, and students with lives. But this is not a step down, but rather arguably where whatever remains of the mission of the university, and the radical ethos of the 1960s, now lives. It is exhilirating, exhausting, and remarkably underpaid, let me tell you. And no one describes themselves as "activist-scholars," because they don't have to. No one cares about that anyhow. Working class students don't get terribly excited with symbolic politics. They want to know what you can offer them, not what you can represent for them. And that is the true challenge for any scholar and teacher: what can you offer the collective us (thinking, stretching, expanding, knowledge)?

Academic Exilic: The Difficulties of the (Overly) Examined Life

Mr. Gordo is pleasantly snoring away (lightly) while I peck at my keyboard in the odd early morning here in Cold City. He arrived here from Big Eastern City late last night for the weekend. We spent today doing pretty much absolutely nothing: meandering over breakfast (Chez moi), trying to decide whether we should go to the Cold Place Historical Museum or wander the neighborhood, instead driving around a bit, walking in the park (which had a decidedly low facteur vent), then ended up going to see Transamerica, which was an absolutely stunning film I shall have to cover in another entry. All in all, a pretty good day, although my teaching schedule shall interrupt our connubial bliss tomorrow (at least, momentarily).

Since the demise of my employment at Sadistic College, and my arrival here in Cold City, we have had a long-distance relationship. This seemed fairly straightforward when we were still living together, but has since proven to be perhaps more of a challenge than either of us anticipated, for a number of different reasons which are hard to quantify, some largely material (two households, money, distance, money, different social lives, money), and others most definitively emotive, namely the violent destruction of our intricate and complex life together that had developed before, during, and after the disasterous events at Sadistic College.

We had lived together for three and a half years when the time came for us to part, me to Cold City, Mr. Gordo to Big Eastern City. But moreover, even though Sadistic College is a hateful little place, both of us had fostered a life there that was complex in its nuances and inflections. For myself (Mr. Gordo can choose to comment on his own blog about his experience, if he so chooses), I had made many good friends who I miss terribly, and one of the most painful aspects of having Mr. Gordo here in Cold City is both a reminder of what has been lost (the cherished personal life) but also in comparison just how truly cold Cold City is. Of course, I still have my old friends, but those relationships must now grow and stretch to survive.

Here, I work. Period. Yes, of course, I have friends (not colleagues, mind you), but it's like joining a conversation mid-stream. They have lives themselves, and in any city it can hard to develop personal ties and textures as rich as what I had at Sadistic College (and don't think I miss the irony in the juxtaposition). The demands of my new job have also occupied quite a lot of time.

In anticipation of Mr. Gordo's visit, I spent an awful lot of money and not a fair amount of time getting the garret up to speed, and it has worked. My place now feels like, well, my place, as opposed to an apartment kept solely for overnight stays or elicit sexual adventure. For instance, there are pictures on the wall. There's a rug now. The TV is off the floor. But I am still pained by the visit in ways that are difficult for me to articulate (and in a manner different from visiting Mr. Gordo in Big Eastern City, where in addition to the proximity of old pals at Sadistic College, I have had, in the past, my own personal life and many other friends, from college or what have you; Big Eastern City is textured for me in ways that are distinct and separate from Sadistic College).

Part of the deal, if you are ambitious in academia, is the ability to pick up and move, one's things contained in a matchbox, at a moment's notice: a better job, a fellowship, an opportunity to pursue. This has generally been the pattern of my life since leaving home at 17 to go from my piss poor LA barrio to Pretigious Eastern U., but it hasn't become any easier over the years. Over the last twenty years, I have moved from one coast of North America to another 5 times, with innumerable moves in between within those points on the coasts. The price of these moves, for one thing, is a lot of stuff that has gone missing (CDs, books, clothes, furniture, artwork: you name it, I've had it, sold it, lost it, got it back, then left it again)! And not the least of this theme, I suppose, of meta-loss, is friends, the labour of those friendships, and the labour of one's personal lives in those places.

Oh yes, one gains as well. On paper I'm meeting the deadlines, marking the posts, looking pretty professional. I'm an old hand now, I suppose, professionally speaking. And at the very least I'm well traveled. I'm not the precocious but parochial young lass from East LA, and all in all I'm happy with those changes, as bewildering as they sometimes can be. But I wonder what the price of this restlessness is for the academic profession as a whole. Is ambition measured by one's willingness to NOT be committed to those things that seem to gain value as you slide ever so dangerously close to 40? Or, I suppose another way to look at it is, can one have both wanderlust and stability, in some reasonable form? As academics become increasingly the postmodern version of professional bedouins (everything ready to be packed and moved at the drop of a pin), can we hold on to the few things that count? Or, in other words, I guess, how does one build and sustain community? Universities and colleges make a lot of four-colour brochure hash about community, but are generally poor inculcators of the concept. Community-building is rarely rewarded in the profession (and in the case at least of Sadistic College, actively destroyed again and again), and therefore is not an important professional concept to most academics, who in my mind are mostly sociopaths anyhow. But for those of us who aren't sociopaths, for whom community is important, can we find a place here? Maybe another way of putting it is can we find a negotiation that allows us to fall within the parameters of what is acceptable to ourselves and the profession?

