SE02 E02: Field notes: Featuring Matthew J. Cull, Andrea Pitts, Sanjula Rajat, and Jules Wong
[Intro music plays]
Anna
Welcome to Thinking Bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast. I'm Anna Mudde.
Kristin
And I'm Kristin Rodier. On Thinking Bodies, we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. We collage with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
Anna
Maybe even a DIT experiment, doing it together.
Kristin
That's right. We do it together on this podcast and we share the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Jules
I'm Jules Wong.
Matthew
My name is Matthew J. Cull.
Andrea
I'm Andrea Pitts.
Sanjula
Hi. My name is Sanjula Rajat.
[music fades]
Kristin
Today, we're continuing our series of episodes on the theme of trans philosophy with lots of the smart, funny, and engaging clips of conversations that we had at the Thinking/Trans, Trans/Thinking Conference a few months ago.
Anna
That's right. And if you didn't hear the episode with Catherine Clune-Taylor and Simon Ruchti, go back and listen. It's a really good one.
Kristin
It is. That's our first Field Notes episode. We talked about our favorite Golden Girls, which turned out to be…
[Anna laughs]
… a controversial conversation, more than I expected. We talked about what we might want to teach high schoolers. And we got to this really interesting insight at the end of the episode that even these really internally critical forms of philosophy, like feminist philosophy, trans philosophy, trans-feminist philosophy, they really still uphold the value of philosophy. At least that's what we're sort of noticing from the conversations we're having.
Anna
That's right. Yeah.
Kristin
And I thought that was really cool because part of what we're trying to do in this series is to introduce listeners to the diversity and richness of trans-philosophy, which was the subject of our conference.
Anna
Yeah! So let me catch folks up, if they didn't get to hear the previous episode. Kristin and I took the podcast on the road, on the road into slightly uncertain territory. We crossed the U. S. border and we had a really great time. The ThinkingTrans//Trans Thinking Conference was organized by our philosophy colleague, Amy Marvin, and held at Spellman Library on the campus of Lafayette College in Easton Pennsylvania. And it's very exciting because Kristin hasn't heard these clips yet.
Kristin
Yes, I'm excited.
Anna
So Kristin, on the way to the conference, you made a list of some fun and probing questions for us to ask people when we had a chance. And they were great. They're great questions and fun questions. But also, I do think they are probing. But I understand that there were early indications that you might be suited to hosting talk shows.
[Kristin laughs]
And I can really see that in the ways that you ask questions in general. But also in our last episode with Catherine and Simon, that really came through. So I really want to credit Kristin with the fun and engaging questions from last time, because those were all yours.
Kristin
Yes, all the silly ones. Definitely mine.
Anna
[laughs] I don't… they were… I mean, they're silly, but I don't think that's quite right. Because you can tell by the ways that people responded and answered your questions. They actually weren't silly.
Kristin
Yes, let's fix this. So the idea being that… [Kristin laughs] one way of asking a philosopher to kind of reveal some of their philosophical voice and interest and abilities is by sometimes asking a sort of oblique question.
Anna
Yup.
Kristin
And we got a lot out these questions, even the ones that were a bit, just funny. And yes, you were asking me about early indications of talk show hosting.
Anna
Yeah, like was this talk show host like an aspiration? [Kristin laughs] Or was this a capacity that other people noticed about you?
Kristin
Well, okay, so I was very chatty in school, which will come as no surprise.
Anna
That does come as no surprise, actually.
Kristin
I got a lot of detention.
Anna
Oh, no. [react/sigh] We were still doing that. Okay.
Kristin
Yeah. I got a lot of detention. I think you're sort of referring to how I put on our social media, which, you know, at thinking bodies pod, go check it out, that in grade eight, my grade eight grad, you know, they gave away awards. Most this, most that. And one of them was–I was voted most likely to have my own talk show. Which… is a weird memory at this point…
[Anna laughs]
Kristin
Because it's like, the teachers got together and thought of all of these awards. So everyone got something and mine was most likely to have our own talk show. So something tells me, maybe I was getting there. Kind of…
Anna
That is a bit weird.
Kristin
Yeah, I was getting burned a bit for being the chatty one, but they're trying to like spin it. I don't know.
Anna
I was gonna say I really feel like they were acknowledging that they were part of a system whereby there were detentions for talking too much, but that we could reframe this as a capacity.
Kristin
[surprised] Ok, I love that.
Anna
I don't think that's probably what was going on. But I do… [Kristin laughs] I do think that that's how we could read it. And that's kind of nice.
Kristin
I like it when you put it that way. Okay.
Anna
[laughs] I wonder whether, though, people just maybe noticed that you even then were like a supremely careful listener. And that's actually kind of an unusual skill. It's definitely an unusual academic skill, because, you know, skills of scholarship are to produce, we're trained toward output, not toward careful listening. So, I mean, I think that that was actually kind of, intentional or not, that was a really interesting thing for them to award to you.
Kristin
Huh. It's funny, because I'm sure there are people in my close relationships who are like, telling me I'm very distracted and not a good listener.
Anna
Oh, interesting!
