SE02 E01: Field Notes: Featuring Simon Ruchti and Catherine Clune-Taylor
[intro music plays]
Anna 0:25
Welcome to thinking bodies: a feminist philosophy podcast.
Kristin 0:31
Western philosophers have separated the mind and body, and here on thinking bodies, we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. We crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
Anna 0:51
Maybe even a DIT experiment, like doing it together.
Kristin 0:55
Right, this is a Do It Together podcast where we share the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Kristin: I'm here with Dr. Catherine Clune-Taylor, a friend of the pod.
Catherine Clune-Taylor: Ha! Yes, friend of the pod!
Simon Ruchti:
I am Simon Ruchti, I am an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Westchester University in Pennsylvania.
Kristin:
We want to start off by giving a huge thank you to Corinne Lajoie!
Anna 1:59
Yes, we do!
Kristin 2:01
Corinne was the guest producer on our last episode. I learned a lot. I had a lot of fun.
Anna 2:08
I did, too.
Kristin 2:09
Yeah,
Anna 2:09
So much fun.
Kristin 2:10
and we've been putting it out there since our first episode to get guest producers. And I hope this is the start of more collaborations. If you want to get involved or you have an idea, get in touch with us. Listen to the episode with Corinne. It's phenomenal.
Anna 2:26
It really is. Yeah.
[music fades out]
Anna 2:29
We're doing something a little different today, Kristin, because we went on a little podcast road trip.
Kristin
We did.
Anna
We did. We crossed the Canada-US border somewhat trepidatiously, very trepidatiously, back in March with our microphones and our recorders.
Kristin
I know! And we had this conversation about whether our recording devices and all of our batteries were going to get us stuck at security. And mine did!
Anna
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right! Mine did not.
Kristin 2:49
No, they didn't like how many batteries I had in my bag.
Anna
Just so many batteries.
Kristin
Batteries for more episodes than we could have ever recorded.
Anna 3:00
You were backing up the backup. You had backup plans for days, that's all.
Kristin
They're all of my anxiety batteries. [laughs]
Anna
That's right. [laughs]
Kristin
We talked to some amazing philosophers, some thinking bodies.
Anna
Yes.
Kristin 3:35
And today is the first episode, or this episode is the first of what we wanted to share, what we recorded.
[pensive music plays]
Kristin: 3:15
Who's the best Golden Girl?
Simon
Bea Arthur.
Kristin
Dorothy?
Simon
Yeah.
Kristin
Why?
Simon
Because she's just so dry with her sense of humor.
Kristin
Who is the best Golden Girl?
Catherine
Oh my god. That is a controversial question, and yet I'm going to be brave and say what we all know and that it's Dorothy.
3:41
Kristin: Ah… ummm. You know what? It's Sophia all day long.
Anna
Wow. Okay. [resigned, doubtful]
Kristin
And you know what? Here's why. Here's why. Here's why.
Anna
Sell me!
Kristin
Both of them were quite adamant about Dorothy. And maybe this speaks to my philosophical orientation, but you just don't get Dorothy without Sophia.
Anna
You're not wrong. You're not wrong about that.
Kristin 4:10
[laughs] You know, the inappropriate wisecracks, you know, they play off of Dorothy, right?
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
I love the twist, her twisting stories that were totally made up, and at the end, the punchline would be that it was her all along in the story, you know? She was always up to, up to something with the, you know, the other seniors, and I just love that. And she was the original, you know, bad words incoming, the original sort of “give no fucks” old lady on TV, and I loved it. And she would roast Stanley, the ex-husband….
Anna 5:46
For me, it is obviously Rose. That is the obvious answer. [Kristin laughs] First of all, I maintain that she is the smartest. I maintain this. So I appreciate that about her. But I think she's also an excellent litmus test for people. So depending on how we respond to Rose,
Kristin 5:07
Okay.
Anna
I think, is a really important litmus test.
Kristin
Okay. Couple things. [Anna laughs] First of all, you saying that she's the smartest is what we philosophers call “taking the non-dominant view.”
[both laugh heartily]
Kristin
Okay. That's, that's, I'm interested in how you defend that, or if you plan to at all. And then, and then I'd like to hear more about why she's a good litmus test for other people.
Anna 5:36
She's a good litmus test because I think she is a couple of things. I think she is the most like sort of openly provincial character.
Kristin
Interesting.
Anna
They are all provincial in their own ways, but she's sort of openly provincial in ways that I think we all are, regardless of how sophisticated we are.
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
But hers is just sort of right out on the surface. So there's that. But the reason why she's a good litmus test, I think, is because she has qualities that some people find annoying,
Kristin
Yep.
Anna
But some people also find sort of annoyingly… maybe “femmy” in ways that they don't appreciate. And I also think that you have to pay attention to her. I think she's a very divergent thinker.
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
So, I always think that if people can tolerate Rose, they are a safe person. That's how I sort of view that litmus test.