Today, in our Cold City alterna-paper, my horoscope reads:

Imagine that you're a circus acrobat whose specialty is working high in the air. You're skilled at swinging from one trapeze to another. You have utmost confidence in your timing and concentration and grip, so that when you let go of one bar and are flying towards the next, there's no doubt you'll make it. I believe that your life has now brought you to a transition that's metaphorically similar to the moment of being in between the two trapezes. Don't think too hard as you soar across the abyss; trust your instincts.

How apropos! I couldn't have put it better myself, although I'm still trying to learn the instinct bit!

The Voluptuous Horror of the Academic Job Market (Part Two): Ripping the Wig Off the Committee Machine

You’ve got to climb Mount Everest to reach The Valley of the Dolls. It’s a brutal climb to reach that peak. You stand there waiting for the rush of exhilaration. But it doesn’t come. You’re alone and the feeling of loneliness is overpowering.

— Jacqueline Susann


¡Meet the Search Committee! The dark heart of the academic search machine lies in the committee, and the political and institutional intrigues that surround it. All committees are political, as are all searches, in one way or another. But in this sense, not all searches are created equally. Some are overly burdened by the freight of differing institutional histories and traumas (usually revealed coyly at some point in the campus visit); some are a cover story, with the candidate of choice just off-stage, waiting to assume his or her preordained position after a whole lot of wasted paper, letters, and campus visits (the Ivies and increasingly wannabe Ivies are famous for this little gesture: Ever see an advert for a job at Harvard in English, specialty open? There you have it!); yet others represent struggles over the heart and soul of departments in crisis, for which there will be no happy ending (typically revealing themselves in widely disparate qualifications: 18th Century Lit and/or Woman of Color Feminisms in the same position listing, for instance).

Like Susann's fabulous vixens, eyes firmly focused on success, getting to the Valley of the Dolls, in our case the tenure-track, is a struggle, but once you're there, you confront a whole new set of challenges. Being on a search committee counts towards one's requirements for university service, and it is not for nothing that often a search committee placement ranks much higher in this pecking order than, say, the library committee. Search committees are, in a word, contained hysteria masquerading as process and procedure. They are the raw, unsettled core of the institution and its values that can provide, to the junior faculty member conscious enough to learn its lessons, a sentimental education worth its weight in gold (if not in time and energy spent). And as Susann ripped the wig off of the facade of Hollywood and Broadway, isn't it time someone ripped the wig off the purportedly meritocratic process of selecting the "best" candidate? Girls, let's roll...

This year I have had the unfortunate privilege of being on several committees, not necessarily by design but by necessity. Suffice it to say that I have learned an awful lot about the way the institution runs, its histories and disagreements, and exactly how candidates are chosen. It isn't pretty. Now, as I've said before, this sudden switch from eager-beaver candidate to committee member making and breaking candidates has been one of the more intense aspects of the process for me. In fact, junior faculty never lead committees, but rather mostly follow: that is, divine clues and hints from those institutional players who are setting the agenda (the committee chair, other tenured members of your department, crucial key campus allies on the committee, your Dean). So, the latitude given junior committee members is fairly discrete. Sometimes it gets to the point where you have to wonder what you're doing on the committee at all. Why couldn't they have hashed it out without you, because Goddess knows as a junior faculty member you have better things to be doing! "I have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!"

But here is the delicate and complicated art of committee staffing. Like defusing a nuclear warhead, only not as fun, who composes the committee is usually an art unto itself. The symbolic logic of placement is important. You must have:

a) key allies, who will work in your (the department, the college, you personally) interests.

b) You must balance off (if you are strategic) with key opponents, who will feel like they are a part of the decision making process, but in the end (and ideally) will be compromised by the very process they seek to influence (see key allies).

c) In many institutions you must have a "community" member (student, staff, or alumni), who will be so clueless as to let you have your way (unless they are serving as currency for outside detractors, stakeholders, or internal sociopaths/critics).

