Towards an Embodied Analysis of the Academic Field

Race, Gender, and the Academy

As we discussed in Harassed, encounters within the university are highly intertwined with violence experienced “outside” of it. Indeed, experiences in the classroom, in the field, on job interviews, or when seeking promotions cannot be fully understood in isolation from each other. As Bridgette, a Black sociologist we interviewed, observed, she learned to “be polite and laugh off” harassment at the hands of men professors in her program, an approach she later applied when she was harassed during her fieldwork. The Comaroff case demonstrates how integral this approach is for many students attempting to navigate academic culture and establish themselves as scholars, teachers, and mentors—a process in which one’s own mentor is crucial.

Academia is structured around straight cis white men’s bodies, particularly those from middle and upper-class backgrounds, a point that Christin Munsch develops in her article on tenure and advancing in an academic career. Munsch’s article addresses the myriad types of violence that occur over the course of one’s career because institutions are constructed upon an idealized hegemonic masculinity that celebrates stamina and strength. Most men do not achieve this ideal, even if they more closely approximate by virtue of their gender presentation. Drawing on personal accounts, Munsch provides a critique of academic temporality and productivity by detailing the physical, psychological, and emotional harms that scholars may proudly assume in an effort to demonstrate their ability to keep up with the “clockwork of male careers” (Hochschild, 1975). Munsch’s article demonstrates the need to document not only personal experiences, but also how these are borne out of structural constraints and institutionalized dynamics of inequality. It is a compelling account of how academics are not only encouraged but required to put their bodies, health, and wellbeing on the line to obtain and secure economic stability as well as social status and recognition within the university.

In her article, Erika Grajeda zooms in on the classroom to demonstrate how race, class, and gender intersect in her experiences as a Latina assistant professor at a predominantly white institution. Recounting an episode in which white women students in her class strategically mobilized their own sense of vulnerability in order to silence men of color and discipline Grajeda herself, she explores the “ontological expansiveness” (Sullivan, 2006) of white privilege in the classroom. What happens, she asks, when women of color refuse to be academic domésticas for white women students, challenging them rather than engaging in “the affective task of appeasing white discomfort?” Grajeda’s argument adds productive depth to our own assertions about gender, safety and the academy, reminding us that gender can never be understood in isolation from race, class, and other structures of domination, and that white women’s whiteness can dominate even when in other circumstances they may be oppressed on the basis of gender. Indeed, Grajeda’s piece calls for recognition of how white women’s performance of vulnerability and socially accepted status as victims can be weaponized in the university setting, as her white women students made use of structures of domination (race as well as gender, their own as well as that of others) to exert their will to power, recentering whiteness through discourses of “civility” in the classroom.

Together, the articles by Munsch and Grajeda powerfully illustrate that academic spaces reflect the same norms and patterns that make addressing harassment in the field so difficult.

Competency, Risk, and Pleasure in the Field

When the researchers we interviewed for Harassed considered changing their projects due to harassment in the field, they were often told by mentors and colleagues to suck it up. Demonstration of competency in this sense—proof that one is worthy of the title of researcher—is made inseparable from stamina, strength, sticking it out. Similarly, many discourses and practices of qualitative research conflate bravado with competency. Long-term intensive fieldwork is expected to be a period in which ethnographers become vulnerable and break down barriers and boundaries in order to achieve “social competency” in the worlds they study. Of course, not all expressions of vulnerability “count,” and not everyone’s vulnerability matters to the arbiters of what makes “good” ethnography. How vulnerability is judged, and whose vulnerability is equated with a competency constructed through hegemonic masculinity, depends on the relative positions of differently embodied individuals in social and academic hierarchies. Unwillingness to perform vulnerability can also be costly for women, even more so for women of color. As Grajeda’s article makes clear, a Latina women professor who does not display care and vulnerability in the ways that her students expect is placed in a precarious situation with not only her students but, more importantly, her supervisor.

