Abstract
Taking a deep breath to steady myself, I walked through the doors of the JW Marriot Los Angeles. The sterile cold air hit my face as I nervously looked around, glad I had my face mask on. It hid the marks on my face. Marks that were open or healing wounds from my picking at it due to anxiety.
I was surrounded by people dressed in business casual, lanyards displaying their names—though not their institutions—rushing through the halls, sitting in groups, chatting with one another in line. It was the 2022 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) held in downtown LA just one month after Academic Outsider was published. Intellectually, I knew that even for those who would read the book, most would not have read it in the month since its publication. Still, I was terrified. Nervous that people would know some (but not all) of the deepest parts of me that I strive to keep hidden but no longer could. Anxious that colleagues would no longer see me as a serious scholar and dismiss my book as “me-search” rather than as a serious theoretical treatise on love as well as the structural, emotional, and symbolic violence of the academy, as each author of the review essays note.
Thankfully, most of my immediate fears were just that: fears that never materialized. At least not in that moment. Most people—to my face—were touched by the book. There were exceptions, even at the ASA. Like the senior White colleague who I thought I was friendly with, having previously shared meals and coffee, but who made eye contact with me and turned away at no less than three different receptions. Of course, the behind-the-scenes politicking and gossip is hidden from me, invisible and intangible: how retaliation often manifests. In that respect, I’m sure it will be difficult to ever be hired in a sociology department again. That’s because in writing about my personal experiences, many may think that I aired, as Ghassan Moussawi notes, the “dirty laundry” of my former department and the profession; of my family.
Indeed, a close family member stopped talking to me because of the book and the so-called damage I did to the “reputation” of my dead mother. This despite the fact that I circulated the essay “On Love and Worth” with those family members to whom I’m closest to even before publication, as that essay reveals that my mother’s stepfather molested and raped her for years, culminating in my birth. My mother’s abuser recently died. Yet, this person and others in my family not only went to his funeral but brought their kids with them. They had also continued to have him in their lives up to that point. Since then, I’ve been the one to cut ties with anyone who went to his funeral in the name of my own boundaries and mental health.
The publication of Academic Outsider has emboldened me to take these, and even more, risks. Risks that align with my integrity, even if they possibly mean the imminent death of some version of a career that is now out of reach, and likely always has been. Risks like resigning as an elected Council Member at Large of the ASA in November 2023 because of no forthcoming statement about the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Like removing myself as a coauthor from a publication in a top journal because I was uncomfortable with its citation politics. And yet, these risks I’m taking continue to terrify me. The fear of speaking out, of retaliation for my choices are all there, lingering and seeping into each corner of my mind. And these fears are not imagined. Some have already happened. Not a single person from the ASA Council reached out to me after my resignation and people who I considered friends, not just colleagues, stopped talking to me because of the “big name” of one of the coauthors from the article from which I withdrew. These are the same people who I thought of as kin, given our shared ethnic and racial background and their previous support; support they gave even when I shared my concerns about the paper. But their support was performative at best and conditional at worst. Despite similar experiences and critiques, these very same people dropped me so they can maintain their relationships with gatekeepers. People choosing not to be in my life is something I am okay with. What is hurtful, however, is the lack of communication. The silence. The ghosting. The limited support behind the scenes but never in public, a point Moussawi emphasizes in his essay, that is then taken away because of concerns about their own careers.
As Moussawi reflects in his essay
playing the game is taxing . . . [it] is a violent process that BIPOC people must endure—a game that many often fail at but some play well, too well and who then become gatekeepers invested in maintaining the status quo . . . [and] those who uphold them are seen as “good” gatekeepers of the discipline (whether BIPOC or white).
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And yet, to be a member of our profession is to necessarily be part of the game, which means—if you are a marginalized scholar—you will be subjected to violence in big and small ways as a normalized part of your job. The only way to truly opt out is to leave. So, too, is it important to remember that gatekeepers are not only those who work at elite institutions or publish in elite journals or even are only White scholars. Rather, people become gatekeepers when they reproduce the “white logic, white methods” (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008) of sociology and dismiss work that is not legible to the mainstream. In this we see how even—maybe especially—people at non-elite institutions, particularly those at research-intensive ones, reinforce the standards of “good” and “poor” scholarship and do not put into practice the critiques they have about racism and knowledge production. This includes scholars of color.
