Academe

Philosemite and Jew; Or, How I Got Cancelled

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A guest post from Clive Gabay – who has visited with us before – on his recent experience of academic freedom.

In October 2020 I was informed that an article I had written on anti-Corbyn forces in and around the Labour Party, and the ways they relied on racializing articulations of ‘Jews’ in their professed ‘love’ for the Jewish community, had been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.  There was one caveat; because of the ‘sensitivity’ of the topic, the editors just wanted to pass the article by the publisher’s legal team. This was to ensure that the editors would be financially protected if someone brought a vexatious case against the journal.

Throughout the subsequent 18 months of to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher’s legal team, the journal’s editors were incredibly supportive, and as exasperated as I became by the various turns the tale started to take. The categorisation of the article as dealing with a ‘sensitive’ topic was one that would however come to be the undoing of what had been decided by three anonymous reviewers to be a publishable article and a contribution to knowledge. I’ll return to the implications of this shortly. First, some details on what unfolded over the following 18-month period, which led to the article finally being pulled from the journal and deemed unpublishable.

In March 2021, four months after acceptance, the publisher’s legal team wrote back that the topic was indeed ‘sensitive’. The article named individuals via their publicly available statements, and the legal advice was that there was a risk that some of these people could sue. At the same time, in the legal team’s opinion, “the article as it stands is open to accusations of political score-settling against Corbyn critics and a lack of good faith”. Well indeed. While I aspire to always write in good faith, I tend to draw the line at those who make racist statements, and facilitate racist governments, and who do so in the name of a community to which I belong. This became more of an issue subsequently, when the legal team also tried to retreat from making any editorial suggestions in the name of showing fidelity to academic freedom, thus leaving the question of legality in the unqualified hands of the journal editors and myself.

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GCRF’d

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Twenty-four hours before universities closed for the Easter break, the heads of twelve international research projects received a letter from the funding super-council UKRI, instructing them to either cease activity altogether or make do on just one third of scheduled monies for 2021-22. The twelve ‘Hubs’, as they are known, work on everything from water security to child nutrition, trade to gender, oceans to slums. Supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and each lasting five years, they provided over a thousand jobs across the UK and as many as eighty-five other countries. The Hubs were required to accept the terms and return details of their contortions – paying due heed to “equality, diversity and inclusion”, natch – within three and a half weeks, national holidays included. In this they faced the same ultimatum as a catalogue of other projects of varying scales and aims financed by GCRF or the Newton Fund, collectively deprived of hundreds of millions of pounds in one fell blow. The year’s settlement is almost £300 million less than UKRI had spent in 2020-21 and £120 million less than what was needed just to meet existing promises, a crisis triggered by the government’s reduction of development aid to 0.5% of GDP, adding gratuitous policy fuel to the economic fire of the pandemic.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer explained that austerity ultimately served the end of “doing aid better”, a near-hallucinogenic level of gaslighting atop the material harm.[1] The direction to ‘reprofile’ demanded such changes at such pace that it may be understood as a starvation tactic, leaving at least some projects with no option but to fold with immediate effect. Compounding the shock, Hubs are forbidden to spend any more than the fraction of what they were due, even where they hold more in reserves.[2] It hardly needs demonstrating that a spasm of this intensity inflicts immediate damage to livelihoods, partnerships and careers. Early career researchers facing redundancy, contracts broken, a year of pent-up plans rendered useless, trust squandered. Some of the ramifications are absurd: because they had been instructed to continue as planned, despite the pandemic and even after Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced the headline aid cuts in November last year, Hubs had organised fieldwork, rescheduled conferences, advertised jobs and appointed staff, in some cases reviewing and awarding hundreds of thousands of pounds to new projects only to pull the plug mere days after notifying applicants. Callousness piled upon wastefulness, as when an expert in water management moved countries with a young family only to learnt of the cuts in their first week on the job. The damage is unequally distributed: many if not most GCRF posts are in the global south, along with their most immediate beneficiaries, where resources to absorb the damage are in shortest supply.

