Activism, Instrumentalism, And Academic Hubris

In an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, “Imagining Queer Studies Out of the Doldrums,” Donald Hall, Professor of English at West Virginia University, argues that

just as the initial intensity of the feminist movement on college campuses waned long before sexism itself was seriously challenged, so too is queer intensity declining precipitously, even as heterosexism remains legally entrenched and homophobia remains a common political tool and general social undercurrent.

I confess, my first thought was: “Well, Duh!” Why would anyone expect that, if sexism and homophobia are as deeply entrenched as feminism and queer theory proclaim, merely studying them on campus would eradicate them?

But, upon reflection (or, failing that, reading Hall’s essay), the answer becomes clear. Campus feminism and queer studies are not primarily academic enterprises; they are movement organizing tools. Professor Hall, to his credit, recognizes that there is a problem with the political instrumentalism of these fields, or at least with admitting it, and he includes what, in context, sounds to me like defensive-sounding disclaimers:

I always actively encourage my socially conservative and religious students to speak their minds — not to shoot down their ideas but certainly to generate genuine awareness that not everyone agrees with each other on topics that my queer students seem to take for granted as already resolved. I do not teach political activism — that is not my role as a cultural-studies professor — but I do teach about the dynamics of social movements and hope that my students develop a passionate attachment to the topic, whatever their political beliefs.

That’s nice. Still, it is quite clear that Professor Hall regards queer studies as successful only to the extent that it instigates and energizes political activism. Accordingly, scholarship is evaluated by political rather than scholarly criteria, such as whether or not it is useful in cultivating “a passionate attachment” to changing the world.

Once ignited, that intensity has to be nurtured carefully. Readings from the early work of Judith Butler still help in that regard. Her now largely abandoned implication of individual agency in changing sexual and gender norms through disruptive performances (which surfaces in both Gender Trouble from 1990 and the essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” from 1991) still makes students leave the classroom thinking that they can change the world if they first work creatively on themselves or their selves.

Indeed, much of the early energy in queer studies generally derived from the sense of being asked, and being willing, to commit one’s self to an important, realizable, and exhilarating cause. Unfortunately some recent theoretical work is not helpful. Especially deflating is Lee Edelman’s much-discussed antipolitical polemic from 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which is actually a symptom and reinforcement of the very problem of general political passivity that I’m discussing here. Edelman uses Lacanian theory to argue that queers should repudiate the “oppressively political” and abandon any claim to a “viable political future.”

Thus, despite Professor Hall’s window-dressing acknowledgment that “it is not my role as a cultural-studies professor” to “teach political activism,” he defines his task — and, by clear implication, the task of queer studies — as

how best to rekindle not only intellectual intensity in the classroom, but also an excitement about a dramatically different future that might even motivate students to engage in the hard work of collective action and sustained response long after they leave the university. Fundamental not only to “identity politics,” but to all critical-thinking-based pedagogy is the belief that students, whatever their political orientation, should become engaged citizens in the world, not passive consumers who simply accept the status quo.

It never seems to have occurred to Professor Hall that a student, or anyone, could think critically, consider the “dramatically different future” proposed by queer studies acolytes and others, and prefer (not “simply accept”) the status quo.

If Senator Byrd already had both feet in the grave, he would no doubt be turning over in it to think of this sort of “cultural studies” being taught at his state university. (That is not to say, however, than I would join his ghost in trying to ban it.)

ADDENDUM

Professor Hall recommends some of Judith Butler’s writings as model passion-inducers. Have any of you ever tried to read anything by Judith Butler? I did, once, and found it only slightly preferable to the prospect of walking barefoot over hot coals. In my view she richly deserves the first place award she won in 1998 (what took so long?) handed out by the scholarly journal Philosopy and Literature for those who commit “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years.” Her prize-winning entry, one sentence from “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

You bet.