Performing Collegiality, Troubling Gender

Three Vignettes of Academic Life

1. 1. Kenyon College, where I have taught for the last thirteen years, prides itself on its traditions. Five times during the course of an academic year (six times if a new president is to be inaugurated, which has happened twice during my tenure at the college), the faculty is expected to don academic regalia for the performance of the college's annual rites. The round of rituals cyclically punctuates the long durée of institutional time—the academic year: Opening Convocation, Founders' Day, Honors Day, Baccalaureate, and Graduation. Dutifully—and perhaps to satisfy the anthropologist manquée in me—for each event I pull out of its protective plastic wrap my Penn regalia, my "academic drag," so thoughtfully purchased for me by the president of another small liberal arts college at which I taught in the 1980s. The gown and hood display Penn's tasteful mainline colors—burgundy and navy—trimmed with blue velvet to indicate my doctoral status. Because I look positively ludicrous in mortarboards, the hat is soft blue velvet with a real gold tassel, but still much too big for my too small head. While I would never have spent my own money on something so impractical as academic drag, I am grateful to have it since it gets so much use from year to year. But one little thing rankles every time I put it on. Attached to the end of the hood is a small loop of thread, which I take to be the means by which one attaches the hood securely to one's person. However, I never seem to have an article of clothing to which I can attach it. It occurs to me that gown and hood were designed to be worn with clothing men are likely to wear—buttoned dress shirt and tie; it works less well with clothing women typically wear.

2. 2. We have all experienced that moment at a professional conference at the registration desk when we pick up nametags. Usually they come with a plastic holder to be attached to the wearer's clothing, usually at the level of the breast. Three methods of attachment are common: the pin, the clip on, and the elastic string. The first two are the more usual. To my eternal irritation, I am always being asked—the badge being a little piece of what, paraphrasing Bruno Latour, we might call a "reified imperative"—to poke a hole in the flimsy material of my favorite blouse or sweater or to figure out some way to clip a badge literally onto air because what I am wearing has no breast pocket or lapel to which I might affix it.¹ Sometimes I just refuse to wear the badge; often I clip my badges onto the waistband of my trousers.

3. 3. When I taught at another small liberal arts college in the 1980s, the building my department was housed in had a single bathroom, which, by my time there, was unisex. I often wondered what led to a situation in which a public building could contain a single public restroom. My clue was that it contained a urinal but no tampon machine. When I asked I was told, with no apparent irony, that the building was constructed at a time when the department was entirely male and the builders assumed they could economize by not including unnecessary luxuries like a ladies' room. Presumably female students (the college was from its inception co-educational) and secretaries had no need of restroom facilities and indeed for many years the department secretary (inevitably a female) was required to use the facilities in another building. The unisex restroom remained until the building was replaced in the 1990s.

I begin with these three scenes from my academic life to make two points about collegiality. The first is that the set of practices or performances that we collect under the term "collegiality" is at once totally global and hopelessly local. The professionalization of the disciplines, as Ellen Messer-Davidow has shown, involves us in procedures (attendance at academic conferences is just one example) that bind...