Sexual harassment—like other embodied experiences—is often discussed in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes about feminine weakness and vulnerability and masculine power. Some of this is inevitable because harassment is usually perpetrated by dominant groups to disempower those they seek to dominate. Yet, our interviews show women and queer researchers embodying strength and, more often than not, putting their research ahead of their discomfort and safety in order to avoid being treated like a stereotype. ² They avoid telling their mentors, wrestling on their own with how to develop and maintain relationships that provide data but also pose certain risks, and most consequentially for the construction of knowledge, keep these experiences hidden from view. But in striving to be accepted as legitimate producers of knowledge, researchers become complicit with the dominant logics of traditional research methods, including notions of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage. So how do we talk about these kinds of risks and dangers in ways that do not seek to demonstrate competency, but also aren’t damaging to survivors’ careers? How can other terrains of validation and collective care be woven together to transform dominant approaches that mark certain experiences as data and others as personal reflections?

The articles by Anima Adjepong and Brandon Andrew Robinson provide other ways to think about competency, offering alternatives to traditional tales of the field and exploring how embodied experiences are essential to understanding field sites, the relationships ethnographers build in them, and the claims built upon them.

Robinson’s “Notes from a Trans Ethnographer” examines how “a lifetime of embodying gender expansiveness, being queer and non-binary, and regularly experiencing misgendering acts” has shaped their worldview, and, thus, the questions they ask and the scholarship they produce. Robinson’s analysis contributes to understandings of how cisnormativity in the academy not only facilitates the silencing of non-normative embodied perspectives, but also perpetuates the colonialist gaze on deviations from the Eurocentric gender binary. Centering trans/nonbinary standpoints, they argue, can help dismantle this gaze.

Robinson’s article has also helped us reflect on how we wrote about silence in Harassed. Robinson explores the difference between acts of silence and acts of silencing, arguing that while not all silences need to be revealed, they can still serve as important analytical tools, providing crucial insight into the research experience and context. Indeed, as Robinson notes, silence about these experiences can be seen as a form of resistance; embodied experiences do not have to be made public for them to provide an important base for analysis and argumentation.

Importantly, both Robinson and Adjepong reflect not only on moments of risk and discomfort in the field, but also on the importance of centering and being attuned to experiences of pleasure. Robinson’s focus on trans and nonbinary embodiment brings attention to pleasure and joy, both the pleasures one encounters in the context of research and the urgent need to think about how research can bring about joy and pleasure. They thereby link the subversion of dominant research modalities to possibilities for liberation. Reminiscent of Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to suspend “damage-centered” research in favor of narratives of desire, Robinson calls on scholars to attune our work to how intersecting structural inequalities “block pleasure for certain groups” and asks us to consider “how we can change conditions to maximize people’s pleasure potential.” Embodiment brings not only risk but possibility, and Robinson’s piece demands that we attend to both in equal measure.

Anima Adjepong’s article uses the notion of the erotic to reconsider embodiment and intimacy and advocate for a more honest admission of the body in ethnographic fieldwork. Rather than reducing it to sexual intimacy, Adjepong follows Audre Lorde in expanding the erotic, emphasizing shared feelings, connection, embodied truths, and a deep embrace of researchers’ and interlocutors’ agency. Like Robinson’s, their article demonstrates a different approach to embodied ethnography—through a focus on pleasure, joy, and connection in the field. Adjepong argues that, like harassment and violence in the field, the erotic is often treated as awkward surplus but merits attention as embodied experience that can contribute valuable ethnographic insights. As with experiences of violence, admitting the role of the erotic in the field may make researchers feel like they are doing ethnography “wrong.” Adjepong suggests, however, that attending to the erotic is essential in order to unveil “the political and social structures that have affirmed some bodies as more belonging than others,” demonstrate “how the erotic can disrupt those structures of exclusion,” and draw attention to agency, possibility, and pleasure in the social worlds ethnographers study. Attending to the erotic also invites awareness of negative embodied responses, of course, and, as Adjepong notes, challenges us to confront what it means to be fully human—and thus desiring connection—in the context of our fieldwork.

In reflecting on these articles, we have been challenged to consider not only how experiences of harassment shape how ethnographers do research, but also what these experiences tell us about the social worlds they study. Thinking in this way, substantiating arguments through “polluting” experiences—that is, experiences that produce disorientation, slippage, discomfort in the moment, and long-term concerns that one’s work will be judged invalid by others—opens up opportunities to challenge the androcentric, racist, and colonial heritage and logics of fieldwork and academia.