Kristin
I love that. This is not what I thought we would talk about, and yet I love it.
Anna
[laugh] She might, still she might still be annoying. I understand. I understand that.
[music plays]
6:58
Anna
Right. So today we're starting a series of episodes on the theme of trans philosophy with lots of the smart and funny, engaging clips of conversations that we had at the Thinking Trans Trans Thinking conference.
[music fades out]
Kristin 7:10
Yeah, and we're, we're kind of introducing a few things. We're thinking about philosophy conferences, what they're like, um, what, how they are places where we get to do philosophy. They're one of the things that I think are highlights, right? We, we meet people, we learn. And then also specifically about trans philosophy, which is the subject of the conference we went to. I feel like maybe some of our listeners don't know much about philosophy conferences. So I was thinking maybe we could set the scene and kind of describe what they’re like.
Anna 7:47
Yeah. So… that's a great idea. So usually when a conference is announced, you submit a paper to the organizers. Sometimes the paper gets accepted. And then when it's accepted, you head off to the conference so that you and a bunch of other people who have also submitted papers that have been accepted can present your papers to one another. And so I usually think of conferences as one of the ways we can try out our work in philosophy. So scientists have labs and we have conferences. Something like that.
Kristin 8:18
Yeah. And sometimes, you know, you, you know, some of the people at the conference, but sometimes you don't, you know, you're going to a new society. Maybe you're going to one you've gone to a number of times. And so sometimes it's more about that. Sometimes it's more about the hang than it is about the topic, you know,
Anna
Yep, absolutely.
Kristin
You’re trying, you're trying to find friends in a city where you, you know, you, you know, people. But anyway, the, but the actual work of it is a lot of sitting.
Anna
Yes. So much sitting!
Kristin
You're sitting,
Anna
Yes.
Kristin
You're facing the front of a room. A person usually presents paper for about 20 or 30 minutes. And then there's 10 minutes of questions. Sometimes there's a dedicated respondent who's looked at the paper for a while ahead of time.
Anna
Yep.
Kristin
Then you just kind of repeat that over and over again. And if you're lucky, in between those papers, there's time to stand up, go for a drink, go to, you know, the washroom or whatever, have something to eat. They can be pretty jam-packed.
Anna 9:17
Jam-packed and like weirdly physically grueling with all of that sitting. Some of us are smart enough now to kind of get up and stand at the back of the room. At this conference, the organizer was very, very attentive to the fact that we have bodies and that they affect our ability to think. So there was excellent food. There were plenty of breaks. And we were in this really beautiful library. So, the space felt really convivial. There were places to sit and relax and to chat. So it was a really great conference.
Kristin 9:51
And, you know, it's worth mentioning because conferences don't always have that feature.
Anna
No, no they do not. [laughs]
Kristin
You know, sometimes you are in a bunker. In the basement somewhere.
Anna
Yes, you are.
Kristin 10:02
And, and there is, there's no snacks and, you know, it's, it's, it's a bit grim.
[sounds of people talking casually in the Skillman Library]
Kristin
I wish philosophy conferences had more of this… and less of this...
Simon: 10:17
Ugh. More casual conversations and less of the fighting over semantics.
Kristin:
Love that.
Catherine:
So I wish philosophy conferences had…I'm going to say two things… I'm going to say three things... I wish they had more interdisciplinarity and were less hostile to multidisciplinarity, particularly given how rigid philosophy is about its methods. I wish philosophy conferences had better food. And I wish they had more time for socializing and fun.
Kristin:
Yeah. If someone asked me, I wish they had more of, I would say karaoke and dancing.
Catherine
Yeah. We're all very serious and we need to not be as serious
Kristin 11:20
Yeah. It seems like there's this perception that there's a lot of fighting at philosophy conferences. Oh, geez.
[both laugh]
Anna
Yes. I mean, there can be.
Kristin
Yeah.
Anna
That’s possible, I suppose.
Kristin
Fighting over semantics and, rigid and its methods and, and, and combine that with people being hungry.
[laughing]
Anna
Yeah. Yes. And drinking quite a lot of coffee.
Kristin
Yeah.
Anna
So, yes. Altogether, it can be a little charged. That's true.
Kristin
Anna, what do you wish philosophy conferences had more or less of?
Anna
Well, I wish they had less posturing because it is fucking exhausting dealing with the posturing. And I get it as a coping mechanism, I get it. Right? Like, these are sort of awkward social situations. Sometimes you're meeting a lot of people you don't know. You're trying to, you know, appear to be qualified and credible and all of these things. But being on the receiving end of posturing is hell. And I cannot state this strongly enough: For some people to posture, other people have to be an audience. [Kristin laughs] And I tend to be an audience. And it is exhausting…
Kristin
Mm-hmm.
Anna
…So, like, I always wish, like, could we maybe just be more frank? Like, this is weird and awkward. It's also geeky fun. But it can be weird and awkward. Like, “I feel weird. Do you feel weird?”
