I think your points are sensitive and thoughtful. The question we all have to
ask ourselves is this: what do we use for our criteria in evaluating these
kinds of questions? The US legal and the university system has developed a
particular way which (ideally) makes its judgemets based on "universalist"
and "modernist" notions of "equality" and "justice". While some in this
conversation would disagree with me, I believe these concepts hide the fact
that we make sense of the world through the sets of ideas, conceptions,
optics that have been sedimented and naturalized through history and that
when not made explicit, the sexist (and racist, homophobic) striated
conceptions that ALL of us employ (including myself) to organize our ways of
living in the world go underground. While some argue we can get rid of these
kinds of "prejudices", it seems to me we must learn to live within them, and
most importantly, accept our own participation in them as we try to transform
them.
It seems impossible (to me) that the Daly affair did not involve a
considerable amount of misogyny, from the "man" who tried to get into the
class and the organization that sponsored him, to the way the university
handled it, to the press coverage of it. This is not to trivialize misogyny
and use it as a blanket term but to recognize that all relations where gender
is expressed participate in misogyny. As is the nature of a class system
where one class is privileged at the expense of another, the privilege is
reproduced through the simple existence of that class. This recognition is
the basis of the "postmodern" or Foucaultian critique of identity, identities
and power are intimately involved.
If one agrees with me about this, one must be careful about the way in which
certain notions of "justice" and "fairness" obfuscate this. The complicated
operations of misogyny in this particular case should be made explicit and
not ignored. Again, this is not to say that my sympathies lie with Daly. For
the most part, I think tenured professors have an awful lot of privilege
which they frequently forget. Still, the fact that Daly is fired for this and
that she is frequently read as one of those "annoying" and "radical"
feminists are not unrelated. To say that they are not is to deny the
operations of gender in everyday life.
Finally, for me, this case is not about Daly but about her students (an idea
lost on some). If one believes that the purpose of the university is to
foster spaces where people can think critically about their world (as well as
to understand the world they think critically about) then Daly's classroom is
essential to some and should be left alone. Can someone make the same
argument about an "all male" space or an "all white" space? Yes, but it only
makes sense within the discourses of a universalist standard. If we answer
these questions through an understanding of the history of inequality and its
effects on the ways on which we understand ourselves and the world, the
answers, while still requiring work, become clearer.
In this case, "Modernist" and "Universalist" standards provide solutions and
lazy substitutes for people who don't want to really understand history and
collectively work hard to precipitate social transformation. Of course, the
implementation of this would require a fundamental change in the legal and
political system of this country, one that doesn't seem to be in the cards
anytime soon. Still, it always pays to be sensitive...
Robert Ausch
CUNY