To my beloved brother, if I had one

He uses the body to do harm when he is in his periods of sickness. He still is the same body even if he is better; has the same arms and lips that in those dangerous occasions reached for me and poured hatred at me. And he uses the same eyes. His body made it possible to have a go at my smaller body. Didn’t it? Was it only my smallness? He had not eaten or slept much so he was surely physically tired: his skinniness and paleness testified of hours and hours of lack of nutrition, lack of rest. When my father’s body was present there were frightening situations too, but they were not focused on me. He has a bigger, but older, body. A safe body, in a ‘keeping himself and others safe’ kind of way. My little brother had at the time a very small one, almost never targeted by his older brother’s sickly anger. My mother’s body had a similar fate as mine. However, she has also a big body. If it is not (only) size… shape?

"It isn’t only size that provokes anxieties about the body among teenage boys. There is the question of shape (Connell 1983 [1979]:20)".

I have a profound problem with men. There, I have outed myself. I have a problem with not always and constantly being in the critical mode, of always (expected to) being affirmative when it comes to men. Of being endlessly understanding, respectful and nice when my history and my body reminds me of injustices, restrictions, limitations, abuse, violence. In the academia I am not allowed to say these things, not allowed to even think them. Easy equations are simplistic we are taught in feminist courses. The reality is more complex, more nuanced, more dynamic and fluid. I want to stand up and scream: fuck all that! Let’s riot! Let’s hold men responsible for the things they DO! Part of me strongly believes in feminist revolutions, in separatist organizing and sisterhood. I do not, however, stand up and scream in anger. Instead, I sit nicely on my seminar-chair and nod my head understandingly while discussing yet another disembodied text on men – or masculinities as they now are fashionably termed.

Prescription by wise men: separation of mind and body helps. Your brother is not his sickness, the wise psychiatrist tells me. Yet my body feels reluctant, becomes tense and reserved in my well-brother’s presence. Separation between deed and person is a must must, the wise psychiatrist adds. Yet my body remembers past and present violations, recognizing my brother’s well-shame as well as my idiocy of not being able to do away with my stupid stupid anger. There is no body I am allowed to dispose it on. His body is a sick body is a socio-emotionally and hence a culturally protected body. My body is now a distanced body is a materially protected body.

So perhaps target the body of academic work instead? Perhaps men and masculinities – as subject, topic, discipline? Maybe my material anger fits there? I am not allowed to scream. Not literally. I can write my anger, hide it in diaries and let it be the best darn kept secret in the world. Anger should not materialize into kicking and screaming, into torn papers and nasty words, into tears and broken bones. Yet I think I out myself constantly. It must be obvious, must it not? You all looking at me strangely, becoming silent in the seminar (hysterical woman, mad woman). And I go to enormous effort of not disposing myself as the rabid radical feminist. All my energy placed into picking the key board even harder as I feel my temperature rising, my blood boiling. The academic playground becomes my place for anger management.

The wise psychiatrist does not help me/make me wiser. Or my brother. There is no ‘we are dealing with this together’-situation. ‘We are not dealing with this ever, period’. It is literally my body against his in those painful moments. His presence, my shrinking non-presence. His expanding spatiality, my diminishing.

"To be an adult male is distinctly to occupy space, to have a physical presence in the world (Connell 1983 [1979]:19)".

Why did his body catch this sickness? How come he used his body in the way he did to exercise hate? Why hate? Why my body?

"The significance of the body in the formation of masculinity has mainly been discussed, under Freud’s influence, as a question of the psychological and symbolic importance of the penis (Connell 1983 [1979]: 18) ".

"[P]enises are particularly tangible symbols of masculinity (Gerschick 2005:374)".

This is all very well, I think, when and after reading. I put the book or article aside, I might even be a little exaggerated afterwards. Such brilliance! Such amazing analyses! Surely this in itself is revolutionary! So I get a new role model, another bright scholar to put on my growing best of-list. And then… yeah, then what? All this seems separated somehow. From my anger, my initial and immediate experience. It is as if I cannot feel the connection. Or maybe just do not know how to. Or even want to. Suddenly everything feels a bit too enormous to take in. The change always talked about in the final paragraph, the preface or conscientiously put into the text here and there, exactly how should it come about?

Man, male, masculinity.[1] Woman, female, femininity. Concepts Garlick (2003) urges us to use interchangeably. An act of change in itself? And how does this fit into the rigorousity of scientific practice, ie defining in absurdum, and keeping the categories neat and discrete? And all these nice notions of fluidity and non-fixity, of transgressed boundaries and (conceptual) messiness? What if I need some order, some sort of ‘realness’ to cling onto, so I don’t lose track of my goal, my motif, myself?