Kristin
Mm-hmm.
Anna
… Maybe that's just me. But maybe a way to say that is to say, more, like, expectations of collective hospitality with one another. And also, to echo the point about food, I really think that just some, like, real bread that maybe you cut with knives and, like, jam and tea just all the time would probably help, you know, with everyone's stress level. But it also gives you something to talk about. And, you know, there's a niceness to that.
What about you, Kristin?
Kristin 13:21
Uh, well, I echo your, uh, idea of carbs.
Anna
[laughs] Yes. Bring on the carbs!
Kristin
I'm thinking of all those studies they do about, uh, parole hearings where people are much more forgiving when they've just had lunch.
Anna
Ah! Yes.
Kristin
And I wonder, I wonder if we maybe pay attention enough to our body states?
Anna 15:49
Maybe not.
Kristin 15:49
And how that affects us or not in our thinking. And, and, um, well, for me, for conferences, I will say, like I said to Catherine there, the karaoke and dancing, of course. I think there's something kind of letting guards down. So maybe that's a connection to your question of posturing.
Um, and also food. I feel like conferences put me on a diet.
Anna
Often, they do. Yes.
Kristin
They force me to pack a food bag. Um,
Anna
Yes.
Kristin:
But, you know, if I'm going to be really nerdy…
Anna
Yeah, be nerdy! Yeah!
Kristin 16:39
… and to just answer, like I really want to answer. Um, I wish these conferences had more emphasis on professional development and skills. So like, how do we do parts of the job that enable, um, kind of the things that we also want to do? So how do we apply for jobs? How do we deal with writing and publishing? Maybe we need to have sessions on being an ethical mentor or supervisor, you know, even things like giving a good presentation.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
You know, I think that there's something about, we kind of have a standard presentation in philosophy, which is reading a paper. But we also have to, to your point about audience, it's like, well, that’s me writing for a journal. Am I writing for a listener in the room?
Anna
Right. And it’s different.
Kristin
Yeah. Am I here to share my ideas?
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
And then, oh, I have a whole list of, uh, things that I wish we had skills workshops on here. Doing public philosophy, teaching workshops, and then being a good colleague. So doing admin and service work, maybe where the connection is between, um, being a philosopher and, and certain kinds of work, parts of the job-job, which are so important.
Anna
It's so important.. and often very demanding, especially in neoliberal institutions. That's real. So, yeah, I think that's right. Like thinking about how to do that and be a good colleague would be amazing. Yeah.
Kristin
Yeah, and I can hear kind of a criticism of me saying, well, that would be expanding the scope, you know. Um, and I guess I kind of am biting that bullet and saying that that's, that would just be a good thing, right?
Anna
It would be a good thing. Yeah, absolutely.
[music fades in]
Kristin16:26
If you could teach philosophy to high schoolers, what would you pick and why?
Simon:
If I could get away with teaching what I wanted to teach, I would teach a philosophy of sexuality because they have no understanding of what sex is. They don't understand why they're so excited about it, why they're afraid of it, why they maybe should be at times afraid of it, and why they need to get over that fear of it.
Kristin
And what would a philosophical approach to that give them?
Simon:
I think it would entertain them, that's for sure. I think it would give them a sense of why they have their anxieties. And I think that's the biggest part for young people, is they're so anxious about sex, helping them understand why.
Catherine:
I actually think the philosophy I would teach to high school students if I could I think would be you know Foucault's work on power and on identity and subject formation. I think that teenagers are so wrapped up in this process of figuring out their identity and who they are, and it might be helpful to historically situate that. But also think about how it's actually not just about who you are but all of these kinds of categories and understandings of the self that are available to us are also part of these larger systems of power. Right?
[music continues]
Kristin: 18:01
And same question to you, Anna.
Anna
Oh! well!
Kristin
What would you teach to high school students, should you get the chance?
[music fades out]
Anna
Should I get the chance? I think that would probably be a bad idea. I feel like I would lead some sort of corrupting revolution, which would be fine in my book, but I'm not sure that they would like it. I think this question sort of gets at what we want to see more of in the world.
Kristin
Yep
Anna
And so one of the things I want at least Canadian students to learn is something about Aristotle's idea of moral luck. I would give that a sort of critical reading, combined with the idea from Schopenhauer that we might best greet one another as “my fellow sufferer” or “my equal in misery.” Like, we can maybe disagree about what constitutes the good human life, but I'd like them to come to university without the idea that you, quote unquote, “make your own luck.” Because honestly, fuck that. I would like a world in which fewer people had that idea.
Kristin 19:09
So, so why moral luck specific…? Okay. Well, first of all, let's have a little tiny primer on moral luck, but why moral luck for high schoolers?