Kristin
But when it comes to philosophy, I think listening to philosophy really drew me in. You know, lectures, presentations, often so mesmerizing, being able to sit and be captivated by thought.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
And then I would read, like, you know, a philosophy text, a written philosophy text, I'd read it three, four times, you know. But listening kind of gave me that experience, that duration of ideas that I always really liked. So. Yeah.
Anna
That's really… and interesting too, that we're now making, making audio.
Kristin
I know. I know.
Yeah. It's a new phase.
[music plays]
Anna
So, last time we were thinking with Catherine and Simon about philosophy conferences and what that part of the discipline is like. But we didn't actually tackle a central question or what some people think is THE question.
Kristin
Uh-oh. The question. The question?!
Anna
[laughs] And I don't actually have a good answer for the question, but I asked Jules Wong THE question. And so this is what they said.
[music fades in]
Anna
What is philosophy?
Jules
For me, philosophy is a practice of asking why things are the way they are. Why we do things in some ways and not others. I think these questions tend to be motivated by experiences of estrangement. A lot of my work begins from encountering myself and my experiences as strange. While this kind of reflection can be disorienting and takes me to heavy places, it is ultimately playful and kaleidoscopic.
I'm really interested in questions of audience though. I fixate on who we are speaking and writing to, how we recognize and misrecognize each other in and through our writing, and how philosophical communities are places of great vulnerability. I think these issues only intensify among affinity groups, and trans philosophy, like any community of academics, is just a special kind of affinity group. We're united by a common interest in ensuring transition is a livable possibility, an interest that is really near to us. But we're also philosophers with different inclinations and training. This means trans philosophy spaces, at their best, are so generative, because we can critique each other and assume that critique is in good faith.
I think a lot about philosophy's tendency to universalize, at least under the influence of enlightened thinking. As many racialized and minoritized philosophers point out, this universalizing tendency in the theory works against universalism in practice. Philosophers often want to speak for everyone without earning it so to speak. Some think the right response is to abandon universalism. My orientation as a philosopher is instead to fulfill universalism by transcending it, to transform philosophy's pretension for speaking across and for all, into a careful, caring, and persistent curiosity about those polychromatic exceptions, leftovers, and errors. I think trans philosophy does this really well.
The life of trans philosophy extends philosophy's future. We are working across disciplinary boundaries, intensely committed to reading widely, far beyond the philosophy on course syllabi.
[music fades out]
Anna
So Jules answered this with such precision and deep knowledge. I was flabbergasted, actually. And Jules is pointing to such a basic feature of a lot of philosophical practice of universalizing. And actually, I was remembering taking a course in religious studies at one point as an undergraduate, and it was just as I was starting to kind of get the hang of writing and philosophy, and the religious studies professor's note on one of my essays was something like "your propensity to generalize is ill-advised,"...
Kristin
Oof!
Anna
…which is kind of an "ouch" moment. Yes.
Kristin
Ugh! Let's just note that you remember that feedback word for word! You know, it left an impression.
Anna
It really did.
Kristin
So those of you with--Those of you with your marking pens, please listen carefully.
Anna
Yes, under advisement. Okay. Yeah. So like on the one hand, "ouch," but like I also kind of now want to say like “once more for the people at the back,” right? Like “your propensity to generalize is ill-advised.” Because instead we can attend to, as Jules says, "careful, caring, persistent curiosity about those polychromatic exceptions, leftovers, and errors." I want to weep. I've written all of that down, "careful, caring, and persistent curiosity." And I love the way that Jules is linking this to the community of trans philosophers, to the existence of trans philosophy as a space in which a lot of difference, a lot of “polychromatics,” is taken up with that sort of curiosity and attention to vulnerability.
Kristin
Yeah. And really highlights that sort of getting together around these shared areas of interest, but also experiences allows for a space where critique can happen in good faith, you know?
Anna
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristin
And some of that has to do with just having a lot of the right people in the room. But the point here too is about what this critique and what this improvement and and a community of vulnerability is trying to uphold, which is a place to make trans possibilities more livable and to find, you know, sort of theories and, you know, sort of concepts that help make that more possible. So I think that's, that's so cool.
You know, our last episode kind of came at “the question” obliquely by thinking about, uh, what changes a person undergoes when learning philosophy. So like “what is philosophy?” is like, while the proof is in the pudding, it is whatever it changes you to become more like maybe, I don't know.
Anna
Yeah, I like that. Yeah.
Kristin
You know, so there are sort of features of “the question” that can even be broken down more. So, philosophy is a practice. It's a tradition. It can be a set of questions. Well, not just any questions, [both laugh] but, you know, good… We're not interested in whether a tree falls in the forest and all that. No, I'm not. But you know, these good meaty questions that Jules started with.
Anna
Yeah. And I also resonate with Jules’s first thought there that philosophy is a practice of asking why things are the way they are, why we do things in some ways and not others. And that's actually usually what I say about it. Um, but I really like this, uh, idea you have that, um, when we're asking “what is philosophy?” that we think about what philosophy does to and for us and, and how we, how we can engage through practice, through traditions, through questions and, and, um, asking more questions.
[music fades in]
So, um, I asked Sanjula about how they came to trans philosophy, but also how they understood the relationship between trans philosophy and feminist philosophy, if they thought there was one at.
