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Adrienne Rich, in a lecture she gave in 1978 to the teachers of women students, spoke of what she called the “misleading concept” of “coeducation”: “that because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory experiments, they are receiving an equal education.”30 For women do not enter or exist in the classroom on equal terms with men. They are assumed to be less intellectually capable, encouraged to take fewer risks and be less ambitious, given less mentoring, socialized to be less confident and to take themselves less seriously, told that evidence of a mind is a sexual liability and that their self-worth depends on their capacity to attract men’s sexual attention. They are groomed to be caretakers and mothers and doting wives rather than scholars or intellectuals. “If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because I am a woman and can be raped,” asked Rich, “how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit working in that library?”31 Equally, we might ask: if I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) as a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel sitting in his classroom?
Imagine a student who, infatuated with her professor, pursues him and, thrilled when he returns her attentions, has sex with him, dates him, only eventually to realize that she was just the latest in a string of students, and that their affair is less a sign of her specialness than it is of his vanity. What happens next? Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, she can no longer take his classes, or spend time in his department (her department); she worries about which of his colleagues (her teachers) know about the relationship, and whether they might hold it against her; she suspects (rightly) that her academic successes will be chalked up to her relationship with him. Now recognize that this is an experience that happens to many women, and almost no men; and, further, that this isn’t because of some natural division of sexual labor, but because of the psychosexual order into which men and women are inducted, from which men disproportionately benefit and by which women are disproportionately harmed. I think it is clear that our imaginary young woman was not sexually harassed by her professor. But was she not denied the benefits of education “on the basis of sex”?
The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”
<3
[...] Thanks to the Hollywood actresses of Me Too, these women can now appeal to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to sue if they are sexually harassed. But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or health care for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask for their papers?70 Few if any feminists believe that harassment should be tolerated, that employers shouldn’t be sued, or that laws against sexual harassment haven’t done much to help working women, poor women included.71 But a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women, for it obscures what makes most women unfree.
The question—“If not the police, then who?”—also betrays a misunderstanding of the abolitionist tradition. For most abolitionist thinkers—most notably, among the feminists in this tradition, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore—the proposal is not, needless to say, that the angry energies of those who are made to exist on society’s margins should be simply let loose. Abolitionists see that carceral practices substitute control for provision: that “criminalisation and cages” serve as “catchall solutions to social problems.”74 As Davis wrote in June 1971, sitting in a Marin County jail awaiting trial on charges of helping to arm black activists, “the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration.”75 What if, rather than relying on police and prisons to manage the symptoms of social crisis, that crisis were met head-on? As the legal academic James Forman Jr. puts it, abolitionism asks us to “imagine a world without prisons, and then … work to try to build that world.”76 What would that take? It would involve the decriminalization of activity, like drug use and sex work, whose criminalization is known to exacerbate rather than reduce violence.77 It would involve a restructuring of economic relations such that crimes of survival—food theft, border-crossing, homelessness—were unnecessary. (George Floyd was killed after using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. He had recently lost his job.) It would involve putting in place the social and political arrangements to meet the needs that, when they go unfulfilled, produce interpersonal violence: public housing, health care, education, and childcare; decent jobs in democratically organized workplaces; guaranteed basic income; local democratic control of community spending and priorities; spaces for leisure, play, and social gathering; clean air and water. And it would involve creating a justice system that, wherever possible, sought repair and reconciliation. Abolition, Gilmore explains, “isn’t just absence … abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.”78
not new or anything but nicely put still
There’s a certain kind of cultural hero—the artist, the scientist, the thinker—who is often characterized as one who lives for “the work.” Family, friends, moral obligations be damned, the work comes first. The reason the work comes first in the case of the artist, the scientist, the thinker is that its practice makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. That conviction of centeredness irradiates the mind, heart, and spirit like nothing else. Many if not most of the Communists who felt destined for a life of serious radicalism experienced themselves in exactly the same way. Their lives too—impassioned by an ideal of social justice—were irradiated by a kind of expressiveness that made them feel brilliantly centered. This centeredness glowed in the dark: it was what made them beautiful, well spoken, and often heroic.
[...] the mere articulation of the words in my mother’s mouth produced a peculiar and relieving focus against the murkiness of that mysterious force, a focus which told me where and who I was: I was the daughter of Papa who worked hard all day long. Finally, the words said: We are all of us, here in this house, vitally connected to the fact that Papa works hard all day long. We pay attention to and respect that fact; we make common cause with it. This last, this oneness, this solidarity, produced in me pride and excitement; it dissolved the numbness and transformed the pain back into a moving, stirring, agitating element: something to be understood and responded to, something to be dealt with and struggled against.
They took with them on this journey not only their own narrow, impoverished experience but a set of abstractions as well, abstractions with the power to transform. When these people sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that had world-making properties. This context lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity of the soul into which they had been born and gave them, for the first time in their lives, a sense of rights as well as of obligations. They had rights because they now knew who and what they were. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians. They were not a people without a history, they had the Russian Revolution. They were not without a civilizing world view, they had Marxism.
Who, who came out of that world could fail to remember the extraordinary quality these experiences embodied for all those living through them? You were, if you were there, in the presence of one of the most amazing of humanizing processes: that process whereby one emerges by merging; whereby one experiences oneself through an idea of the self beyond the self and one becomes free, whole, and separate through the mysterious agency of a disciplining context. In short, you were in the presence of the socializing emotion, that emotion whose operating force is such that men and women feel themselves not through that which composes their own unique, individual selves but rather through that which composes the shared, irreducible self.
What I remember most deeply about the Communists is their passion. It was passion that converted them, passion that held them, passion that lifted them up and then twisted them down. Each and every one of them experienced a kind of inner radiance: some intensity of illumination that tore at the soul. To know that radiance, to be lit from within, and then to lose it; to be thrown back, away from its light and heat; to know thereafter the ordinary greyness of life, black and lightless; that was to know a kind of exaltation and dread that can be understood only, perhaps, by those who have loved deeply and suffered the crippling loss of that love.