#production of subjectivity
Once again I am feeling overwhelmed by the number of assignments I have to work on, and am dealing with this by writing about a completely unrelated topic that my goblin brain has decided to become fixated on. This time, it’s the way in which universities are imagined as neutral actors involved in generating and transmitting knowledge, when they are of course not neutral (nothing is neutral) and involved the production of a gender-and-national normative student body. Before I get into this, I would like to situate this commentary and clarify that while I am using Academic English courses as a central example in my discussion, I am certainly not limiting this discussion to Academic English courses specifically; rather, I am using these courses as a kind of informal case study which might illuminate the way academia is more broadly involved in the production of certain kinds of subjects and subjectivities.
Per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, academia is “the life, community, or world of teachers, schools, and education.” I would argue, however, that it might be useful to additionally consider academia as a set of discourses and institutions. Through this kind of lens, we can think about the way that the classroom is always a site of power, and all classes are involved in the production of particular (although occasionally conflicting) subjectivities. These subjects/subjectivities are created through the way that the classroom is invested in a communication of knowledge which is generative/productive–what is produced is not only “new” knowledges, but also “new” subjects shaped through certain disciplinary processes and discursive frameworks. Although larger arguments have been made about the way grammar is inherently racist (and classist, ableist, etc), my focus here is more on thr role universities have in disciplining the production of what is called “higher-order thinking”. The Academic English course is a useful point of entry into considering what this means and what this looks like because it is a course specifically interested in teaching not just English as a language/rhetorical process/technical craft, but as it specifically pertains to the American subsection of institutions called “academia”.
At my university, Academic English courses are “themed”, with the particular theme this quarter being “equality”. This is of course implicitly a national discourse, with the readings thus far frequently privileging the idea of equality/fairness and often linking it to “the West”. This is further heightened by the fact that the students of Academic English courses are predominantly non-native English speakers (NNES), sometimes international students and frequently positioned as being from outside of the U.S. regardless. As one student noted in response to an assigned article which asserted that human societies are more equal than primate societies, equality is an abstract concept and our understandings of what qualifies as a “more” or “less” equal society is heavily situated in the particular way through which we perceive equality (for example, in the U.S. the association of equality with democracy allows many to imagine that the U.S. is uniquely equal, and yet we can clearly see that this is in fact not the case through not just the prevalence of racism, capitalism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc in our society and especially in our institutions, but in the way these intersections of oppressionare foundational to the nation). Essentially, assigning readings which tell students to view equality/equity as good things associated with “the West” in ways which imagine the Global North as fully embodying (or at least uniquely striving to embody) equality and further exclude the possibilities of other ways of navigating or experiencing equality in other nations/communities is a method of producing students who internalize these myths of American exceptionalism and engage in U.S. academic writing through these kinds of implicit frameworks.
In this same way, gender normative subjects are produced through the university as well. Professors, for example, frequently continue to (incorrectly) teach that singular they/them pronouns are grammatically incorrect and teach students to use awkward, implicitly ranked, and exclusionary phrases such as “he or she” in their academic writing. I have also observed exercises designed to teach things such as the use of adjectives and verb conjugation being used to police gender; one male (presenting) student, for example, told the class that he was “motherly”, prompting a roughly five minute detour while the professor wondered whether it was possible for him to be “motherly” and suggested he probably meant “caring” because he couldn’t really be motherly. In another lesson, the professor promised to upload several articles on gender equality for anyone who might find them interesting, before commenting (and therefore suggesting) that the guys probably wouldn’t. Because of the power professors hold over their students, when a professor comments that men will not be interested in gender equality, they are implicitly instructing their students that men cannot be interested. Only women are invested in gender equality and men have no reason to care or be invested (and those who are not cis women or cis men are invisibilized). Similarly, when a professor supposedly teaching adjectives uses the lesson to discourage students from defining themselves through the “wrong” gendered descriptors, they are actually teaching how to be an appropriately gendered subject in the academic institution.
If these examples feel like they’re too small or insignificant to be worth excavating in this way it is only because of they ways the larger patterns which shape them are naturalized and obscured. I do want to emphasize, however, that while institutions and (hegemony more broadly) are constantly in the process of attempting to produce us as specific kinds of subjects, it is important to remember we still have varying degrees of agency within these systems. When I say the university is invested in the production of subjects/subjectivities, I do not mean to suggest it is universally successful. Rather, I want us to consider and acknowledge this attempt at production, because by denying and obscuring this process we increase the likelihood of its success. As I said earlier, there is no such thing as neutrality–the production of knowledge will always coincide with the production of frameworks of interpretation, methodologies of production, and subjectivities which can access, produce, and engage with knowledge through these methodologies, discourses, and frameworks. However, we can acknowledge these processes and, through this acknowledgement, choose what subjectivities we are complicit in producing and demand more inclusive and accessible academic practices in our institutions. We have an ethical imperative to acknowledge the violence that accompanies dominant productions and the disciplining that surround them, to come together in solidarity and resistance, and to intervene in the places we see this violence play out.