Dawn Dow points this out in her review essay, when she writes that the book
encourages us to consider how we value knowledge from different kinds of people and different knowledge-making processes and locations. Standards that are more closely tied to job security and advancement are often structurally reinforced through tenure assessment policies. These standards are likely to be the most in need of being challenged and harder to completely shed or overlook because they are tied to people’s livelihoods.
Precisely because of this, universities and the academy more generally are conservative, despite racist rhetoric that says otherwise, as we can see in the increasing attacks on critical race theory and on any research tied to race, racism, sexuality, sex and gender, including the doxing and harassment of people who speak out against genocide. Just because it’s easier to follow the system, however, doesn’t mean we should accept the status quo of the discipline.
Indeed, in discussing how I draw on Black feminist thought to theorize love in the book, Dow shares that
I particularly value that she is challenging who gets to create theory and knowledge in spaces that are not entirely safe in the hope of creating more safe spaces. She does this vital and transformational work by unpacking what produced the need for some to have safe spaces while others don’t and how to redesign the academy or design it from the perspective of love. Designing spaces that aim to show love to others might sound like a radical idea until you consider how love is already embedded in institutions of power—just not for marginalized groups that have been excluded.
That love shapes where we put resources and who we give recognition to is also mentioned by Heba Gowayed in her review essay. Pushing back against people who would “understand these critiques [in Academic Outsider] as contempt for academic life [is] to misunderstand them; for Victoria they are clearly said from a well of love.” To critique is to love, as Jennifer Nash (2019) similarly argues. But too often, that’s not how critique is seen. Because to understand critique, or complaint, as love “threaten[s] a bond [people] have to a university, a department, a project, or a colleague” (Ahmed 2021:8). I would add it also threatens bonds to the profession and discipline more broadly precisely because taking critiques and complaints seriously would force people to confront how each of us—myself included—upholds these systems of domination and oppression that exclude so many.
And yet, to see this book as a set of essays solely about the academy or my personal experiences is to miss the point, its theorization, and the richness that stems from trying to read and engage with scholarship across fields. As Gowayed points out “Academic Outsider is a text that resists categorization.” This could be a through line of my research, as my first book Global Borderlands (Reyes 2019) also resists easy categorization. To write like this is also a risk, despite rhetoric applauding interdisciplinarity in theory. That’s because interdisciplinarity isn’t truly valued in the practices of hiring, merit reviews, promotions, and for mainstream sociology journals. Often reviewers and colleagues, particularly for those who are not yet tenured or have a tenure-track position, require engagement with mainstream debates and “classical” citations and theoretical frameworks to be taken seriously. Yet my work, including Academic Outsider, doesn’t tackle what’s considered to be central questions of a given subfield or discipline, and as such it becomes not Asian American enough, not economic sociology enough, not theoretical enough or about race and gender enough. I’m not alone. But the very fact that we have normalized that there are central questions that orient a given subfield means that those who push against it do not receive similar recognition or attention, vis-à-vis publication outlets, citations, awards, grants, fellowships, and more, as those who reproduce the status quo. As many have also pointed out, it also stifles knowledge production as relevant work crosscuts fields, and we limit ourselves, our profession, and knowledge production more generally when we stay within narrowly siloed disciplines.
That the book resonated so much with so many people, including the very generous reflections in this symposium by Dawn Dow, Heba Gowayed, and Ghassan Moussawi, is both affirming and devastating. Affirming in that I am not alone—something I intellectually knew because of the vast writings of scholars of color who document similar experiences and in the everyday conversations with friends, but which emotionally didn’t sink in until person after person after person reached out to share similar stories. Its publication is also devastating in that the road to a just and loving academy is long and filled with seemingly irretractable obstacles, as the inequities we currently face are similar to those of previous generations. That is, it is disheartening to see how contemporary scholars and scholars of previous generations have not only similar experiences of gendered racism, classism and queerphobia, among others, but also similar “debates” over what constitutes sociology as a discipline. But we are not alone, nor are we the first to face these struggles. To struggle against the status quo is to join a long and rich history of people challenging the academy and beyond. But to do so, each of us needs to make the intentional effort to uncover and uplift those who are often unrecognized and turn away from the elitism and gatekeepers that saturate our profession. To turn away from the neoliberal emphasis and culture of individualism and careerism. That is our task if we are to truly transform and transgress the academy (Fillingim, Reyes, and Rucks-Ahidiana 2023). And each of us must make the conscious decision to take on this task each and every day.