Sanjula
I think feminist philosophers and trans philosophers should think together, but more importantly, I think they do think together. Um, of course, there are currents in feminism, particularly gender critical, uh, or, you know, trans-exclusionary radical feminist thought that are profoundly transphobic and trans-antagonistic. But, uh, Emi Koyama's “Transfeminist Manifesto,” for example, lays out this point beautifully, where there are important affinities between the projects of feminism broadly and trans-feminism specifically, and there is a lot that both of those areas of study and political movements can, should, and do learn from each other.
[music fades out]
Kristin
Sanjula mentioned something really interesting: this notion of “gender critical feminism”, um, and there's scare quotes in there, right?
Um, I remember hearing this term a few years ago and thinking, "Hey, I'm critical. I'm critical of gender. Maybe, maybe I'm one of those." And then, of course you Google it and go, [with distaste] "Oh. Okay. Never, never mind." But, uh, that's like what my first interpretation was definitely isn't what the term is. So to be “gender critical” means that you're critical, that gender is well, in my own words here that gender is what feminist philosophers have been arguing for decades. Meaning an unstable, socially constructed, normative, uh, relational, you know, it's related and unrelated to the body in various ways, it's specific, it's particular, it functions through oppression. You know, um, they're critical of that set of claims.
Anna
Yeah, like gender's a central, uh, thing that feminist thinkers are trying to understand.
And we know how complicated that is, right? That's extremely complex. And so the folks, I have the same sort of reaction, right, to the folks who call themselves, quote – in huge scare quotes – “gender critical.” Um, in what sense “critical,” right? Yeah. In what sense “critical”? Uh, they tend not to be critical at all.
Kristin
Yeah, and just… not to give it too much oxygen, but, you know, one way to unpack the term is to say they're critical that there's anything sort of special going on with gender. That gender is just sex. So that's, that's kind of where I've come to when I think about “gender critical” is sort of… they're critical of gender because to them it… this… there's nothing special going on.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
So that brings us back to the naturalistic account, right, a static, binary account. So I struggle to find feminism in the view, though they call them, I struggle to find feminism in their view, though they call themselves that. But you know, Sanjula is right to bring it up because it is having a moment.
Anna
Yes. And [with annoyed exhaustion] that moment seems to be interminable. Um, uh, [sigh] yes. And I don't think we want to roll trans philosophy into feminist philosophy or make all trans philosophy, trans feminist philosophy.
Kristin
No.
Anna
But Sanjula, described one way of understanding the relationship between trans philosophy and feminist philosophy.
[music plays]
Sanjula
To my entry point into trans philosophy, again, I think in this same vein, my entry point into trans philosophy was feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy in this really broad sense, interrogates the questions of gendered oppression and a structural transformation of the conditions under which gender marginality and oppression operates. And trans philosophy and trans feminism respond to that question by broadening what we mean by the marginalization of people under patriarchy.
So, yes, women are profoundly marginalized under the violent structures of patriarchy and its intersections with capitalism and white supremacy and, you know, of course there's conversations to be had also about disability and all these other axes of oppression. But yes, so women experience a kind of oppression under these structures that is directly about their status as women, as not-men. And trans philosophy then complicates that picture, not just with this question of like what is a woman really, but more important questions I think about, okay, so the structures of patriarchy assume that women are inferior to men because they also assume that there is only a binary structure of gender and that one oppresses the other. So it's binary, it's exhaustive, it is domination, and all of those are things we would want to problematize. And then, this idea that one is born into those genders in an uncomplicated sense. So what it means to be a woman is it means, “okay, you are born with a certain kind of perceived body that you then grow up to be a girl. That girl grows up to be a woman.” This uncomplicated linearity of how gender works.
And then there's the violent maintenance of that linearity that feminists have that feminists have problematized for centuries. So women have always questioned the idea that gender is somehow biological and natural because they have said, “if it's biological and natural, why does it require a constant violent enforcement?” Women have problematized this all of history, and feminists have pointed out that if it's natural, why does it require this violent maintenance? Which is why I find anti-trans feminism so…ah, well horrific and violent, but also just confusing as a project. Because I think that to be a feminist...to be a good feminist, certainly, is to recognize the malleability of the structures that we take for granted and for given. And so that, for me, is also the affinity of trans thought and trans philosophy with feminist thought and feminist philosophy.
[music plays]
Anna
Yeah, can you imagine sitting in a recording studio in the basement of a library with Sanjula giving that response? Like five stars. No notes. It was stunning.
Kristin
It was stunning. That was a brilliant introduction of feminist philosophy in like two paragraphs.
Anna
Yeah. Yes! Exactly.
Kristin
Sort of what really struck me is this enforcement of “an uncomplicated linearity” of gender. Like that it just like temporally unfolds in an uncomplicated and determined way. And yet it's violent enforcement. And so, yeah, it's just a really succinct way of expressing some of those core problems of feminist philosophy.
Anna
It really was an amazing primer, off the cuff, of feminist philosophical commitments and how those can flow into trans philosophical questions and considerations and how those trans philosophical questions and considerations really provide this important assist to other feminist thinking.
