Scholarly Work Is Not [always] Autobiography

In an August 2000 article in Cultural Anthropology, Virginia Dominguez reflects on a moment of scholarly inclusion that crossed the narrow borders of identity politics in order to affirmatively acknowledge her scholarly work. Interrogating her response to that moment and advocating a related scholarly re-orientation that pays attention to "what love does, or should, have to do with it" (362), Dominguez writes "While opening the academy to people who in the past have been largely excluded is essential, conceding the right to participate in the production of knowledge about particular places, peoples, pasts, and societies of the world to people just from those places in principle limits all of us to the production of knowledge about only very narrowly defined communities of which we might unquestionably be a part" (364). Dominguez also notes, of course, that the "on-the-ground application of the principle" has generally meant that "Non-'minoritized' U.S. anthropologists still study most other people in the world, but few 'minoritized U.S. anthropologists study -and are seen as authorities on - people and places separate from the society with which they are ancestrally connected" (364).

Given my own scholarly orientations, Dominguez's argument, and related conversations, have long been important to my work: they both challenge and make space for my projects and prevent me from either assuming carte blanche justifiability or despairing of my inherent status as trespasser.

A few recent exchanges, however, have gotten me thinking about a corollary another aspect of Dominguez's point, one that I haven't often considered from my own particular identity status, even though the sentence is starred on the tattered copy where I first read it: "Where are the Chinese experts on the Italian Renaissance (in the United States), or the Indian experts on the American Revolution (in the United States), or the Puerto Rican experts on GATT (in the United States)?

The corollary to that set of questions, raised in the sentences around it, is this: why must members of a "minoritized" group include study of their own group among their scholarly interests? How often is a white, or male, or heterosexual, or U.S. native scholar assumed to be qualified to teach or study whiteness or masculinity or heterosexuality or [North] America in addition to whatever else s/he teaches or studies?

A scholar acquaintance of mine, during a conversation about the academic job market, recently encouraged me to be open, in job interviews, about my interest in gay and lesbian stuff and women's studies. Another recent exchange with a feminist scholar of women's rhetoric required me to explain that, though there are several rich avenues for exploring issues of gender within my current scholarly project, I have not chosen to pursue them directly.

Now, the second anecdote is less, err, problematic than the first. For a scholar interested in women's and gender studies to inquire about the implications of gender in my work is not different from a scholar of literature asking about how Ecuadorian literature fits into my project. And yet, the exchange prompted some pondering. I consider myself a feminist, yet my feminism does not directly enter into my scholarly work. Does that make me a bad feminist? I am a woman, yet my primary political and social investments are not correlated to my sex or my gender. Neither are my primary scholarly interests. I do realize that in both the theoretical underpinning of my work and the practical realities of my scholarly career I owe a great deal to current and fore-going women who have blazed professional trails and made the conceptual paths I follow visible as well. At the same time, I refuse to believe that I betray their efforts if my own work does not directly advance the goal of making the histories of women and the interstitial influences of gender more obviously central to the study of rhetoric.

To the first anecdote. As can be gathered from the paragraph above, my own work does not trace the histories of women or gender in composition and rhetoric. There are, however, a number of amazing scholars of my own own generation whose work does chart new territory for the field. It is, most certainly, my duty as a scholar (not as a woman) to support and engage their work, to read it, and to make sure that students are reading it. On the other hand, for me to suggest that, because I am a woman, I am particularly qualified to teach the sorts of classes those experts would teach, or write the sorts of articles and books that they produce, would do them a gross disservice. My future courses (be they on visual rhetoric, history & criticism, publics and democracies, the Americas, or performance) will most certainly engage a range of perspectives and a variety of authors, not for reasons of identity politics, but for reasons of quality. A rhetoric course on social movements would be remiss not to include the women's movement. A study of the rhetorical force of images of indigenous people in Ecuadorian art (hmm ... wonder if anyone's doing that?) will need to grapple with the gendered choices made by artists. But there are men and women in the field who can, do, and should teach courses on feminist rhetoric or women in rhetorical history with a level of expertise that I do not currently have. I would be horribly uncomfortable suggesting that I would be able to teach such a course simply by virtue of the training I have received thus far and my own possession of two X chromosomes. This is not to say that I wouldn't share the task of prepping such a course if I were hired at a school where we had no expert. Graduate school, if nothing else, trains us to train ourselves, deepen our knowledge, and respond to new intellectual challenges.

The question of a scholarly interest in gay and lesbian stuff is a tad more complicated. With an MA in Performance Studies and a continuing interest in bodies and performance, I'm tolerably familiar with more-or-less current work in queer theory. I could put together a course that looked at the legacy of queer theory within rhetorical studies without feeling out of my element. At the same time, my encounters with that broad array of work one could loosely lump under the heading 'queer theory' have generally, um, 'queered' the question of sexual orientation, refusing to be about gay and lesbian, often refusing to be about sexual orientation at all, being far more interested in social forces, public spaces, identity politics, and performance than in the lived particulars of "being" gay or lesbian, transgendered or transsexual, queer or whatever. My future course on bodies and performance will be utterly indebted to the giants (and the worker bees) of queer theory, but I'd hesitate to describe it as an example of "gay and lesbian studies." My own writing, similarly, may quote Butler and co. but if the word "lesbian" appears in my dissertation it'll be as an aside or in a comparative and I can't say that any of the little project fetuses bobbing around in my head these days are any more likely to prefer members of their own queer little genders.

Frankly, the closest I come to writing directly about any of my own identity categories is in writing about whiteness in the Ecuadorian context. But, the Ecuadorian white-mestizo experience/performance of whiteness is sufficiently distant from my own that such a comparison hardly seems justifiable.