Context: this post, this post, and this post
After receiving my official pre-residency literature, I’m disapponted but not surprised to note that Professor Oppression Points is not at all an anomaly. The workshop descriptions were dripping with cloying intersectional canards: we’ll be “dismantling” this and “interrogating our complicity in” that. A subsection on “using our values to bolster your activism”. There are support groups that meet every night after dinner.
I don’t doubt that I’m going to do well in this program. It’s a really good fit for me academically; its structure serves my work and my goals very well. And I get to work independently after the nine-day residency, which is the light at the end of the tunnel. But I can already tell it’s going to be nearly impossible to get through this residency without placing myself and my identity in a context that is deeply alien to me, and it chafes me that that has probably never been considered through an accessibility lens. Inclusivity isn’t just “all races all genders all creeds”; it’s about making space for different ways of seeing the world.
I’m also legitimately worried that my refusal to publicly perform my trauma, combined with my field of study (”colonial” is right in the name) and my personal aesthetic (modest, buttoned-up), is going to get me pegged as tradcon, if not outright alt-right. And I’m done for if that happens, because I know how this works. No one will come to you in good faith, no one will consider that their interpretation of signals is not the end-all; they’ll encourage one another to avoid and shun and malign me for “safety’s sake”. I’ve seen it happen enough times. Once you’ve been interpreted a certain way, you become radioactive.
I think we all end up tradcon eventually, if we don’t just fall in line.
More things in heaven and earth, etc.