Kristin
Yeah. Well, yeah, as a feminist philosopher who's read and engaged with a lot of trans philosophy, you know, benefited from, in my own thinking, trans philosophy, I also see these connections. And, you know, the systems of gender enforcement and their techniques, their tools, their sites, their ways of creating violent eruptions and so on, come down very hard on those of us whose bodies don't fit categories in the right way. And that breaks down to all kinds of features of reproduction, able-bodiedness, you know, all kinds of things that we're supposed to do to fit these categories. And yeah, Sanjula brings that up really well.
[music fades in]
Matthew Cull
I come to trans philosophy from feminist philosophy. I started out as, you know, someone interested in how we organize society, thinking about feminist responses to patriarchy and gendered roles. And in particular, I was interested a lot in the sort of metaphysics of gender that underlied these various feminist responses to this broader patriarchal structure, because it struck me that a lot of the ways in which, say, socialists or liberals or postmodern feminists would approach resistance to patriarchy, would rely on a particular conception of the human person and in particular the gendered person, right? So liberals have a particular kind of metaphysics of the person and the metaphysics of gender, which is tied to a particular kind of set of political strategies. I mean, I think there's an interesting story to be told about what sorts of metaphysics affords certain sorts of politics, and what certain politics presuppose regarding the metaphysics of what a human is.
Anna
So I'm going to interject into Matthew's line of thought here because what they're saying is really important. So let's kind of let that land. Kristin, can we parse the idea that part of feminist philosophical thinking is about what a human being is a metaphysical question as it relates to the political ends of feminist work? And also, full disclosure, the metaphysical questions are the ones that I always find super-compelling.
Kristin
I know. I think of you as the metaphysician in our duo.
[both laugh]
Anna
OK. OK. Oh, dear. OK.
Kristin
You're the metaphysician, probably also the epistemologist. [Anna laughs] Let's just give you all the hats, and I'll just… It's a lot of hats. Yeah. OK. I’ll just peanut gallery…
Anyway. Well, you know, when I think about questions of what a human being is, it's interesting to me, at least, to think about that over time. Yeah. Mm-hmm. …you know? That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because so much of the history of philosophy that we study doesn't really engage in the question of gender, you know?
Anna
No, no.
Kristin
It really does just talk about human, and then that human is assumed a man. And so a lot of the questions we see about being a human from, you know, the ancients, let's say, is sort of more about what makes us different than animals. “Ah! we have a reason! We have a soul!”
Anna
Right.
Kristin
“We're, you know, we're part of a bigger cosmological plan that we may or may not be able to affect with our free will!” You know, that kind of stuff is, you know, early on in thinking about, you know, what it means to be human, but when you look at the liberal person, right, the liberal person, and liberalism has really been in conversation with feminism.
Anna
Right. Yeah.
Kristin
Right. Sort of kind of revising this notion of the liberal individual. The liberal person who might have political ends within a liberal framework, right, wanting to have rights, maybe their reproductive rights, maybe their bodily autonomy, something like that. This liberal framework really thinks of the human as a rights holder.
Anna
Yup.
Kristin
You know, a sort of bundle of rights that you have. One of those is bodily ownership, let's say, a property ownership.
Anna
Property, yep.
Kristin
And the kind of being that you are is an individual, right? You're an individual, you're sort of atomistic at your best, right? Yeah.
Anna
I'm not connected. I'm not connected to other things… we're like billiard balls. We're just bumping into one another every so often. [both laugh] Yeah. Yeah.
Kristin
This kind of goes back to what we talked about with the Hobbesian people in the state of nature, before they, you know, signed their social contract there on the on the episode we did on Annette Baier. You know, certainly not a fundamentally relational vulnerable being who, you know, would need collective strategies for finding for their political goals, their political ends. And that's a big part of the critique of liberalism coming out of feminism, which is what gets called the dependency critique.
Anna
Right. Right.
Kristin
That we're fundamentally dependent on one another. And so if we build society with this individual rights holder in mind, we're leaving out too much.
Anna
Right. So yeah, so making that connection there, if you believe that not only human beings by nature, but the best kind of most grown up, most fulfilled human being is a human being that does not have fundamentally relational ways of being, that is not fundamentally vulnerable, that would need, as you say, like collective strategies for getting along in the world. If that's what you believe.
Kristin
Mm hmm.
Anna
Then the way that you the way that you think about what women might want or need in that picture, what anyone might want or need in that picture is going to be shaped by that metaphysical view of the person. But also, which you're pointing out really nicely, the feminist response to that view is going to be particular, which is also really interesting. Right? So if the dominant view is of a particular kind of individual, then a feminist critique can be sort of taken up with that sort of individual. The individual you're talking about, though, also, it was really nicely resonant with our conversation about María Lugones on the logic of purity, because she describes the dominant subject position in spaces influenced by European systems of thought as ones of purity or purported purity. So that if human beings are multiplicitous, if we're complex and relational and vulnerable and also many things all at the same time, that gets managed and handled and controlled so that we can appear to be as sort of pure and homogeneous as possible. And so she describes the cultural preference for purity as one in which we form our concepts as excluding anything that isn't taken to be homogeneous with them. And so that's another kind of metaphysical picture. And of course, feminists have engaged with that critically and also have quite taken it up. So this is a really interesting part of Matthew's discussion.