Anna
Well, so the bit of a moral luck in Aristotle, this is the idea that, broadly speaking, how good your life is depends on luck. Because how good your life is depends on things like your health and your capacities and who your adults were, who you get to mimic as you work to become an adult. Whether your children grow up beyond you to make you look terrible. All these things are things that are sort of out of our control a lot of the time. So there's this question of “luck.” And that gets us to the part where we, what we call luck and how good your life is, concretely speaking, is actually just the products… these are all the things that are products of the systems that human beings have created for ourselves and that collectively we could change.
Kristin 20:10
Hmm.
Anna
Right. Those situations are never natural. They're created by us. The fact that some of us are born into situations where there's active warfare against people like us while others get to flourish, right from the beginning, is luck. And that, like, we don't decide. Right. That's true.
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
But whether those situations exist are matters of work and decision. And so you can have a critical reading of that. Right. You can also sort of ask questions that Aristotle did not ask about, like, how natural, right, this luck is.
Kristin
Yeah.
Anna 20:52
And whether these are products of cultural construction, as we might say. And there's also quite a lot of joy, I think, when I approach you on some level with, like, “hey, like, being a human being is kind of hard.”
Kristin
Hmm. Hmm.
Anna
Right? Like, “I see you trying so hard and it being really terrible a lot of the time. And I'm just I'm with you in this moment.”
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
And I think that stuff would set them up potentially for the more meaty stuff that I'd want to teach them at university. Or if not a university, because, of course, there are lots of other good lines of life, it might set them up for, like, citizenship with basic decency.
Kristin
Yeah.
Anna
Something like that. Or maybe, I mean, maybe all of this just boils down to the fact that I'd like them to learn statistics about how vulnerable we all are all the time in the world to one another.
Kristin
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Anna
Maybe that's all I want!
Anna
What about you, Kristin?
Kristin
Well. Yeah. I kind of want to say something about this question of being a human being is kind of hard. And it made me think about driving, like how much nicer we are to people face to face. But then when we're driving…
Anna
Oh, yeah
Kristin
… and someone like puts their signal light on like a little bit late and we're like, “you piece of…”
Anna 24:28
[pretend shouts] “What is wrong with you?!”
Kristin
Yeah. And so it's just kind of like, no, no, that's still that's, there's a person in that car. Uh, Do you always signal on time?
Anna
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah!
Kristin
Like, can we not see each other?
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin 22:22
How do you decide? One piece is like, what would I wish Kristin had in high school?
Anna
Yes.
Kristin
You know, um, or what would she have needed at that time? And, uh, I think I would teach Sarah Ahmed on happiness,
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
Which is a good connection to what you said about luck, right? Because she talks about “hap”
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
like “hap” as chance. Oh,
Anna
Yep. Happenstance. Yeah.
Kristin 23:28
Yes. And so this idea that, um, it's quite modern to feel like you are in charge of your own “hap”, you know, your own chance
Anna 25:28
Right.
Kristin 25:31
And that, that, um, idea came from somewhere and that idea is doing some work.
Anna 25:37
Right
Kristin 25:37
And, so Ahmed talks about happiness as a kind of promise, a promise. So we get turned towards happiness, uh, because we think that if we get near the things that we're told will make us happy, that that will make us happy. And so, um, this idea is, if we can give it a historical context, they, they would start to see that the choices that you make, uh, are actually conditioned by and pointed towards the choice that we can give you up, uh, not necessarily some kind of sense of satisfaction or fulfillment or purpose, but really about keeping all of us geared into, uh, sort of neoliberal white supremacist, capitalist system, right? It's about conditioning our choices towards this promise.
Anna
Right.
Kristin
Why do I want students to have happiness on their radar? Because I think a lot of the ways that we come into a political understanding as highschoolers is to think about injustice as unequal access to happiness. We’ve taught students to think of injustice is in terms of who gets to be happy and so we need, what we need is “happiness for all!,” the “pursuit of happiness for all!”,
Anna
yeah
Kristin
right? But I think that that's a very narrow political question.
Anna
yeah
Kristin
Um, and so Ahmed made me completely question this and redirected my thinking towards different indicators of oppression. So instead of thinking what's going to make me happy, I started to think, how does happiness work?
Anna 28:08
Right. How does happiness work? yes.
Kristin 28:09
How does happiness work? So
Anna 28:10
Right
Kristin 28:10
I'd like high schoolers to be thinking about how they get turned this way or that towards, uh, these different promises of happiness. And maybe they can start to think of values or purposes in life other than happiness, like community or justice or politics or participating in labour movements or protecting the environment. You know, starting to think about happiness as a, as what it often is, which is a political tool…
I was going to say that, um, I was going to admit that I watch bad reality TV…
Anna
Okay! You can admit that. This is a safe space
Kristin
Some of the, um, some of the goals it seems for people coming together. And of course, this is probably a feature of people who want to be on reality TV, but it is probably reflective of culture is to be a power couple.
Anna
oh yes!
Kristin
Right. We're going to be a power couple.
