The Neoliberal University and Academic Feminism
This panel takes its inspiration from our insistent critique of the academic corporation in which we find ourselves working today. Increasingly, faculty are underpaid and hired as temporary, contingent, or lecturers, who are nevertheless often expected to give service beyond teaching. Our senior administrators, compensated at the same levels as the corporate structure, are hired as much for their fundraising abilities as for their academic inclinations or interests. Juggling multiple jobs, our students are enmeshed in an aggregation of precarity that is not only financial: their protests of the institution’s raced, gendered, sexed and classed inequities, for instance, are repurposed into website photographs designed to advertise the institution’s openness to critique. Particularly as women, as queer, as trans, and as first-generation, the discomfort with an institution that is hostile to them is transformed into a burden to reform the institution. Does our activism and theorizing alleviate or intensify these inequities? How is the genealogy of such processes, which we often hear ourselves take for granted as deeply unethical, connected to the humanist values we espouse and teach? Some senior administrative positions, such as Diversity Officers, for instance, are the result of our successful struggles to force the administration to be ethical. What if the neoliberal university is not, in fact, antithetical to our goals or practices as feminists and principled social actors in the institution? Finally, how might we think both critically and imaginatively about the temporal implications of the neoliberal university today and our place in it: the claim now made on all of our time; our conception of “free” time; our justification of time spent away from the institution’s demands; the disproportionate burden of time placed on some students, staff and faculty?
Roundtable Participants:
Eng-Beng Lim, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College
Eng-Beng Lim is the Founding Director fo The Dartmouth Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS), and Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Dartmouth College. He is author of the award-winning Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (2004), and is at work on two monographs, one on Perverse Megastructures, and the other on queer friendships and visual fantasies of boy harems with a botanical theme. He has written broadly on toxic masculinity, queer performance, Asian/American discomforts and parasitic sex on Bully Bloggers, LARB and Social Text where he is part of the editorial collective.
Iyko Day, Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
Iyko Day is Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College and Faculty Member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016) and she co-edits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press. Her current project examines nuclear colonialism in North America, Africa, and Asia and the aesthetics of racial capitalism.
Jigna Desai, Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies at University of Minnesota
Jigna Desai did her undergraduate education at MIT in Cognitive Science, Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (Astrophysics), English literature, and Women’s Studies. The free-range framework of undergraduate education created an exposure and openness to multiple different ways of knowing and translating across disciplines and fields. This early exposure left her with a curiosity about the intellectual engagements that are cross-institutional and seek to restructure knowledge within from the position as a feminist. As a Professor in the Dept. of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS pronounced Gee Whiz) and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, she holds affiliations with the Departments of American Studies, Asian Languages and Literature, and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, as well at the Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change, the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Collective (RIGS), Film Studies and Moving Image Studies, and the Center for Bioethics. Her research spans media and cultural studies, transnational and postcolonial feminisms, disability studies, Asian American, race, and immigration studies, and critical sexuality and queer studies. She is the co-director of the MN Youth Story squad a university-K-12 partnership that deploys feminist, queer, and critical race studies curriculum, digital media-making, and undergraduate mentoring in underserved public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Currently MYSS is collaborating on a project called Lake Street Breathe documenting and narrating the impact of breath and its barriers (environmental racism, COVID health disparities, murder of George Floyd and police violence, the uprisings) as well as the subsequent mutual aid on the inhabitants of Minneapolis.
Within the university, with her colleagues, she has pushed back and succeeded against austerity measures that have tried to collapse and eradicate six interdisciplinary units (American Indian Studies, African American and African Studies, Asian American Studies Chicano and Latino Studies, American Studies and GWSS) – TWICE -- once as the Director of Asian American Studies and once as the Chair of GWSS. . She writes with her colleague Kevin Murphy about this experience in an essay called “Subjunctively Inhabiting the University” published in the Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies. The last attempt led them to found the solidarity space of the Race, Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIGS) initiative. But she has no illusions -- it was really undergraduate and graduate organizing , occupation of the president’s office, and the subsequent arrests that made the real difference. She has also served within the faculty senate and high level roles within faculty governance. These experiences have provided a comprehensive understanding of the neoliberal universities racialized logics, policies and practice. She much prefers hanging out with the middle school youth than administration, but acknowledges that both are brutal in different ways.
Moderator: Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University. Her research engages aesthetic strategies of writers and artists contending with the legacies of slavery and indentureship, feminist engagements with the state in the wake of globalization, and the resonance of archival histories of intimacy and loss in the present. She is completing "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century," a reading of the imperial present just before the First World War. Another project, “Dread Intimacies,” examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.