Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools could never dismantle the master’s house. She was talking about feminist women working within the patriarchal structure of academia, but her words make sense in many contexts where information is created and/or knowledge is disseminated—online, in the book publishing business, on TV, in K-12 classrooms, and certainly in the ivory tower. Can you ever radically change a flawed system when you’re part of it?
An excellent use of the master’s tools!
When I was waking up to feminism, or at least getting comfortable with calling myself a feminist, the texts that touched a nerve were poems by eighteenth and nineteenth century women poets, commonly called “poetesses.” Their poems were about friendship, children’s deaths, the beauty of nature…but they were simultaneously about constructing empowered female communities, envisioning writing as a vocation (at a time when most vocations were closed to women), imagining a place for women outside the domestic sphere, even about embracing female sexuality. They apologized for their writing a lot, but you could tell they weren’t that sorry.
These women spoke to me because they so artfully resisted the patriarchal structure while writing and living within it. Subversion. I learned this word from them, and it is one of my favorites. It was a word I had been missing to define so much of my experience.
At the end of last summer, the feminist blogosphere exploded with reactions to Robin Thicke’s anthem to date rape, “Blurred Lines.” (Bear with me, this is definitely going to relate to Audre Lorde and poetesses. I’m sorry for the attempt at non-linear writing structure. So sorry!) Here is my favorite response to Thicke’s misogynistic explosion, “Defined Lines” by a group called Law Revue from Auckland University:
This video! It is an amazing representation of what one can do with the master’s tools. The women in “Defined Lines” appropriate so much from Thicke: the stick-in-your-head tune, the black and white color scheme (and of course, the black and white sexual roles), the giant hashtags, the…wrapping of people in plastic?
The video’s power comes from its absolute reversal: we might not bat an eyelash at dead-eyed women in white plastic outfits absently gyrating to a song about non-consensual sex, but it’s certainly alarming when men are doing…well, all those same things.
Our readings for this week speak mostly to the power relations of publishing practices in the academy–a system in which professors do research, write papers, and submit them for publication in academic journals, never expecting to see a dime from the journals themselves. Publication is understood as part of a professor’s job, necessary to be awarded tenure (as opposed to being fired and cast out onto the Island of Misfit Academics). Big publishers produce the articles, and libraries pay vendors for access to the articles. Hmm.
Publishing practices are just one piece in the patriarchal puzzle that is the academy. Other, interconnected pieces include: students’ access to college (or lack thereof) based on class, race, and geographic location; professors’ access to support for research and writing, often largely determined by the prestige of the institution where they get a job; the abysmal state of the academic job market, created by decreased funding for faculty positions (especially in the humanities and fine arts) and the system of graduate education that produces more people with terminal degrees (usually PhDs) than could ever be hired…phew!
The first issue, students’ access to college, comes full circle when we think about potential professors’ access to post-baccalaureate education and, subsequently, jobs. We are all students first, so subject positions like class, race, and gender have major effects on who makes it through grad school and into faculty positions in the first place–who becomes the privileged few who get to produce the academic journal content they’re not going to get paid for! Woo!
The corner piece of this puzzle is the classroom: who controls it, how are students allowed to communicate their ideas, what subjects are deemed worthy of study? All of these questions are caught up in the patriarchal structure of the academy. Who controls the classroom? White men, more often than not, especially at more prestigious universities. How are students allowed to communicate their ideas? Usually in Standard English, in argumentative written formats that mirror academic journal articles, usually for a grade that will end up on an official printed transcript, representing the money the student spent (or the debt she incurred) to take that class. What subjects are deemed worthy of study? Canonical works, quantifiable information, mainstream groups. And when “others” are studied, it is usually a very conscious effort: Look at me! I managed to get a black woman and a Hispanic man on my syllabus! I deserve a cookie!
So…remember Robin Thicke and Law Revue and Blurred Lines vs. Defined Lines? Oh, and the poetesses? They’re back! Earlier in this quickly-becoming-unwieldy post (I’m sorry! I’ll quiet down soon, I promise!) I talked about my admiration of Law Revue and nineteenth century poetesses for their ability to subvert patriarchal structures while existing within them–using the master’s tools. I have made a decision to exist inside the patriarchal system of the academy, so can I do something powerful with the (master’s) tools at hand? Will it ever make a difference?
Here’s what I do: In the classroom, I practice feminist pedagogy, which decenters the professor/student power relationship, assigns value to student experience, and embraces academic work in non-conventional forms and on non-conventional subjects (among many other things). In writing, I try to choose underrepresented subjects and to take every chance I can to write outside of the traditional academic style. I try to become allies with other feminists inside and outside of my institution. But I am quiet about all of this. Like Timothy Gowers in our reading on Elsevier, I am hesitant to draw too much attention to myself as I slyly chip away at a wall.
I know Lorde is right, that these subversive acts will not dismantle the patriarchal system of the academy. Is it enough to start chipping away at the foundation, or maybe start rotting the walls? I know I will continue to struggle with these questions, especially when I see students who have been systematically underserved by K-12 education and continue to be alienated in college, especially when I swallow a good old-fashioned dose of everyday sexism in the workplace.
I don’t have a neat conclusion that will wrap this all up. Only questions. And, in the absence of answers, this handy how-to that might help all of us impostors pass as real academics.
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