Anna
[puffs] Okay. [laughst]
Kristin
And that, that's a point. That's a, that's a way of creating a hierarchy of what a good relationship is. And I think it works a little bit like happiness where it's like, we're going to have this perfect together thing where we are achieving a certain way. We're looking a certain way, uh, the accumulation of capital, blah, blah, blah. Like, what do you think of when you think of someone saying, “Oh man, they're such a power couple.”
Anna:
I think “Uuughhhh…”
Kristin:
[laughs] That's very fair. That's very fair. That's very fair.
[both laugh]
Anna
I think “I will… I will tiptoe in a wide berth around that power couple.” Yeah, no, but I think you're right I think that's exactly right that there's there's something about the ways that yeah there's something even structurally about the ways that we understand happiness as something to aim for and also the sort of like materializing of that in the power couple right there's there's something sort of connected between those. Yeah that's really interesting so I think like you and I should probably tag team this high school education…
Kristin
We should, we should.
Anna
Because I think Aristotle's bit on moral luck kind of comes up with that discussion of happiness in which his line is really like, “No! Happiness is not feeling warm fuzzies or following your bliss, ding-dongs! [Kristin laughs] Like, happiness is a matter of living up to human capacities and it's hard and most of us are bad at it and there are a lot of things in the world that we can't control.”
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
Having said that, that also opens the space for saying that yeah Aristotle misidentified a bunch of the things over which we have no control because of course there are things that we can change including how we orient toward happiness.
Kristin
Hmm.
Anna
And so I mean I think, yeah, I think I could come in with the problem and you could give them like a really nice reading from Ahmed on how to how to approach happiness as an alternative, yeah.
Kristin
Yeah. And, you know, other than Ahmed, I would probably teach like some, like some foundational liberal theory and critiques of that, just so they can better understand kind of their, like the current political rhetoric, understand their world and what's wrong with it, what could be improved, or maybe something on the philosophy of technology, something to understand you know, their phones and the sort of content economy. But yeah, I could probably go on forever.
Anna 32:24
I think the four of us actually could could probably make some good trouble with the high school students, yes.
Kristin
[laughs] Yes. And hopefully they wouldn't turn on us too, too badly.
Anna
That's right.
Kristin
Okay. So I asked Simon, um, sort of about… pressing questions that keep coming back to him in his research.
Simon:
Ah, how is it that we got to where we are today? And what are ways to sort of get out of that? Mm-hmm. So, so much of what's making a mess of my country right now is our obsession with a certain kind of masculinity. So, I think that we might argue that masculinity is a myth, doesn't actually exist. It's just in our minds and hurts us.
I think in America, in the United States, it was because we were panicked when we lost that western frontier. And so we had to come up with something to replace it. And so we created this myth of the ever-present, ever-virile, ever-conquering man. And that's what we're still trying to deal with, even though we've run out of things to conquer. So we make up new things, like trans people are the new thing to conquer.
[Kristin thinking…]
Kristin
That's really cool. It's like the mass psychology of fascism around, like, western expansion and frontiersmanship. And now it's, we've found a gender minority, a different body.
Are you familiar with Laddelle McWhorter's work? She has this great book, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America (2009), which kind of gives a genealogy of the connection between racial and sexual oppression around the idea of, of course, like, white imperialist, sort of like, colonial America's goals for expansion and exceptionalism, but also that plays out through the idea of containing and controlling the abnormal. And that's abnormal sexuality, abnormal bodies. So whether that's disabled bodies and the project of eugenics, or if that's, like, who's reproducing and why, and how they, how their trajectory into a grown-up heterosexual who makes good babies is part of the national project. So I was just thinking about that in terms of how the fear of trans kids has become kind of emblematic of that loss of that western exceptionalism.
[music fades in]
Simon:
Right. Yeah, the flawed bodies that, that prove the flaws in all of our bodies.
[music plays]
Kristin: 32:04
It's… it's part of the discussion of trans philosophy going on at this conference, is this idea of, like, sort of a loss narrative around, about sort of gender normativity.
[music fades out]
Simon
Right.
Kristin:
And how trans kids are being harmed by medicine or whatever, Jordan Peterson crying his tears or whatever, and one of the things McWhorter talks about in that book is that part of successful gender normativity in a person is that gender normativity in their child, but not just that that child grows up according to the heterosexual matrix, but that they're also reproductive. So my, my parenting success is my grandparenting success, because I'm reproducing the nation through the child.
Simon
And, you know, it's funny, I can on some levels understand the anxiety of the parent with a kid who comes out to them as trans, because you've spent so much of, even before they were born, imagining what their life would be like. And now that person that you imagine and the future you imagine disappears. But that's something that every parent has to face at some point or another. It's just somehow become more traumatic for us when our kid comes out as trans.
Anna
Yeah. And so, that trauma so often appears to parents as like a product of the child who is trans and not a product of the pervasive myths about masculinity and what is natural that are already harming us, already very traumatic, and that's why Simon's work on masculinity here is so important because even these ways of relating to our children and thinking about… thinking that we can know what they will be and what their lives will be and what our lives with them will be like is understandable, but it's it's also a kind of violence and maybe a gendering violence, often a gendering violence.