Condemnations and appeals for clemency have flowed from all directions: the Lords Science and Technology Committee, the Royal Society, UKRI’s own independent advisors (a number of them now resigned in protest), the last British governor of Hong Kong, the Development Studies Association, the Academy of Europe, the Royal College of Pediatrics, Bob Geldof. On paper, UKRI forecasts that all Hubs will eventually receive the full funds pledged, provided they can survive a few years of purgatory. But there are suspicions that GCRF money may not return even when development aid does (and it may never). It is rumoured that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy sees past funding decisions as excessively oriented towards ‘development’ over ‘science’ (not the greatest crime for projects funded by development aid, even if you accept the hard distinction between science and development research, which you shouldn’t). What was at first explained as a cashflow bottleneck becomes an accusation of deficiency, a problem located somewhere in the intellectual mission itself. Research England chief David Sweeney counsels that researchers must prove their utility to the nation and “build their case” anew. Gone are the days of the research grant as “charitable donation”. A charitable donation! The rebuke is more than an insult; it mangles the recent history of UK aid and exposes, if inadvertently, the fault-lines of the new national mission.

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Judith Butler Goes to Norway

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A guest post from Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a PhD student in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis interrogates the concept of Aryanism, which she understands as a set of contingent and contradictory relations connecting India and Europe. Her broader research interests include global intellectual thought and history, and postcolonial theory.

Butler, Judith. 2020. Kjønn, Performativitet og Sårbarhet. Preface by Stine Helena Bang Svendsen. Translated by Lars Holm-Hansen.Oslo: Cappelen Damm, Cappelens Upopulære Skrifter. (147 pages)

For the very first time, the work of philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler is being translated into Norwegian, in a publication encompassing extensive excerpts from her books Gender Trouble (1990), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) and Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2018).

Why is it that we had to wait until the year 2020 to be able to read Butler in Norwegian? One way to think about that question might be to interrogate the unheimlich nature of her work in a Norwegian context. How does Butler’s theories of the performativity and fiction of gender fare in Norway, a country where the most successful feminist movements have been those predominantly reformist in nature, concentrated around state-centric demands for ‘gender equality’? How is Butler read in a country whose feminist imaginaries can be said to be particularly ‘womb-centric’, with an often inbuilt ontological scepticism of genderbending impetuses such as Butler’s (Jacobsen in Bendixsen, Bringslid, and Vike 2017)? Poststructuralism, the theoretical impulse most central to her work, has also been comparatively late to arrive in Norway (Riiser Gundersen 2016). And when it appeared, along with its queer theoretical descendants, it was highly contested (Danbolt 2012).

This piece invites us to consider these questions, thinking both with Butler and her critics to examine the potentials and pitfalls of contemporary Norwegian political discourses on the relationship between political emancipation and ‘the body’.

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Feeling (in and out of time)

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The fourth in our coronacrisis series.

Andes_In_A_Crystal_Ball_(190455783)

Photograph: ‘Andes in a Crystal Ball’ by Luis Ezcurdia. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

On Monday, my day began at 7am, giving feedback on a PhD student’s research proposal and ended some fifteen hours later, when I gave up trying to contact a relative who is locked down alone and I finally managed to calm the insistent panic that they were not ok. They were ok, they just forgot that we had set up a call. Lost track of time.

I learned about the three seasons of the Ancient Egyptian year and the key features of their agricultural production (Year 7 Human Society and Its Environment) and how to design a fair and reliable experiment (Year 7 Science). I reminded my kid to log in to his Google classroom on the hour every hour and perform his virtual attendance, because his school has been very clear that this is the only thing that they care about during these extraordinary times and it takes less emotional energy to play by their rules than it does to point out all of the ways in which their rules surely don’t apply at this time. To this time.

I hosted the first weekly virtual coffee morning for colleagues in my Department and listened to PhD students tell us about how hard it is juggling childcare, space to work, and in many cases completely redesigning their project because it’s clear that the fieldwork they have planned for this year is likely no longer possible. I suggested that it was important to give these students space to grieve their lost projects, their other selves.

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Fatal Collaborations

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A guest post from Chris Rossdale, issued in the midst of the latest round of UK university strikes over pensions, pay, precarity, workload and inequality. Chris is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. He writes about militarism, race and colonialism, social movements and political resistance. His book Resisting Militarism was published last year with Edinburgh University Press, and will be the topic of a Disorder symposium coming to a screen near you soon. You can also find Chris on Twitter here.

In January 2020, hundreds of students at SOAS staged a walk out, joining staff on the steps of the Bloomsbury campus to protest against yet another round of budget cuts. Once again, the institution was at the front line in the long struggle against the neoliberal restructuring of British universities, its position here an enduring product of the collision between aggressive management and well-organised staff and students. This time, administrators had announced that a budget shortfall would be filled by cancelling unfunded research leave for lecturers. Activists expect that this will also entail slashing the hours of sessional teaching staff, the ‘fractionals’ whose inspiring and successful unofficial strike action in 2014 presaged the more determined University and College Union (UCU) action we see today.