Matthew
OK, so that's how I got into feminist philosophy, trans philosophy is through this kind of trying to understand what gender is. And it struck me that like… I keep saying “it struck me.” Lots of things strike me, like cricket balls, especially. But one thing that comes up again and again is this thought that our gendered world is one which contains multitudes. We are not in a gendered world of a simple, straightforward, hierarchical patriarchal social relationship, which is one to one across all times and everywhere. And you can say that sort of thing with reference to trans people, but also I think one can see it even in particular societies, the relationships of intersectionality give us reason to think that the gendered world is varied and awful in lots of different kinds of ways. So trans philosophy seems like a way of engaging with that variety through a particular kind of lens.
[music fades]
Kristin
Yeah, talking about multitudes, it seems like Matthew's really highlighting the personal sort of self-understanding dimension of gender. You know, the personal, the situational. Self-understanding is hard at the best of times. [both laugh]
Anna
Yes. Yes, it is.
Kristin
I struggle all the time. But you know, this is hard.
Anna
Yeah! and Matthew said the “gendered world is varied and awful in a lot of different ways”. And that's a really helpful thing to keep in mind. In keeping with what Sanjula was talking about is the sort of linearity of the way that gender gets enforced. And of course, self-understanding contains multitudes as well, as you're saying.
Kristin
Yeah, yeah.
Anna
I was also thinking that paying attention to other people can also yield multitudes of gendering. And one of the things that Matthew's point about the gender world containing multitudes was making me think about is the idea that if you're trying to make sense of gender, a really important for some of us, at least helpful idea is that there are as many genders as there are people if we're thinking about what it is that our systems of gender are trying to categorize.
Kristin
Right.
Anna
And then so if we think about all of us as like deeply complex, deeply varied in all kinds of ways, then what we say about systems of gender in addition to that, how we understand gendered concepts and the genderings of human beings and other non-human worldly things, which are often, like, really violent and awful, can start with this basic recognition that those are systems of trying to make sense, under certain sort of conceptual schemes, of human variety, but then they end up being sort of shorthands for that variety or reductions of that variety to to allow us to recognize certain kinds of maybe overlaps and resonances or, as is also the case, to police one another into staying under the umbrella concepts that were supposed to be fitting within: man or woman or masculine or feminine or whatever.
I'm not sure that's exactly what Matthew is referring to here, but that's one version of the idea that the gender world contains multitudes. That's one version of that idea.
Kristin
Absolutely. And I think when I go back to this idea of sort of umbrellas, right, we have commonalities, we have shared experiences, shared understanding, that hold a lot of gendered experiences together.
Anna
Yep.
Kristin
And some of that is because of relational unfoldings that are part of sort of our own creative self-expressions. And part of that is because of social coercion, dominance. [Anna agrees] Shaping and forcing, you know, the ways that we treat babies it even has has a huge effect on how they feel in their bodies just a few years down the road. So we really stamp and coerce gender from the beginning.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
So, you know, I want to say that there's this multitude, but, you know, we we don't want to say gender is [just] anything either, because then it's like nothing in particular.
Anna
Right.
Kristin
So we have to pay attention to the personal as well as the system forces and what they're shaping.
Anna
Right. Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. In your American cultural context, we use really large umbrella categories. We have man as a concept, woman as a concept. Some of us recognize non-binary. Many cultures have more than two and more than three genders. And many places in the world with a two gender picture have had that imposed by Europeans. But there are also these qualities that each of us have right, some of which are learned and some of which just seem to be who we are and some of which we can change and some that we can't. And those things are true of us or at least sometimes feel true of us in ways we maybe can't account for. And so we can understand gender as a way of trying to make sense of those things at a cultural level.
Kristin
Yeah, and just thinking about “qualities,” we're talking about kind of discourse and thoughts, right? and noticing a lot of variation there. But when we think about sort of embodied gender it does seem like there is lots of variation across human beings. Yes. But some things about how we feel about gender are more flexible than others.
Anna
Yes, that's right! And actually last episode Catherine Clune-Taylor raised the problem of the naturalistic fallacy. And we were talking about how it's often really hard to tell what about us is natural or quote unquote natural, and what about us is cultural or quote unquote cultural or learn. And it seems pretty clear that what we call “nature” is always already a product of culture, right? Just the idea of nature itself is a product of cultural thinking. And also what we call culture includes things that are not within our control. So we can think about existing gender systems as one thing, and the complex collections of qualities that each of us live, possess, and are as other things. But it's not really possible to separate those two things. Right? It's really not possible to pull those apart. And that's a really interesting feature of gender.
Kristin
I know. It's like, how would you ever meet someone who is, you know, a human being, but who has no culture?
Anna
Right. Yes!
Kristin
And then what, you would study that person and say that that's what's natural? It's not possible, right?
Anna
Well, you would if you were operating under a logic of purity, as it turns out, as María Lugones tells us.
Kristin
Oh, right. I keep forgetting!
[both laugh]
Anna
Yes, yes. Those collections or qualities that we live are so… like really complex.
Kristin
I barely understand mine. On good days.
Anna
Oh, me too. Yes!
[music plays]
Anna
One of the questions we talked about last time was the question of what might be most important to teach high school students?
Kristin
Yes. And you did a really good job of reinterpreting my questions!
Anna [laughs]
Oh, no!