I'm just thinking one of my first published articles is about this idea that we can know our children before they're born yeah but that's really inseparable from a kind of frontiersmanship right and a sense of like claiming other people's lives and bodies… I also just wanted to highlight Simon's comment that there are “flawed bodies that prove the flaws in all of our bodies,” which… that was a that was a gut punch moment.
[music fades in]
Kristin: 34:59
You primarily teach in Women’s and Gender Studies. If tomorrow you had to swap disciplines, where are you going and why?
Simon
I would go to the history department. Because I love old shit. I like to figure out how we convinced ourselves of the histories that we believe in. And sometimes there’s just really funny stories from the past.
[music continues]
Kristin
I’m going to a desert island and I can only bring two philosophers’ work with me, who are they?
Catherine
Oooooo-oo. Okay. The first one Foucault, that’s really easy. Who is the second?... So, actually I would say the second is Sylvia Winter because I have not read enough Sylvia Winter. So I would want to spend some time… Sylvia Winter is one of those people who um you know being a philosopher we didn't really read, and I read so many people who draw on her so generatively. And I keep telling myself I'm going to take a month and have a little summer school for myself.
Kristin 36:19
A Sylvia Winter Winter.
Catherine
Yeah exactly, just keep never getting there. So, that's what I do.
[music continues]
Kristin: 36:26
Okay, if you're going to a desert island and you can only bring two philosophers' work, whose would you bring and why?
Simon:
Plato, because I love Plato.
Simon:
And Butler, because Butler, I think, informs so much of what I do.
[music fades out]
Kristin
I did some soul searching about this question, okay. It's not easy.
Anna 45:49
It's not, yep.
Kristin 45:51
And part of you is thinking, well you want to be strategic, right? You're on a desert island, you're going to need a lot of material um and so I said I said Beauvoir because Simone de Beauvoir has you know novels and plays and memoirs and journals and as well as like dense philosophical works so I feel like that would definitely keep me mentally engaged.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
And then, I have to agree with Simon: I’m gonna bring Judith Butler.
Anna
Yeah. But like again, lots of, like, chewy, sweaty stuff to like dig into there. Yeah. [Kristin laughs]
Kristin
But, given your love of hypotheticals, Anna, what would you uh…
Anna
Yes, ah… yes.
Kristin
What would you bring?
Anna 46:42
[in commanding voice] Bring me my soapbox, please! I have some things to say about thought experiments! … But we may just leave that for another episode.
I would bring Maria Lugones because she's amazing. I would bring Donna Haraway because funny! and dogs! I think and I think I would bring Antonio Gramsci because I almost certainly should have read more of Gramsci more seriously than I ever have, so I maybe need an Antonio Gramsci winter. [Kristin laughs]
Kristin 47:20
Okay, and I'm just going to avoid the rules here and say you… you're taking three?
Anna 47:27
I am taking three. Oh yes! [laughs]
Kristin
That's fine. That's why it's not a real question.
[music fades in]
Kristin
Okay, so if you took the brain of, let’s say, an 18-year-old person and you put them through a four-year degree in philosophy, and then you looked at that brain again, what would be different about it?
Catherine
Oh. So I think that’s a brain that would be a lot more critical and would think about the kinds of assumptions that underwrite a lot of arguments or what people say. I think it’s also a brain that would recognize that we often use the same words to refer to different things, right? And that we need to kind of be clear about what we mean and when we’re on the same page. Like, there are a lot of things I find kind of annoying about the way that philosophers write, but one of the things we’re really great at is clarity and specificity in terms of like, “when I say this, this is what I mean,” so we can all kind of be on the same page.
But I think a philosophical brain is also one that… recognizes everything kind of needs to be understood in its historical moment, right? That certain understandings of the self can only emerge when certain other things happen, for example. But I do think the philosophical brain is one that is very good at argumentation and starts to recognize that actually, a lot of arguments that we see in the world are bad.
Kristin
Yeah, I like that. One thing I was thinking of is when you’re describing that, that you’re kind of forming a view of philosophy that looks at conditions of possibility. Yes, and so that’s your orientation, yes, in a way, right? Because, you know, other orientations would say something about objective truth or something like that.
Catherine
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s definitely my orientation as someone whose areas of specialization were feminist philosophy, philosophy of sex, gender, and sexuality, but also philosophy of science, and especially kind of feminist approaches to philosophy of science and feminist epistemology. And so, you know, I’m not someone who talks about or deals in truth—I’m always kind of thinking about how a system and the rules of it can change. So what counts as what we know at one point can be different at another place in time.
Kristin 41:47
One of the ways that this question has been answered that I think would square with you and with the person who would answer it differently is this idea of philosophy training us about knowing what we don’t know. Yeah, so like, studying the history of science and philosophy of science doesn’t make you more grounded in the idea that science gives us objective facts.
