What Ought a Woman Professor to Wear? A New Materialist Perspective on Being Subversively Compliant in the Academy

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Collaboration, Kinship, and Healing: Subversive Compliance in Curriculum Studies (Table 9)

Abstract

Objectives: “You should just wear the blazer.”

The comment hung, leaden, in the Zoom reading group discussing Gayatri Spivak’s (1993/2009) essay collection Outside in the Teaching Machine. In the reading group, we had struggled through the work. Finding it borderline impenetrable to those not well-versed in cultural theory and not thoroughly well-read on deconstructive and poststructural French philosophy, the book left us wondering: what’s the point (St. Pierre, 2001; 2021)? Who is this for? Who is the audience? Should we care about what all these dead thinkers have to say (Tuck, 2010)? We grappled with questions of the text’s accessibility, usefulness for our own work, and whether we were reading it correctly (Strom, 2018). The book inspired in us negative affect; we shared the experience of feeling angry, annoyed, and impatient with Spivak (Strom & Mills, 2021).
Between our conversations about it and the affect even bringing ourselves to read the book inspired, Spivak’s (1993/2009) book worked on us in a real and material sense (Barad, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). In other words, it was more than just a book: it changed physical reality. The colorful, gumball-machine cover inspired feelings of dread in Author 1, shaping her to-do list and workspace around itself through a plan of avoidance. We both felt resentful of Spivak and a sense of reading the book only out of duty, a sense of compliance to the reading group Author 2 had volunteered to lead and in which Author 1 felt obligated to participate.

We then wondered about our own assumptions about accessibility as educators, writers, and thinkers in the academy. Why were we so mad at Spivak (1993/2009) and the book? Why did we expect it to be easy to read (St. Pierre, 2001)? As two women professors in the academy reading a text written by a woman of color, did we assume that because it was written by Spivak, she shared the same concerns with legibility and comprehensibility we did? As professors, too, we paired Spivak’s discussion of the experience of teaching with our own experience as teachers and the role of clothes, of all things, in being taken seriously and taking others seriously as scholars. We attempted to bring the same attention and care Spivak brought to authors and artists such as Mrinal Sen, Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas, and Hélène Cixous to our own experience navigating the hidden curriculum of the academy, not through writing but through sartorial self-presentation.

Methods, Perspectives, Materials, Results & Significance: This presentation addresses legibility and the hidden curriculum of the academy through unpacking our experiences. We discuss what we policed ourselves and were policed to wear on our bodies to be recognized as scholars and the affectual, and what implications these have for collaboration and healing as we subversively navigate the academy, compliant to the structures of others but still pushing back against the norms of the teaching machine (Spivak, 1993/2009). The object of the blazer, we argue, signifies a materialist representation of acceptance and legibility within the academy.

Authors

• Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley, Baylor University

• Eugenia Vasilopoulos, Concordia University - Montreal