On Embodiment, the Aesthetics of Resilience, and Resistance

One of the questions we have been asked consistently when we talk about Harassed is how to do embodied ethnography. More specifically, how can a researcher utilize this approach if they do not want to, or do not feel they have the security to, talk about experiences with sexual harassment in the field? This is an important question, one that we referenced in the book but did not explicitly build into our recommendations. It is worth quoting (Berry et al., 2017)—all women of color activist anthropologists—on this issue:

Our written words betray our screams, which are neither audible nor appropriate in the academy. Confronting violence not just as individual survivors, but as knowledge producers enhances our collective struggle. Yet at the same time, we realize that these provocations may damage our careers in the academy and our relationships to local struggles that we have worked to cultivate.

Talking and writing about sexual harassment and other “polluting” embodied experiences is a risk, both personally and professionally. As Gloria González-López writes in a conversation with co-editor Patricia Richards that closes this special issue:

[A]uthenticity and intellectual vulnerability may look contrastingly different if you are a doctoral student or if you just received tenure or if you are the senior professor who is already thinking about retirement. And as always, both authenticity and intellectual vulnerability are shaped by all the axes that organize social inequality, including, but of course, not limited to, gender, class, race, sexuality, body ability, country of origin and citizenship status, age and generation, language, and religion.

Yet, practicing vulnerability at any stage of our careers can be disorienting and destabilizing. And we agree with Eva Moreno (1995, p. 168), who has argued that “our emotions and fundamentally disturbed equilibrium are too important to be traded in for [academic] credits.” Again, we underscore Robinson’s point: as researchers, the ways in which we confront awkward surplus can inform our analysis without requiring us to reveal every detail in our writing.

We still believe it is crucial that conversations about harassment in relation to fieldwork become more common and accepted. Natalia Ochoa’s article is a step in this direction. Ochoa draws insight from her own experience of harassment—not while conducting fieldwork but in the course of a quotidian life experience, visiting the dentist, within her field site. She uses this experience to reflect on the historical race and gender hierarchies that structure her site, demonstrating how colonial norms surrounding sexual violence continue to reverberate in the present day. Her contribution documents these experiences as data and incorporates them into the analysis, providing powerful insight into the social relations that ethnographers are interested in studying and become caught up in as they carry out their daily lives in the field. A young mestiza researcher, Ochoa contemplates shifting power relations and exposes how, depending on the researcher’s personal history and particular embodiment, internalized power relations can blind them from identifying their own fieldwork experiences as forms of sexual violence.

But doing embodied ethnography does not require focusing on a particular type of experience in the field, or even making experiences public. For those who do talk and write about them publicly, there is more than one avenue to do so. In the poem by Gloria González-López and her conversation with Richards at the end of this issue, González-López reflects on the place for what she terms the “aesthetics of resilience” in academic work. She refers to how poetry and other art forms can help facilitate what Fals Borda (2009) has called a sentipensante (feeling-thinking) perspective, in which we do not isolate what we can know with the heart from that which we know with the mind. González-López associates the use of creative forms with making room for vulnerability and authenticity in scholarship and, ultimately, contributing to the depatriarchalization of the academy. The aesthetics of resilience and moments of resistance—whatever form they take—are crucial to transforming patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative institutions and practices that have protected harassers and perpetuate silences in the field and at home.

As we read through the contributions to this issue, we have reflected on their diverse approaches to research, teaching, and mentoring and how they might transform academia, in ways that support those so often pushed out of it—those whose knowledge is depreciated by hegemonic standards, those who do not have the resources to put themselves back together after experiences of harassment, those whose trajectories do not adhere to designated rhythms of productivity and expectations of progress and publications. As Robinson notes in their article, pushing marginalized scholars out of disciplines like sociology reifies the cisnormativity and other normative modes of knowledge production within departments and disciplines. Pushing out these scholars means pushing out those best suited to train, teach, and mentor critical and reflective thinkers, those most capable of transforming departments and disciplines.

The articles in this special issue push forward conversations about how race, gender, and sexuality intersect and inform everyday life in academic spaces. They call on scholars to reassess definitions of competency in the context of fieldwork, as well as current standards used to evaluate our careers. They provide a space for thinking about what pleasure can tell us within the field and encourage us to contemplate what research can do to minimize pain in the world and maximize pleasure. And they underscore precisely why attending to embodiment—its pains, its pleasures, its histories and silences—in the field as well as institutional academic spaces is so crucial for the wellbeing of scholars and for the production of transformative knowledge.