SOAS also made headlines last year when students learned that the institution was taking money from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in return for providing academic expertise and training to the British armed forces. Research by the Decolonizing Our Minds society revealed that SOAS has received at least £400,000 since the end of 2016 to deliver ‘Regional Study Weeks’ to the MoD’s ‘Defence Cultural Specialist Unit’ (DCSU). Currently active in at least 22 countries including Afghanistan, Chad and Chile, the DCSU is similar to the widely-criticised Human Terrain System developed by the US to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It involves the MoD supplementing its forces with specialists in the culture of societies where British operations are active, in pursuit of a gentler form of domination in ‘rapidly expanding neo-colonial context[s]’. The Regional Study Weeks are opportunities for academics to teach DCSU staff about the social and political contexts of particular regions, while highlighting the resulting ‘implications for UK military missions’. SOAS academics made up the largest portion of those teaching, but the weeks have included faculty from LSE, St Andrews, Cambridge, KCL, UCL, Lancaster and De Montfort. As the students’ report states, this academic collaboration with the armed forces facilitates a project that, at best, ‘is useful for crafting more inclusive forms of imperial governance’, and at worst, is used to ‘either destroy or “neutralize” potential sites of resistance with insider information’.

Reports of SOAS’s links with the MoD caused a scandal, but this apparent deviation masked a deeper reality. Collaborations between British universities and military institutions are no aberration – they are the overwhelming norm. A recent report by students at the University of Oxford revealed that the institution’s research council grants active in 2019 included over £80m linked to the MoD, and that nearly 40% of its £420m in science council grants are paired with military-related bodies. BAE Systems has spent millions partnering with over ten universities developing new technologies for stealth drones. Thales, Europe’s third largest arms company, are proud to announce that they are involved with over £146m in Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) funded research, working with over 20 institutions. My own institution, Bristol, received £3m from the Atomic Weapons Establishment between 2010 and 2016, while researchers at Surrey have worked with Lockheed Martin on improving components in armored vehicles. These examples are indicative, not exhaustive; very few institutions can claim to be free of these connections. Universities disingenuously attempt to emphasise the civilian applications of this research in their public-facing communications; however the reality is that the British university system is intimately entangled in systems of military production.

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Moving Out of the Backstage: How Can We Decolonize Research?

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This blogpost is written by seventeen researchers based in (or in between) various settings, in particular the DR Congo, Sierra Leone, India, Sweden, Rwanda and the UK. Since all co-authors do not have a personal or institutional web-sites they are simply listed by name, in alphabetical order: Oscar Adedi Dunia; Stanislas Bisimwa , Elisée Cirhuza, Maria Eriksson Baaz, John Ferekani, Pascal Imili, Evariste Kambale, Jérémie Mapatano; Lebon Mulimbi; Bienvenu Mukungilwa; Lievin Mukingi; David Mwambari; Swati Parashar; Darwin Rukanyaga Assumani; Wolf Sinzaher, Mats Utas and James Vincent.

 

Research here in the DRC is like the coltan and other minerals. Other countries that don’t have access to it claim it and benefit from it. It is the same with research. The research would not be possible without us. Still it is people from the outside who profit from it, get visibility, funding and are called experts. At the same time we – the ones who provide access, adapt the methodology and questions and collect the data in very precarious circumstances – get little compensation and are not acknowledged. It is sort of a continuation of colonial relations.

This was one of the conclusions summarising a workshop organised to exchange experiences among “brokering researchers”, in the DR Congo. This workshop forms part of a larger research project involving also Sierra Leone and India.[i] By the concept brokering researchers, we here refer to researchers based in the research setting who regulate the access and flow of knowledge. They are often, in the literature, pejoratively referred to as “local research assistants” or even “fixers”. While accounts of research exploitation have increased in recent years, in large enabled by social media, they go long back in history[ii] and have been articulated in a range of contexts[iii][iv] in and outside of Africa, most recently in Syria[v]. Yet, while research exploitation seems particularly marked in research conducted in settings marked by armed conflict (which is the focus here) it is certainly not unique to such contexts.[vi]Hence, we encourage also researchers outside conflict research to continue reading and weigh in.

