I am guessing that the criticisms in Feminism Is For Real stem not only from personal bad experiences with the Academy and individual professors but also the gap in perks associated with expertise. Academics are the ones who get paid to teach, books/journal articles published, access to conferences, and so forth. The economy has made some changes that I think will alter that situation: due to budget cuts entire departments are being eliminated, and the ones that remain have slowed hiring and support (hosting scholars, talks, conferences) to damned near nothing. The slowdown in faculty hiring means departments won’t/can’t hire that One Feminist Scholar In The Department whether it’s poli sci or art history, or that they will find someone willing to teach new and inclusive versions of canon material. Department’s continued reliance on contingent faculty like adjuncts to fill gaps in full-time faculty means the hard conversations – challenging students to question/defend their viewpoint in class – will go unsaid because employment depends on student evaluations. I wonder if these changes will shift the landscape of feminist discourse away from “lived”/”passive” who’s-feminism-is-more-relevant discussions towards some considerations in which higher ed is preventing even more people from having these conversations.

I agree with @Cimorene that academia has been liberating for me but share the frustrations when education/expertise is used to shame others into silence. I resent the implication that book/classroom feminism is called “passive” with the implication that it’s not real or effective, but also dislike it when others are shamed for not having an education or access to it.

Beyond Feminism Is For Real, people want a new model of the university that’s not based on what medieval monks did in England when they set up Oxbridge. An institution where “expertise” of the leaders/teachers/professors is both theoretically and practically rigorous, where they can access new texts, discussions, and meet new people. But I can’t imagine how that model can be a) be sustainable or b) replicate the mistakes of the Academy.

When I don’t know something or am unfamiliar with something, I will say just that, “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure”, and always with the addition “I’ll get back to you on this”. I even do this in my classroom.

That said, I have recently witnessed an obvious and infuriating example of people shutting down/shaming peers for mistakes about vocabulary, effectively alienating those “not in the know” from access to and exercises of intellectual power. I mean, it was between two dudes and was about the pronunciation of a technical literary term, but it works the same–shaming silences, and expressions of superior knowledge that imply inferiority, shames.

Personally, I am obsessed with using my acquired technical vocabulary in non-academic settings, because the availability of that vocabulary transformed my life. But it’s not hard to use words or concepts in a way that doesn’t shame, that doesn’t alienate, but unites. I once fucking laid some truth down to my mother and her cousin–both anti-feminists who think I’m a nutso feminazi–about how fucked up it is their their husbands mock them for over-packing on vacation. I talked about the expectations society has for women, how if you’re going to a new city women’s clothing is expected to conform in specific and subtle ways that men aren’t required to understand (they can just wear suits), how there is a lot more to living up to what it means to be feminine/woman than men could ever understand, how fucked up that is, and how even if it’s fucked up it’s ok that we have to/feel compelled to participate in that paradigm. Seriously, it was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with my mom. I supported her, I demonstrated why I am a feminist and why feminism is important, and also that feminism is meant to help women, not hurt them/take away their lipstick. And I was using ideas and language that I learned from academic feminism (more or less), and it was only opening instead of closing off communication.

But not everyone is invested in opening communication, ending hierarchical alienation. Some people are even invested in precisely the opposite. Which is frustrating, because all the people I know who actively perpetuate that bullshit system will talk all day about how that system is fucked up, but then just perpetuate it all over just to make themselves seem more intellectual, smarter, a better grad student, whatever.