Catherine 42:15
No, no, I wouldn’t say that. I think science—what we call science today, which is admittedly very hard to define—looks really different in different disciplines. But I still grant that it is the most efficient system for producing reliable knowledge that we’ve produced. But, you know, I also grant that that system might be refined and changed. We might change our minds about what we think we know. And I do think actually, what you just pointed out there, where you hit on saying that the philosophical mind is one that kind of has a sense of what it doesn’t know—I think we need a lot more of that today. Like, I think that’s quite right. And there is a kind of, now admittedly, not all philosophers espouse epistemic humility—and I think more should—but I think that’s a particularly important virtue.
Kristin:
So I think of you as someone who is really engaged in a kind of public philosophy, where you’re looking at what people are saying and analyzing arguments. So what is the most satisfying fallacy that you have found in the wild?
Catherine 43:40
Ohhh… So, I mean, I’m going to say that I feel like in my field, where I look a lot at the science of sex and gender, I would say the biggest fallacy to my mind is the naturalistic fallacy. So, the idea that something that is—whatever we see in the world, right, like a descriptive claim about what is—means that it should be, or that we can derive a normative claim from that.
And I think in my field, that is working under and underwriting all of our debates about: is being trans natural? Or is it socially produced? Is it a result of an ideological movement? Or is it a natural thing? Or is it natural to be binarily sexed? Right? And anytime people are circulating in those arguments, they’re trying to say that like, “it is natural, so it’s good,” or “it is natural, so it should be,” or “we should recognize people with these kinds of embodiments or identities.”
And my thing is, like, actually, issues like ethics and morality really have nothing to do with claims about what is natural. Right? Like, it’s not natural that I wear glasses either, right? It’s not natural that we have complex social systems and use money and travel around in cars, right? But that argument still carries a lot of weight, even among people who I think should know better.
Kristin 45:25
Actually, that’s what I was going to ask you a follow-up on, which is that I feel like the naturalistic fallacy works on all sides of the political spectrum.
Catherine
Yep.
Kristin
Because “natural” is one of these sort of unquestioned goods, like “health,” you know? “That’s not healthy,” which is an argument against it, right? And so it’s the same thing with “natural.” Like, it’s kind of like you want to claim that something has always existed—that’s going to have a problem when you’re up against a kind of ideological power system that is about dominating and annihilating. It’s like, well, it’s not a claim to protection.
Catherine
No—it’s a claim that’s being made to weaponize, right? I often think we’re weaponizing the natural when we’re constituting certain groups as unnatural, that they shouldn’t exist, that they shouldn’t be or be as they are, at the very least. And so we’re deriving a lot of ethical and political claims from that in a way that is not justifiable. Though, it is kind of how our system has been constituted, right? Like, if we think about our political systems—and often, you know, arguments against discrimination are often about proving that people couldn’t have been otherwise. Right? However, again, it’s completely fallacious. And it feels to me like a kind of distracting shell game that we’re playing, where I’m like, maybe people just need rights.
[music fades in]
Kristin
I know.
Catherine
Right?
Kristin
Yeah yeah. What if people just have rights ?
[music fades out]
Anna
Yeah. What if people what if people just had rights?! That's a thought Catherine's actually making me think about a lot of things but one of the things just made me think about is one of the things I always hope for for my students which is something like a comfort with discomfort and especially with uncertainty and unknowing not not as like happy with ignorance or sort of blissful in that but as skilled enough to be confident in their capacities to doubt and to question, and themselves most of all, in an effort to know better and to understand right even if we never quite get there and this is a really good example right what if what makes most of us comfortable end up being instances of the naturalistic fallacy? Like what if what if most of our comfort is derived from the naturalistic fallacy? It's an interesting yeah point she's making.
Kristin
So like my feelings of comfort actually depend on the operation of this idea that the way things are the way they should be. Wow. Yeah that seems right, I'm just trying to think of an example of that.
Anna
Well, I wonder whether thinking about gender might work here… So like gender both as a way of understanding human beings system for understanding human beings and for understanding ourselves like what happens when we ask ourselves about our own gender? If we haven't been doing that already some of us have been doing that probably since we were wee. [Kristin laughs] But do any of our available ways of understanding gender and gendering work. Can they work? What does that mean for my gender and how I understand myself? Is there space for something like gender to be both connected to something natural–whatever that is and whatever we take to be natural about ourselves–but also absolutely cultural and constructed, right?, and how clean is that nature culture line and how clean can it be like? I sort of hope for my students that they might get to a point where they can sort of feel like I'm confident and critically skilled enough to ask the interesting and important questions, and be open to the answers, even if they're only ever sort of like “working” answers.
Kristin
hmm hmm hmm hmm
Anna
I think my first year students even often have a sense of something like this. Like they seem to know that knowing seems important but that somehow understanding is better even if they're not really sure what either of those are. So… can I be careful and thoughtful enough to proceed on the basis of working theories, knowing that those might end up being mistaken? And to Catherine's point, what sort of potential opens up if we can take that sort of stance or posture?
