It was less edgy than it imagined
Andrea Long Chu worked with Avital Ronell as a graduate student, and believes her accuser. Chu was a teaching assistant for Ronell last year.
The course was called “Outrageous Texts.” Like most purportedly edgy things, it was less edgy than it imagined. In practice, outrageous mostly meant some dead white dudes with weird sexual hang-ups. Sometimes we mixed it up; the dudes were still alive. When we did read women (four of the 15 writers assigned), Avital still mostly talked about men. Her lecture on Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, like the introduction she wrote for Verso’s edition of that book, focused on Nietzsche and Derrida.
It is not illegal to read men. Avital is a Germanist and a deconstructionist who has made no serious contribution to feminist scholarship. That’s fine. But when news media report that she is a feminist — “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?” read the Times headline — they are factually mistaken. This is a professional distinction, not a political one. Personally, Avital may be a feminist, in the Taylor Swift sense of a woman who doesn’t like being oppressed, but professionally, she is not a feminist scholar, any more than every person who believes that humans descended from apes is an evolutionary anthropologist.
Hm. I understand the distinction but I think its validity is pretty limited. Feminism is not primarily an academic discipline, to put it mildly. I find it bizarre and annoying when I see academic types on Twitter announcing that people who lack PhDs in sociology should shut up about feminism. Nah, we shouldn’t.
In class, Avital was waited on by her aide-de-camp, a graduate student who followed her around the Village like Tony Hale on HBO’s Veep. If the energy in the room was not to her liking, she became frustrated. During one session, she abruptly stopped the lecture midthought, blaming her students for making her feel drained. It took a beat for anyone to realize she was serious.
This is the risk with calling people “superstars,” isn’t it. They believe their own publicity and they take it seriously. That’s no good.
It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.
Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is “the skunk.”
Anyone else starting to get a narcissist vibe?
A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious.
A world of pretend-superstars and real peasants.
See, this fits the point I have made for years. The problem isn’t celibacy, or sex, it’s power. A limited hierarchy, where one person is in charge and/or leads the discussion, is fine. But a power structure such as she (and many other of the sexually predatory academics) set up is problematic.
Sexually predatory behavior seems to be more about control, about humiliation, or about just plain domination than it does about sex. Men on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale exhibit that behavior, too, because they have more power than women at their same level, and they will whistle and cat call because they want power over women at the higher socioeconomic levels, and believe it should be theirs. They want to knock the uppity b***h off her high horse, and have her recognize their superiority.
That’s why we have so many institutional problems – military, church, sports, schools – because in these institutions there is a structure that results in one person in an interaction having much less power than the other person. And macho posturing is encouraged, leading to the need to reinforce that power imbalance. Sex. Force the individual into the most intimate, personal, and unwanted act you can, and you have established your power. This is especially true if you can get everyone else to STFU or to defend (or deny) your actions. We’ve seen how easy it is to get that…the wagons go into a circle immediately when one of their own is challenged.
This professor’s behaviour and the fervent defences of it that were at once offered by people who should know better points to what has seemed to me over the years a peculiar weakness of academics: the assumption that power, and its attendant uses and abuses, is something that exists only in the nasty real world, and does not exist in the academic world, where everything is conducted in a wonderfully reasonable way by wonderfully reasonable people. Many academics (and I include scientists) seem totally oblivious of the sea of power relations within which they, like all humanity, are swimming, even as some of them are supposedly concerned with power in their ‘theoretical’ work, and this is why such as Avita Ronell have been able to thrive for so long. When this refusal to recognise the fact of power is combined with narcissistic ideas about the virtues of being ‘playfully transgressive’, the problem is compounded.