To summarise a long and uncomfortable story: there is (most often) a marked inequality between brokering researchers and “contracting researchers” (i.e. researchers often based in the global North, who contract brokering researchers,). The latter are ones who profit the most, not the least from the research in zones of armed conflict. Publishing on issues based on exciting field data in such zones provides a venue for recognition, citations and further research funding necessary for career advancement. The trouble is that the more brokering researchers are silenced, erased and made invisible in the research texts, the more the contracting researcher appears to benefit from this extractive and exploitative relationship. Not only can he/she write him/herself as the daring and heroic inquirer revealing truths in dangerous places, he/she (by not including the indispensable people as co-writers),  can also profit from single (or with other contracting researchers) authored publications. More recently, the silencing of brokering researchers and the promotion of the “contracting researcher Self” has taken the form of indulging in psychological discomforts and so called traumas related to fieldwork. This increasing preoccupation with the psychological and physical well-being of the contracting researcher often appears as quite unintentionally oblivious to privilege and positionality, disregarding the situation of brokering researchers and others in the field.

Not seldom and gradually more so, given the increasing securitization of research[vii], such research is often conducted while the contracting researcher remains in the comfort of his/her country, or stays in a comfortable hotel in a safe urban setting in the conflict zone. Hence, it is frequently the brokering researchers based in the research setting who are most at risk, at times (in cases when the contracting researchers follow to the field) arising from contracting researchers’ risky and suspicious behavior. Moreover, brokering researchers regularly do most of the hard work; provide access to the respondents; translate and adapt the methodology (interview guides/survey questions) to the context; collect the data in insecure settings, summarise the data and provide crucial inputs into interpretation, ensure the safety of the researcher, and much more. Yet, brokering researchers most often do so with poor remuneration, no insurance and no/limited funds to cover unexpected costs crucial to their safety in the field. In addition to this and despite all the work, brokering researchers rarely make it further than the acknowledgement section (sometimes not even that); with slim chances of appearing as co-authors. As Mukungilwa concludes brokering researchers are “like ghosts in the research machine: they are there, but nobody sees them.” A similar situation has been reported also in other contexts, not the least in journalism. It seems academia is not much – if at all – any better.

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Feminist labour at the ISA: White manels, the politics of citation and mundane productions of disciplinary sexism and racism

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This piece is co-authored by a Feminist IR collective (Linda Åhäll, Sam Cook, Roberta Guerrina, Toni Haastrup, Cristina Masters, Laura Mills, Saara Särmä and Katharine A. M. Wright).

At the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Francisco this April there were, as usual, many all-male panels. However, while they remain prevalent, the number appears to be decreasing at ISA at least. At the same time as ‘manels’ have been challenged both within the discipline and more broadly, attention has been given to the gender citation gap, whereby men benefit from ‘a significant and positive gender citation effect compared to their female colleagues’. International Relations is no exception here, women tend to cite themselves less than men, and men (already overrepresented in the discipline) are more likely to cite other men over women.

We were surprised then to find that a panel titled ‘Citation Is What We Make of It! Towards a Theory of Citation and the Implications of Citation Practice for IR Knowledge and Production’ at ISA featured not only no women on the panel, but, as it later transpired, no discussion of the gendered or racialized geographies of citations. Moreover, one of the panelists has published in International Organization on this very issue. As a result, the politics of citation practice was mysteriously absent. Laura Mills’ tweet questioning whether this was ‘some subversive performance art beyond [her] ken’ received significant attention. We attended the panel, some due to our interest in citations and others out of curiosity about subversiveness at ISA. Our presence as feminist scholars was noticeable, since we far outnumbered the four other audience members. From our perspective, the interactions around this panel were illustrative of the ways in which even those who on the surface appear to address such issues, can fall into a trap of talking past them. They can in fact reify a pernicious politics, which characterises IR as just the sum of its citations.

A Limited Vision of International Relations

The vision of IR the panel presented was both particular and exclusionary. It focused both on a narrow understanding of what IR is and of who is seen to ‘do’ IR. As Jess Gifkins has pointed out, IR more broadly is “‘cannibalistic’ (of other disciplines) and ‘slow’ (amongst other things)”. It creates ‘new turns’ without acknowledging that this knowledge has already been produced in cognate disciplines. These traits were exemplified in this space not only through the composition of the panel, but just as pertinently through the myth of IR they spoke to. An elitist IR where citation practices are the measure of contribution, and one whose contributions are siloed away from other relevant knowledge which might challenge them. Yet, the panel title and the questions posed in the call for papers for the panel suggested this could have provided an important space to address these issues.