Kristin
So I want to ask these questions like, “what would you do?” You know, I'm trying to, You know, just kind of get a-- get a quick response. And Anna reinterprets my question as, you know, “So, what do I want to see more of in the world?” And so I asked something deeply practical. And you just make it sound so much smarter.
Anna
Oh, yeah. We'll call that “smarter.” Yes. Good. OK. [laughs]
I asked Andrea Pitts this question. This is what they said.
[music plays]
Andrea Pitts
I thought about this a little bit. Well, at least a book that I would find really, I think, accessible, and although it might read a little dated now, given the new material that's out, given the media that's out now, would be Angela Davis's Are Prison's Obsolete? I think it's-- It still tracks. She's an extraordinary philosopher. She's a public intellectual. She's someone who thinks multi-dimensionally about structures of violence and structures of resistance and movements, movement building. And so I think that book really takes a rhetorical approach to trying to develop this idea of – and the fancy word is “obsolescence” – but the idea of making something unnecessary.
And I think that book for high school students, if it could indeed be taught today, in high school, given our climate and that kind of thing, I think is still really a powerful set of both historical and social analyses. And then also making, I think, an appeal to the reader to really think differently about our world. I think that's a really exciting thing. She's thinking about the kind of the things that limit our possibilities, our imaginative possibilities, our creative possibilities, our relational possibilities. And I do think that she, when she's thinking about abolition, feminism, when she's thinking about possible worlds that we can create collectively, like, that's something we need to be upfront about.
And what's beautiful about that is like it involves the arts, it involves music, it involves joy. It involves the things that make us want to be part of movements, not the misery solely. And I think that that is, you know, those are really enlivening spaces both in a lot of ways. But I think sometimes maybe especially in the US that there's a tendency to want to think that joy is somehow a guilty pleasure or that it's not political. And especially for communities of color, that that joy is somehow a luxury. And I think what her work and other abolition feminists who are kind of thinking along, I mean, maybe within women of color strands and also communities of color of activism are really, I think, trying to make sure that we have those spaces to feel some sense of of solidarity and love and connection that's not simply the work, so to say.
Anna
Yeah. “We dance because you will not steal our joy.”
Andrea
Yes! Yes.
[music plays]
Kristin
I mean, Andrea, I'd like to see more of this in my world, more of teaching high school students about prison abolition. Yes. Helping them find that joy and love and solidarity. You know, my answers around the high school bit were very focused on that sort of weighty existential period of time, you know, coming into being a self.
Anna
Yeah.
Kristin
It's hard to think back to that time, you know. So to have someone who would, you know, plant these radical possibilities for social transformation are just that would be so amazing. I think high schoolers, high schoolers would really, I think, hopefully see a lot of possibility there.
Anna
Yeah. And I can imagine Andrea maybe even getting them to dance, which would be just the most beautiful thing. We'll read Angela Davis, and then we will dance. And that would be amazing. Yeah.
Kristin
Amazing.
Anna
Yeah, that's right. Last time we were worried about students maybe turning on us, or that we'd start a rebellion. We were thinking about offering high school students philosophy that could cue them in, though, to noticing that they don't make everything in their lives about themselves, and that much of what they inherit, they could rethink, including things like the pursuit of happiness, but also, as Andrea is saying, the existence of certain institutions that we take to be really sort of central.
I also asked Jules this question, and I think you're going to love this response.
Kristin
Ooh!
[music plays]
Jules
One thing I would teach to high school students is a lesson on gender as development of character, something we develop through important relationships in our lives and by learning from role models, as opposed to an essential identity. I would emphasize that developing character is always a matter of negotiating your inheritances, whether they're personal or social, and assuming responsibility for a lot of things that make you what you are, even if they are not authored by your hand. It should be clear that everyone has the opportunity to self-reflectively develop character, not just people who have to do extra work to assume a gender.
Mari Ruti in her book A World of Fragile Things describes the continuous labor of becoming oneself. She's not talking about gender at all in this work. But she drives home the point that our inheritances I mean, that's my term, but I think she conveys something like this. I think she means something like things beyond our control like language, social scripts, symbols of value. These things will be alienating and painful. We can experience as disempowering. For instance, gender ideals generally work this way in that we can experience ourselves as lacking with respect to them, and this is a lack that hurts us but does not necessarily cause us to turn away. As Ruthie explains, our inheritances are also the condition of our being anyone at all. While it might be painful and humbling to recognize that you are never simply yourself but also a product of your times. You are also a poet of your times, a force that can receive and transform.
[music fades in]
Kristin
Wow. “A lack hurts us but we don't turn away.”
Anna
Yeah. Yep.
Kristin
And “our inheritances are the condition of our being anyone at all.” It's so interesting. So, we we don't turn away from that “lack that hurts us” because it's the condition, you know, in a way of us being anyone at all. And we don't just inherit that as something that's determining us. We can work on it. That's places for transformation. And I have to review the way that Jules said something back here... “The labor of becoming oneself” and “some of us have to do extra work to assume a gender”. And I think that's such an interesting way to think about gender as also work that we do on ourselves. Right. It's not just something that's enforced. It's not just something that somehow unfolds naturally, whatever that, you know, view commitments are… not mine! But it's also work that we do on ourselves. And yes, we all do.
