Into the Wilde: Academic Micro-Aggressions

As a feminist, I am often asked, “Christine, what’s the deal with micro-aggressions? Why are they important? I mean, they are micro.” Ok, so no has actually asked me that, but the way that people talk about race and gender relations on the internet and in person often imply this question. And that’s the insidious thing about micro-aggressions. Individually, they aren’t always a “big deal” because they aren’t (usually) directly hostile or earthshattering (although they are often damaging on an individual basis depending on the situation). However, over the course of life, these micro-aggressions become a very big deal, not only because they happen to marginalized groups over and over and over again, but also because of the problematic results of seemingly minor events.

Sidebar: To be transparent, this post is talking only about micro-aggressions as they relate to gender. I have no personal experience with racial micro-aggressions beyond the theoretical and I do not pretend otherwise. This post is obviously a very brief and inadequate discussion of micro-aggressions, so if you want more on the subject, you can check out a much more detailed discussion of micro-aggressions done by the University of New Hampshire.

To illustrate the importance of micro-aggressions and the consequences of them, I’m going to talk about a small conference I attended a few weeks ago in New York State. This conference focused on the life and works of Oscar Wilde and, as someone whose MA thesis focused on gender performance in Wilde’s literature, I was pretty excited about this conference. However, I was ultimately disappointed because of the dynamics at work between the youngish (late twenties, early thirties) women and the elderly (early sixties) white men in attendance. It is incredibly important to note that, even though six of the conference’s ten presenters were women, I and other women I interacted with still left the conference feeling like we had been largely excluded from the conversation; this was largely due to the discussions that took place following each batch of presentations. Regardless of who presented, the Q&A following each group of presentations was dominated by the elderly, white male Wilde scholars that were present.

Me at the Symposium

Let’s take for example the discussion following my presentation. My presentation was about queer themes in Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and how they mirror those found in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (here is  the Wikipedia entry for those of you unfamiliar with the novel or the fairytales). While my topic did deal with public perception, the majority of my presentation dealt with close readings of the texts in question. George* (names have been changed for the purposes of this post, but you get my drift) asked me whether I thought Wilde was writing in code out of necessity, or if he just enjoyed writing with hidden meaning. Now as far as my presentation was concerned, I don’t know the answer to this question, nor do I care on some level. While I do think the authorial intent is important to an extent, I had really come to this conference to talk about queer theory, and the content of the works (also, I think the question is somewhat pointless, because whether Wilde enjoyed writing in code or not, he had to disguise his sexual orientation as a matter of his own safety). I tried my best to answer the question, but rather than talking about my presentation, the conversation quickly continued on this trend of authorial intent. Obviously, the conversation is going to reflect the attitudes of the audience, but I felt very much like the conversation had been hijacked. I use the term hijacked because these scholars were, by their own admission, unfamiliar with the fairy tales as well as my theoretical lens; rather than trying to learn something new, they purposely reverted to a topic they were familiar with at the expense of mine and the other presenters’ body of knowledge. I also felt very purposefully excluded because these older, male scholars would specifically address each other and talk over the other (female) scholars. For example, as George was expanding on the question he brought up, he then turned to an elderly, white man sitting next to him and asked, “well what do you think, Bob?” effectively cutting the rest of us out of the conversation.

The presenters

Despite the fact that more than half the presenters were younger women, throughout the course of the discussion, only one woman, the MA literature student Claire, managed to ask a question. She and I talked at some length about the interactions happening, and at lunch, she expressed her frustration with the other attendees: “I really wanted to elaborate on that question I asked early because I was really interested in what she [the presenter] had to say about it. But there was never a gap in conversation again once the older scholars started talking.” As female scholars, we had a strong presence at this conference based on the number of presenters; however, because of the unwillingness of the older scholars to acknowledge their privileged position in academic discourse, Claire and I both felt that we as women were excluded from contributing.

While this is just one instance of academic discourse being monopolized by a privileged group of people, these kinds of interactions happen all the time at conferences, within University departments, and in the classroom. Again, nothing said at this conference was openly hostile: no one told me I had no right to be there, or that what I had to say was not worth hearing or debating. But I still felt that message very keenly after leaving this conference. I was really excited going into it, but I don’t feel like I contributed anything to these proceedings despite my best efforts to do so. Or rather, I put my research out there, and then was ultimately rejected by a privileged group of people that refused to respect or discuss my ideas.

Oscar Wilde

"I am not concerned with the ignorance of others" --Oscar Wilde