Mix it all in a leaky boat of non-confidential confidentiality and unstable academic personalities and desires and you have the search committee. Ah, alchemy! "Gimme a Doll, Just ONE doll!" Now, mind you, this is an ideal situation. Different institutions have different rules that guide committee formation. Usually the chair and the Dean hash it out, but often, especially in controversial searches, it can be quite hard to adequately staff the committee, not only given the time investment, but also by refusing to participate, different stakeholders can seek to malign the process and tank the search (in the beginning by refusing to participate or at the end by claiming they weren't invited to participate). In really bad cases various provosts, other deans, EEOC personnel, and even presidents can poke their noses around, causing even more headaches.

And this is all before the announcement for the position is even released. See? UGLY!

This politicking goes on for the length and breadth of a search, which remember is longer for the committee than it is for any individual erstwhile candidate. The important parameters for any search are stakeholders and politics. Stakeholders include anybody with an interest, or more to the point, a beef with the position, department, or persons therein. And usually, these beefs are personal. In fact, most of the politics involved are personal, and by personal I mean exactly that. Professor So-and-So hates Dean What's-His-Name ("He never says hello in the hallway!"; "He leaves the seat up in the unisex bathroom!"; "He slept/stole/married my wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend!"), and now is gonna fuck his shit up by being on that committee. That sort of stuff. "Neely, you know how bitchy fags can be..."

Politics can be even more intense when they involve generational or paradigmatic differences which, in the quotidian world, amount to little more than a hill of beans, but in the hyperinflated hothouse of academic egomania, mean everything and more. Not many people can find that they can give a shit about whether the New Deconstructionists or the old New Critics are in charge of the English Department at So-So U, but because so many of our senior colleagues don't have lives, it really is all they have going. And because so many of our senior colleagues are in so many ways less qualified than their present and future junior colleagues (even after 20 or 30 years in the profession), the stakes are even higher. Ever wonder why Job X went to the numbnut you went to grad school with? Well, there's your answer in a nutshell. "The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that's ME, baby, remember?" It's all they have left, since many of them have either no book or one book to show for thirty years on the institutional teat. Deadwood lives, and it does not like competition!

When I said before that it really isn't about you, the candidate, I really meant it. Sure, individual performance counts. One CAN tank their interview, it happens all the time (unprepared, ungroomed, unprofessional, uninterested). "They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope. Now get out of my way, I've got a man waiting for me." But committees make decisions, the important decisions (i.e. who to hire) based on all sorts of criteria totally separate from the candidates themselves (at least their professional presentation). Does the job "belong" to a certain field or community? Who does the committee have to satisfy? Is there a racial or sexual inflection (i.e. do we need to hire a person of color, or alternatively, and perhaps more frequently, can we make a show of hiring a candidate of color and then just go ahead and hire the white candidate we feel most comfortable with anyhow?)? Is there an inside candidate or favoured applicant who will be bounced forward (i.e. nepotism)? By the time a short list has been arrived at, most likely all the candidates would do fine. It is time for the nit-picking and hob-knobbing and under-the-table politicking, and pressure exerted on Deans, community members, and members of the committee itself at this point that makes or breaks a case. All of which is all about the specific institutional location and history, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the candidates.

Some examples, not my own: Once, a colleague on a search committee at an old institution told me that one of the senior faculty members was basically tanking all the dossiers from women of color candidates, specifically because the two or three (!) previous occupants of the line had been women of color, and she didn't want any more "unpleasantness" in that regard. So, for a position in minority literature, the committee in essence could not consider any applicant from a (known or self-identified) woman of color. In another case, again at an old institution, a candidate was eliminated from the running because, to paraphrase their detractors, "We don't want or need a black person who talks about Kant." Succinctly put! Committees and the institutions that support them never really want a candidate who will truly challenge them or change their thinking. Remember, the university is one of the most conservative institutions in our society. Or I could tell you the story of my girl F., who is so fierce that to get rid of her the search committee had to change the qualifications for the job in mid-campus visit! Which, to my mind, only speaks to her innate fierceness, when a committee has to go to such extraordinary lengths to make sure it hires "appropriate" candidates of color (i.e. flawless but witless tokens). "Neely, you know it's bad to take liquor with those pills."

In terms of my own experience this year, let's just say I was surprised at the level of interference from outside stakeholders, along with the constant second-guessing on the part of some in the university community as to the intentions of the search committees. Who we eventually hired was truly dependent on agendas I would argue were not in the best interest of the department, which may represent a failure of the chair to exert appropriate leadership but rather speaks more to the dogmatic and exhausting nature of controversial searches: by the end you just want it over, and you don't care if they sign Mickey Mouse as long as it will shut your detractors up. "Come live with me, and BE my love..."