Anna
Thinking earlier about our conversation about qualities, the experience of a lack of yourself with respect to the way that ideals work tells us that there might be things about ourselves or experiences at least so far that when we encounter gender ideals, we have to kind of negotiate those or refuse them or change them or work to change them with others. [Kristin mm-hmms]. Yeah.
Kristin
Yeah. And this is we have to do an episode on some of this literature, but I really always loved the literature around feminist philosophies of self transformation. [Anna makes sounds of agreement] So this question of sort of making one's gender tells us sort of philosophies of the self. So how do I become the the self that I am? Am I unfolding a true or a deep self? There's a view of the self that has a deep self and the deep self is just expressing itself through my actions or do I build the self through my so I don't have a deep self or a true self. Because people will say things like about cosmetic surgery that I'm becoming my true self. By changing my body. Yes. You know, and so that's interesting, right? It's it's it tells us about, you know, commitments around the self.
Anna
Yes, absolutely. Yeah… Actually, when I asked Sanjula about what philosophy is, their answer also really resonated with the conversation we had about this what to teach high school students from our last episode.
[music fades in]
Sanjula
So I took a philosophy class for the first time in my first year of undergraduate education. But before that, I had a wonderful sociology teacher in high school. And he introduced me to a lot of wonderful sociologists who now I approach through philosophy as well, Marx, the Frankfurt School thinkers, black feminists. And for me, I always thought of myself as a sociologist before philosopher. And so when I started the questions of philosophy that introductory philosophy classes often start with our questions of ethics, right? What does it mean to be a good person or do a good thing? And those are important, but less interesting to me in my work than political philosophy and social theory. And so what really attracted me to those initial thinkers that sparked a love of philosophy in me were these really sharp, really getting at the pulse of how the world works and seeing through the veneers that are presented to us as natural by capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, all of those structures. So they were able to see through those fabrications and then also raise questions of, OK, so if these are fabrications, if these are constructions, they can be challenged, they can be undone and something else can be built instead. And so it's also this positive program of imagining something different and doing the work necessary to build it. So that's really what philosophy is to me and what philosophy offers for me in my political work as well.
[music fades out]
Kristin
Wow, Sanjula, philosophy as deeply connected to the political uses of ideas.
Anna
Yeah. Yep.
Kristin
To me, that is just such a good insight, such a good takeaway.
Anna
Right.
Kristin
Because what we've been talking a lot about sort of the tradition of philosophy, it's sort of dominant Western tradition of philosophy. These are the sort of stereotypes in a way of a sort of lone man in a cave contemplating, right? It's Descartes and his candle and the wax and stuff, and it's not connected to the world. And it's trying to make better philosophy by disconnecting from the world.
Anna
Yes, that's right.
Kristin
And here you have that as philosophy enables and bolsters my political work. And my political use of ideas. Right? And I love to see those two connected in community and community work and to know that there is so much rich theory and thinking going on in those spaces and that that philosophy can become that a piece of a larger toolkit, but one piece of a larger toolkit for imagining otherwise.
Anna
Yeah, and it sounds like Sanjula figured that out really early. Really? Which is amazing.
[music plays]
Anna
OK, Kristin. So I also asked Andrea, Matthew, and Sanjula one of your fun questions.
Kristin
Awesome.
Anna
Who are your Desert Island philosophers?
Andrea
I think one of them is Octavia Butler. And I see her doing philosophical work through her literature and short stories. Octavia Butler won because she's just a joy to read and her characters are complicated and tell stories about what's hard about making tough decisions. And I think making decisions under conditions of extreme compromise. And so I imagine if I'm on a desert island, like I've been through some things! So yeah, I feel like Octavia Butler would have some things to say and give me some spaces for possibility! Parable of the Sower actually feels pretty relevant on a desert island!
My mind just went to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, because I think that you know, she's another person, you know, creating space for queer of color worlds and imaginative futures and, you know, crip disabled lives beyond medicalization. And, you know, I mean, she's also just a really fantastic and fun writer. And I feel like I can sit with her work again and again and again and again, like I don't know what's going on in this island, but like it might be good to have her book with me, especially if I'm you know, like, needing to think about my body and think from my body. So yeah.
[book pages turning]
Matthew
Yeah, good. I'm being dumped on the desert island, but I get a choice of books knowing I'm going to be dumped on the desert island. I mean, very good. Yeah. So I don't know. I. It's difficult to pick something long. Because I'm going to be stuck on this desert island for a long time. And it's also presumably got to be fairly rich. So maybe maybe the first critique. Kant's first critique, it's long, it's boring, it's complicated. I'd probably get something out of it eventually after a few years on the island. But then in addition, I seem to have, you know, a lot of time and that seems like a lot of seriousness on one island. So yeah, perhaps I'll also take my favorite book, which is Cressida Heyes's Line Drawings, which is a wonderful book, and it's all about how we might think about gender as something which is played out in practice as a part of social interrelations. So I can get very lonely whilst reading that book, be great.