The panel title – ‘Citation is what we make of it!’ – prompts consideration of what was being ‘made’ on a panel on citation practice and its implications for knowledge production in IR. How ironic that the panel not only failed to consider the politics of their own citation practices in the papers presented, but also failed to consider the very idea of IR produced as an effect of such utterances! Arguably an IR premised on exclusion, silencing and erasure when no mention of race or gender appeared in any of the presentations. Outside of our prompting during the Q&A, there was little to no reflection of why they began and ended their reflections on citation in IR where they did, why these might be the ‘most pertinent’ conversations, and what ‘vision’ of IR was being produced as an effect. Surely a panel title invoking critical reflection on citation would also prompt some kind of self-reflection. Therefore, the title also prompts consideration of what the implications of these practices are for what ‘counts’ as ‘legitimate’ ‘knowledge’. It points to the incessant gatekeeping of particular kinds of scholarship as ‘knowledge’. For who is this ‘we’ that has the privilege to ‘make’ of citation what it will?

All-male, all-white panels cannot be separated from the broader structural inequalities of our discipline which manifest themselves in particular and pernicious ways at ISA. Why? Because when women and people of colour are absent from the stage, their contributions are also made invisible. Manels reinforce the notion that white men are ‘experts’, marginalizing the authority and experience of others. The racism, sexism, and ableism embedded within IR as a discipline become all the more visible at this conference. This particular and exclusionary vision of what (and who) IR is communicated by the panel support, rather than challenge, these wider inequalities. As Marysia Zalewski writes in reference to all-male panels at the ISA in 2015: “Why is it that resistances to curtailing sexism, misogyny and racism remain so strong? Few in a field of study such as IR would simply say “no” to the call to curtail these violences. But many choose not to notice and not to think. Or to choose to be unthinking, even offended when such violences are pointed out. And in effect to not see the violence at all or acknowledge its viscous place in our power-drenched institutional structures.”

Indeed, the very use of the language of violence to describe manels could be met with further resistance. It would be all too easy to respond that to speak of violence as enacted in and through the ‘mundane’ site of the conference panel is to descend to hyperbole. Continue reading →

Feminist Allies: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?

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Columba

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Amy

We welcome a guest post from Columba Achilleos-Sarll and Amy Galvin-Elliott from Warwick. Columba is an ESRC funded PhD student at the University of Warwick in the Politics and International Studies department. Her research lies at the intersection between feminist and postcolonial theory, UK foreign policy and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. She recently published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies: Reconceptualising Foreign Policy as Gendered, Sexualised and Racialised: Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Foreign Policy (Analysis). Amy is completing her PhD in the History department at the University of Warwick. Her project on female experience of parliamentary spaces is generously funded by the ESRC and is jointly supervised by Warwick and the Parliamentary Archives. Her main research interests include gendered experiences of space and the 19th century political culture of Britain.

This year’s International Feminist Journal of Politics conference (IFJP) provoked serious thought about a question that was posed during a plenary session by Professor. Brooke A. Ackerly from Vanderbilt University: “How can I be a ‘good’ feminist ally, and is it better for me to be a ‘bad’ feminist ally than no ally at all?”

Feminism promotes equality, tolerance, understanding, and facilitates a space for the voices of those otherwise oppressed or marginalised. However, as academics, Ackerly’s question requires us to hold a mirror to our professional selves and ask just how far our work within the academy creates a space for the narratives of marginalised groups? And, where it does, do we allow them to speak for themselves? The very nature of academia serves to ‘legitimise’ certain forms of knowledge production, deciding, based on an assumed authority, whose voices are recorded and whose are not. As feminist scholars operating in and beyond academia, how can we conduct ourselves in a way that makes us a ‘good’ ally? And, what does it even mean to be a ‘good’ ally?

Responses to Professor Ackerly’s question were complex and a thoughtful reminder of how we, as academics and/or activists, position ourselves in relation to others. Perhaps this quote from Panellist Anasuya Sengupta best summarises the tensions around feminist allyship:

The conversation that followed prompted a number of questions: Who is a feminist ally? How are they produced? Where are alliances formed? Who has the power to be a feminist ally? And, what distinguishes a ‘good’ from a ‘bad’ feminist ally? Continue reading →

Decolonising International Relations – some Pedagogical Reflections

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This is a guest post by Maïa Pal and Doerthe Rosenow, Senior Lecturers in International Relations, Department of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University.  Maïa is working on a co-edited volume for Routledge on The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics and on a monograph for Cambridge University Press on Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital. She is also an editor for the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Doerthe has recently published the book Un-making Environmental Activism: Beyond Modern/Colonial Binaries in the GMO Controversy and a series of articles about critique and its limits. 