Then again, the perspective of being ON a committee rather than performing FOR a committee has been compelling. What I think has been most interesting for me this year has been the palpable pecking order present among our candidates, and their unrealistic and puffed-up expectations of where they see themselves, which I found thoroughly unpleasant to watch. Now, girls, this isn't my first time at the Rodeo, and I've seen 'em high and I've seen 'em low. My previous post at Sadistic College was pretigious, but hell on wheels. Fit is real, and finding the right fit may indeed not be at a top ten public university or pretigious private one. You can land at Nothing-Special U and end up loving it. After all, we're all not destined for Yale, not that some of us would even want to work there. The Gold Standard for grad students is Research One (PhD granting) institutions, with time and money, but also with such intense politics that one truly must be a barracuda to survive. Some of our candidates were clearly uninterested in working at a non-Research One institution, yet with this attitude are potentially shutting themselves out of a potentially lucrative market: isn't it sometimes better to be a big fish in a small pond, and be appreciated, than a small fish in a sea of pirannas? So candidates too exert agency on a committee, especially when an underfunded institution wants to nab a half-way decent candidate who may have other options (see trendy, below). "Mother, I know I don't have any talent, and I know I all I have is a body, and I am doing my bust exercise."

To wit, more than a handful of the finalists high-hatted us, either at the offer stage or during the actual campus visit, with clear signs they weren't terribly interested, or demanding incredible starting salaries as ABDs with no experience. Talk about chutzpah! "They love Helen Lawson and they love Neely O'Hara!" You have to wonder who is advising these people. But also, you have to wonder about how candidates see themselves in the profession. Do these people read the Chronicle of Higher Education? Do they read Academe? Do they keep up with developments in the job crisis that is now 30 years old? Do they realize that we all can't live in California, much less with a California salary?

But here again is another interesting and disgusting differential that plays into committees and their candidate selection: being well-networked. Remember all the ass-kissing you never did in grad school? Well, you better, because it means you run less of a chance at a prestigious post. Remember all your horrible grad student colleagues who were, let's face it, stupid, but certainly had a way with brown-nosing? Well, those people end up with fellowships and good jobs. The "Cultural Studies" shelves in bookstores are weighted down with their dreck. The book "everybody" is reading and better yet, citing, turns out to be completely vacuous! You know, because you, unlike others, have actually read the book. You, sage scholar, are lucky if you end up with a job at all. Think of it like the high-school cafeteria: who are the cool kids, and who do they hang out with? This is academia. Everyone wants to be a cool kid, and nobody likes the nerds.



All of which is to say that the particular sociopathology of the search committee is one which is reflective of the profession, from grad school to emeritus, from job searching to committee selecting, from department politics to who gets tenure and fellowships. Lemming-like, academics follow trends and styles (disciplinary or otherwise), and seek to be as good as if not better than their professional Joneses. This is why certain candidates come away with their pick of the litter while many, many others never land a tenure-track job. In fact, the academy is so trendy it should have its own People Magazine. The demise of Lingua Franca is still mourned by those of us who remember it in its heyday, as exactly the People Magazine of the Egg Head Set.

In conclusion, some dictums on the behaviour of search committees could prove useful as a corollary to the dictums for candidates, if only to serve as a warning to fellow travelers:

1) Search Committees represent the sociopathology of the institution and the profession: nepotism, racism, sexism, personal and institutional insecurities, fear of competition, homophobia.
2) Search Committees and their selections are always political, rarely if ever meritocratic.
3) You don't still believe in meritocracy, do you?
4) Search Committes rarely are acutely conscious of their actions, even after a hire is made.
5) Search Committees are influenced by things like trends, networks, and pressure.
6) Search Committees are hellish to serve on. (see #7)
7) Search Committees are a thankless task. (see #6)
8) Everyone active in the profession will eventually serve and suffer on a search committee. (see #6 and #7)
9) All candidates circulate as currency; knowing and using this improves your chances of selection. (see #1, #2, and #5)
10) Search Committees are irrational organic states of being.

I hope this helps clarify some issues. But don't worry, there's always next year! And girls, don't forget your beautiful, beautiful DOLLS! You'll need them...

Gotta get off, gonna get
Have to get off from this ride
Gotta get hold, gonna get
Need to get hold of my pride
When did I get, where did I
How was I caught in this game
When will I know, where will I
How will I think of my name
When did I stop feeling sure, feeling safe
And start wondering why, wondering why

-Theme from the Valley of the Dolls