[book pages turning]
Sanjula
Oh my God. Yeah. If I'm stranded on a desert island, I can take two philosophy books with me. Can I include novels? In that case, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut… See, that was my favorite book when I was in middle school, I would carry around a copy every day on the school bus [Anna in background: Oh! Little Sanjula!] and I read it over and over again. So that book has a very special place in my heart. And now I work a lot on temporality. And it wasn't until recently that I was talking to someone about what books we liked as children that I was like, wow, maybe that's where this interest started in nonlinear temporality and the way in which, especially, I mean, that book is about war, but trauma and complicated life circumstances, all necessity, the ability to move backwards and forwards in time. And now I know it’s a metaphor, but when I was a child, I really did think there was real time travel. I thought it was science fiction. It wasn't. Well, you know, you could read it that way, but I thought it was very literal. So maybe that is one of the books I would take.
And… I don’t know what is useful, but I know what is joyous. So… I really love… I want to take all of the books! Because a lot of the philosophy I read, it's not necessarily just politically useful and in a direct sense, but certainly I'm interested in them in part because of what they offer to me in doing the political work. And this desert island question, it places me away from a political community. So I'm like, OK, like, I could read the things I read, but they become purely theoretical in a way that I'm just not used to thinking about philosophy. For me, philosophy is constantly a big conversation that I'm in across time, across space, but also in a literal sense. This has been my favorite thing about graduate school, by the way, is that there's always somebody to talk philosophy with. And it's a one really long conversation. And so for me, the desert island question, this is why it's hard, is because I'm like, OK, I would read a book. That's fine. I can take I can take my favorite books, right? But what do I do with that book? I don't know there's there's no philosophy enjoy reading sitting in a room by myself or on an island by myself. I read philosophy so that I can talk about it with other people and read it with other people. And you foreclosed that possibility!
[music plays]
Anna
“I don't know what is useful, but I know what is joyous.”
Kristin
Yeah.
Anna
Are you kidding me?!
Kristin
Yeah, that's….
Anna
Sanjula, can we just take that?
[both laugh]
Kristin
Yeah. I need to call Sanjula… OK. Oh, man, I feel like now like I answered these questions like almost “What are your hot picks for being deserted?,” you know?
Anna
“Hot picks for being deserted” should be a book title itself.
Kristin
Yeah, but like these answers are deep, you know, I kind of… of course! You ask philosophers a simple question, you’re not going to get a simple answer, you know. Like, you’re getting questions about temporality here, you know, Andrea's like, “well, if I'm there, I've really been through something,” you know? And then, you know, to think about what Sanjula is saying about, “well, my reading philosophy is about political usefulness. And you're making me do this without my community.” Right. I'm like, “Damn, Sanjula! You bested my hypothetical!”
Anna
See, they're not silly at all.
Kristin
No, no. Well, and these are experimental questions, and these are experimental results.
Anna
You got experimental results! Yes, you did! That's right.
Well, and on that note, before we finish up, Andrea let me ask them some of your tremendous rapid fire questions.
Kristin
Oh, even the ones that we haven't included yet?
Anna
Yeah. So let's roll that tape.
Kristin
Oh, jeez. Oh, jeez.
[music plays]
Anna
On that note, cats or dogs?
Andrea
One cat. That has to be the answer. More cats, chaos, dogs I love. But, you know, cat is a vibe. Cat is a vibe.
Anna
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Song you can't not dance to?
Andrea
[pauses, sounds pained in deciding]
There's so many.
Quimbara by Celia Cruz.
Anna
Noumena or Phenomena?
Andrea
Phenomena. You knew that answer! You're like, “I could tell, yeah.”
Anna
Also, with these sorts of questions, there is a right answer.
Andrea
Yes, yeah, yeah. [laughs] I mean, I made space for the mystical, but I don't make space for the noumenal.
No, no.
Anna
Agreed. Phenomenology or genealogy?
Andrea
Mmm, that's a tough one. Well, embodied genealogies?? Hey! Ding, ding, ding! Yeah, yeah, there we go.
… Such geeky and adorable questions. Thank you for those.
[music plays]
[theme music fades in]
Kristin
Just wrapping up, I really enjoyed getting to know these philosophers today and listening to their answers to our questions and chatting that over with you, Anna. On that note, if you'd like to contribute or give us ideas for our next episodes, please go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com. We're also on Instagram at Thinking Bodies Pod. We are trying to cultivate guest producers. So as we've said before, this is a DIT experiment. So we're happy for feedback, participation, and ideas.
Anna
Absolutely. And I will also just say thank you to Jules, Andrea, Matthew, and Sanjula. All of the references for what they mentioned on the podcast today, along with detailed transcripts of all of our episodes are on our website. Like and subscribe.
Kristin
And thank you so much also to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship in getting this podcast created. And thanks to Amy Marvin, Isobel Bess, and the Skillman Library -- everyone who works at the Skillman Library – at Lafayette College for their conference organizing and hosting. And to Joseph Press and Seth Makes Sound, who compose and perform our theme music.
Anna
I'm Anna Mudde. I'm on the lands of the Nehiyawak, the Anishnabek, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota peoples, and on the lands of the Métis Nation at oskana kâ-asastêki, the place where the bones are piled up.
Kristin
And I'm Kristin Rodier, recording today on Amiskwaciwâskahikan, homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibwe, and the Métis. Also called Beaver Hills House.
[music plays]
Krisitn
Oh, jeez! Oh, jeez.