I started on a paper were my purpose and aim was to disentangle the concepts ‘man’, ‘male’ and ‘masculinity’. I did well, I thought. Had things to say (I always do). Yet, I felt uneasy, untrue to myself. OMG! This crap that I’m producing on the academic assembly line transforms me into a person I’m not sure I want to be. It’s like with sick people who do not want to become well (if we for a moment imagine this as a choice), because they are comfortable and secure in the identity of an unwell. I’m not sure if I want to be cured from my anger. My biggest fear is a state of emotional vacuum, of not being moved, touched by anything, emotionally disabled. Yet, bell hooks once fabulously wrote that “[o]pposition is not enough. In that vacant space after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become – to make oneself anew” (hooks 1991: 3). I guess I need to do this, “become anew”, without forgetting the reasons for me being here, doing this. You guys will keep me on track, right?

[1]Funny thing: this fragmented sentence is not underlined with green in my word processing program. The next sentence is (woman, female, femininity). Explanation: “Fragment (consider revising)”. Irigaray has a point: woman is that which is not.

You are the light by which I travel

In tracing my own academic roots, I remember my encounter with Feminist Studies (as it then back in 2001 happened to be termed at The Centre for Women’s Studies) as a sort of epiphany. Not merely due to the fact that I for the first time felt the connections to my own life and could identify with the theories/lives that had been translated into text, but also because the itching, aching lump persistently residing in my body and under my skin during the disciplined/ing literature studies suddenly dissolved when I realised the possibilities for a different way of producing knowledge. Gone was the confinement to single theories, solitary methods and obsessions with singular male geniuses! For some years I lived, breathed, ate and dreamt feminism (professionally and in private life), nevertheless, due to various reasons I decided to retreat into the realms of a mother discipline. Although I at occasions found joy and challenge in conventional linguistics, my heart never skipped any beats for it. Like so many others, I genuinely thought that the crosscutting themes I was interested in could not be transformed into an academic career for real – this was echoed by my father’s voice inside my head that I also should be vary of becoming a “fackidiot” [pejorative term for a specialist in a narrow field]. So, the good girl writes her bachelor’s and her master’s, and thinks narrowly about her disciplinary future until an announcement for interdisciplinary PhD-positions in Gender Studies at another university suddenly catches her eyes.

Fast forward half a year (because I was appointed for one of the positions), the task for the course on interdisciplinarity is to reflect upon possibilities and restrictions when it comes to interdisciplinarity. Although in one sense I never consciously contemplated on interdisciplinarity before – I sort of took it for granted – I do recognize having a continuous, perhaps unaware, conversation with myself on the matter. Disciplinarity, for me, was proper science while interdisciplinarity (and hence effectively Gender Studies) was not. Me a doctor in Gender Studies? Haha! How on earth can I ever explain that for my parents (they barely understood what linguistics was)? And all the feminist critique of the positivist paradigm (with all its implications also on the structure of the universities) I had engaged in, contradicted my thinking on the necessity of disciplinary affilitation (cf Lykke 2004). Was disciplinary discipline not in fact a demand for surviving academically – and socially?

I do not think I fully understood what I got myself into when I accepted the appointment I now have. Nonetheless, to remain in a state of becoming gives certain comfort, and allow for openness: to explore, bridge, develop and invent. Intellectual mobility and “messiness” paradoxically brings forth security and stability. The remains of my disciplinary thinking (if I ever had one) rest now in peace. Instead I greet the freedom and inspiration of intellectual flexibility and of being able to think from different perspectives and angles (cf Pryse 2000). My current thought companion bears the name disciplinary reflectiveness (Pryse 2000) and challenges me to deploy several lenses in order to understand and responsibly engage, as well as identify commonalities and differences. I wish to grasp the potentials for building alliances and affinities, but also to remain respectful of possible restrictions and limitations. It is an extensive task, and I hope my companion will never leave my side. She has to continue to force me to be and remain updated, to dig deeper although my time does not allow it, to be always prepared (thank goddess I was a girl guide for twelve years!) and torture me to be specific, clear, stringent and up to the point.

My companion arrives in a time where the commodification of higher education and marketization of knowledge in Sweden has travelled far down the neo-liberal road. The changing nature of both the universities as institutions and the individuals attending them does not automatically entail that the interdisciplinary trend lands in the critical soil it perhaps is intended for. Interdisciplinarity per se is not critical, nor produce criticalness or different thinking, but can with the methodological help of my companion be defended as a strive-worthy mode of producing different kinds of knowledge (cf Gibbons et al 1994).

If, for some reason, my companion decides to retire, becomes fatally injured or, goddess forbid dies!, before I safely disembark in my first haven, interdisciplinarity meets a shaky fate. Everything’s presumed mixability (theories, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies) is a slippery slope if not used ethically and responsibly. “Messiness”, creativity and eclecticism are, after all, dependent on rigour, order and stringency.