On 22 February 2018, Dr Meera Sabaratnam, Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at SOAS appeared on the BBC Radio4 Today programme [2.53 onwards] to discuss ‘What is decolonisation?’ and what it means to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. She faced David Aaronovitch, columnist at the Times, who complained about the problem with the word ‘decolonise’, stating it was ‘not the job of university studies to decolonise or recolonise’. Instead, he suggested, universities should ‘think critically’ and not look ‘like a political project’ that imposes a particular view on students. In other words, Aaronovitch claims that a university education should – and can – consist in a neutral, open, apolitical transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student, and definitely not the other way round. He is shocked at ‘this business of’ students participating in the elaboration of curricula – no pun apparently intended, but Aaronovitch is obviously a natural. His sentiment is amplified by the current 9K fee system because if students are paying so much, they should expect to get a service delivered exclusively by teachers.

The underlying scandal here is that Aaronovitch is actually complaining about teachers whom he thinks are asking students to do their jobs for them – in spite of Sabaratnam reminding him in her introduction that most of university teachers and other professional staff are currently on strike to defend their pensions from being made dependent on the fluctuations of the stock market, which could result in a 25% pay cut. So behind a poorly constructed and intentionally naïve critique of decolonial education as a political project (which surely Aaronovitch himself does not believe in, since he must be well versed in debates about the objectivity and/or neutrality of epistemology stretching back to ancient philosophies, Western and non-Western) is the old conservative refrain of counter-establishment or radical projects being the product of lazy lefties, in this case teachers skiving by getting students to write their syllabi. Continue reading →

Dear Hurt Male Egos

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A guest post from Linda Åhäll on a recent controversy. Linda is Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University. Her forthcoming publications include the textbook chapters ‘Poststructuralism’ in Security Studies: an introduction (3rd edition, Williams and MacDonald eds.), ‘Gender’ in Visual Global Politics (Bleiker ed.), and the journal article ‘Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion’ in International Political Sociology.

 

Dear Hurt Male Egos, if I may

I am poststructuralist feminist security studies scholar inspired by and indebted to the work of American philosopher and political theorist Judith Butler. I am also Swedish and have spent the autumn term on research leave in the Political Science Department at Lund University in Sweden where, regrettably, Butler has been dragged into an internal conflict about teaching practice by a Hurt Male Ego. A conflict then turned into a national ‘debate’ by a journalist with, in my view, an anti-feminist agenda: on how, supposedly, ‘Gender Studies is taking over Swedish universities’. A national debate then not only picked up, but seriously misrepresented, in international news media. The conflict and subsequent media attention is framed as a tension between gender mainstreaming policies on the one hand and ‘academic freedom’ on the other. But, above all, what has sparked my feminist curiosity is how a tiny number of people, in a twisted series of events, have managed to use Butler – one of the world’s most prominent feminist and queer theorists – for anti-feminist purposes.

For me, it all started when the Hurt Male Ego at Lund wrote an Open Letter addressed to Butler (‘Dear Judith, if I may’), posted on his blog. In it The Hurt Male Ego talked about a ‘Campus War’ and about ‘campus feminists’ as those infringing on his academic freedom. Crucially, the Hurt Male Ego refers to this incident about teaching practice at the Political Science Department at Lund University as ‘The Judith Butler Affair’ on his website, accompanied by photos of Butler. Some days later, the Hurt Male Ego changed the photo of Butler on his website to one where her face was replacing the (authoritarian) leader in the film 1984. Launching this update of the website, the Hurt Male Ego tweeted ‘Big Sister is Watching’. (He has since changed the photo back to a less provocative one.)

Ahall - Butler Big Sister is watching

Then, the Hurt Male Ego’s PhD Student at Lund University interviewed Judith Butler over email (maybe she knew who he was, maybe she didn’t). In that interview, Butler was asked to respond to the following question: ‘How do you regard having your work imposed on a university lecturer in the name of gender equality?’ She answered, understandably, that she was not in favour of having her work imposed by quotas. But, unfortunately, Judith Butler was misled in that interview. Because, in fact, as I explain below, the policy at the Political Science Department at Lund University was never about the enforcement of gender quotas. There is more to the story. (See also this where Butler clarifies that it would be a mistake to use her remarks about academic freedom as a critique of gender studies.)

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