Kristin
Hmm. Yeah. And to connect it to what we talked about earlier, um, about sort of techniques of doing philosophy and sort of rigidity and methods, it would be quite a problem for us to say something like, um, the kind of thing that gender is, is one that, um, doesn't allow for clean conceptual clarity around this nature culture discussion. It's just the kind of thing that it is in the, in the sense that it's personal, that it's relational, that it's embodied, that it's social, that it's just a very difficult kind of thing to collapse into any kind of binary, all kinds of binary assumptions or understandings and that we can sit with that difficulty and have a working answer about gender. And that that isn't the same thing as saying it's fictional and made up and just construct…, you know, like that it's…
Anna 51:52
Yeah.
Kristin
A working answer, a good working answer!
Anna
Good working answer, maybe. Yeah.
Kristin
That we have understanding ourselves, but, um, but that it's, it's evolving and that, you know, we can, it's, it's part of coming to understand ourselves as, I was just about to say beings-in-the-world, but I don't know why I would be being Heideggerian at this time of day!
[both laugh]
Anna
Or any time of day.
Kristin 52:26
Um, yeah. So like I really identify with what you're saying, you know, so like, ideally you and Catherine and Simon, ideally some of the value of philosophy is coming from not just the idea that we might be wrong, but actually having this experience of working through ideas that change.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
And that learning to go through the experience of changing ideas is of value. Um, maybe we're doing some of that at conferences sometimes, maybe we're doing some of that talking with each other. You know, actually, if I could revise part of my response about conferences is that I wish that it had more organic conversation–organic conversation that sort of demonstrated methods, you know, because there's always question period, which isn't quite the, you know, there are moments in question period that can be generative, but there is something to a kind of philosophical back and forth that doesn't necessarily have a goal.
Anna 53:34
Yes. Yeah.
Kristin
Not an expressed goal where, where…
Anna
Right.
Kristin
… question period is very much, let's find problems with this person's paper…
Anna
Yes.
Kristin
… and, and either offer them solutions or offer them, you know, uh …
Anna
Yes!
Kristin
… places to go, like, in the literature. So I was thinking about, um, even my own philosophy training, if you asked me about going in and coming out after four years and what, what would be different about me is just profound, um, loss of certainty in so many things that were, to me, um, clear, clear ideas about who I should become and what I had goals I had and what was true in the world. And, um, and I guess that, put me on a path to do it more! I don't know. Yeah.
[both laugh]
Anna
I mean, there is something about having a certain amount of experience, maybe?, with thinking in that way. And thinking really rigorously in that way. Because I think, you know, when you talk about uncertainty in philosophy, we aren’t talking about this sort of like: “It's whatever you want it to be!”
Kristin
No!
Anna 54:51
Right. Like that is antithetical to the whole discipline.
Kristin
Yeah. And something I was thinking about was that you can imagine someone who might have preconceptions about what goes on at a trans philosophy conference. Um, and we've talked a lot on the podcast about, um, forms of power enacted through philosophy… and what I find so interesting is that a lot of what we ended up talking to, you know, Simon and Catherine and others about was the value of philosophy for the area of, you know, thinking about, uh, trans philosophy, feminist philosophy, and, you know, also life in general.
[theme music fades in]
Anna 55:43
Even these really internally critical forms of philosophy…come back to the value of philosophy.
[theme music plays]
Kristin
So thank you so much to Catherine Clune-Taylor and Simon Ruchti. Thank you to everyone who works at the Skillman Library at Lafayette College, for that recording space and for Amy Marvin, for including us in her wonderful conference and to all the participants at the Thinking/Trans and Trans/Thinking Conference for their generosity and for trusting us with our microphones!
Anna
[giggles] Our trusty microphones and trustworthy wielders of microphones!
This podcast was recorded Lands of the nehiyawak, the Anishnabek, the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, and on the Lands of the Michif/Métis nation, which is also called “Pile of Bones.”
Kristin
And on Amiskwaciwâskahikan, homeland of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibway, and the Métis, also called “Beaver Hills House.”
Anna
All the references for what we discussed on the podcast today are on our website. Our theme music is by Seth Makes Sounds and Joseph Press. Thank you so much to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and for getting this podcast created.
And on that note, if you'd like to contribute to our DIT experiment, give feedback or propose ideas for our next episodes, or if you would like to serve as a guest producer, please go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com.
[music plays]
Kristin
What's a song you can't not dance to?
Simon
Anything my daughter puts on her iPad, because she makes me dance to it.
Kristin
What's a song that you can't not dance to?
Catherine:
Uh, Juvenile’s “Back that Azz Up.”
[Anna and Kristin laugh]
Anna
Her inflection there is just perfect. Oh my god.
Kristin
I know. We need that, uh, we need that song at more philosophy conferences.
[music fades out]