I participated in a roundtable at Computers and Writing, themed “Mission Critical: Centering Ethical Challenges in Computers and Writing,” unpacking the dumpster fires on the WPA-L listserv as of late.
Access copy of the talk below.
(In)visible labor: Radical professional participation in fraught digital spaces
Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Computers & Writing, East Lansing, MI
June 22, 2019
I want to take a stab at understanding the reactions and disclosures on #WpaListservFeministRevolution in terms of Ahmed’s concept of feminist snap, catalyzed by patriarchal and white supremacist discourses on the WPA-L. The #WpaListservFeministRevolution hashtag gave rise to a frustrated feminist collective unified across gender, race, professional status, and other axes of identity with very little infighting or trolling; rather, the flame warriors emerged on the WPA-L, largely embodied by well-established, senior, white male scholars who responded to feminist complaint with defensive agonism.
As a centralized listserv of the field, the WPA-L serves as a site of socialization into the discipline, and a disciplinary mechanism for those already admitted into its ranks. Vannini observes that academics constantly engage in boundary work in professional spaces to preserve their status and privilege, hierarchizing scholars on the basis of status and alignment with a normative value system. Part of this boundary work entails negotiating the changing ideals of individuals and the profession as a whole, which requires rhetorical listening and a willingness to alter grounds for belonging. This did not appear to be the case on the WPA-L recently, which in the fall and the spring was overtaken by casual misogyny and racism, not for the first time, but this time led to sustained public revolt. Precarious members of the field, including graduate students and untenured faculty who are queer, nonbinary, BIPOC, international citizens, and/or disabled, expended time, energy, and intellectual and emotional labor to inform the listserv about its problematic discourse and the abstract violence inflicted by sexist, racist language. A similarly sexist and racist rebuttal system emerged in the reactionary telling of majoritarian stories, which Martinez describes as privileging “Whites, men, the middle and/or upper class, and heterosexuals by naming these social locations as natural or normative points of reference […] distort[ing] and silenc[ing] the experiences of people of color and others distanced from the norms such stories reproduce.”
This shouldn’t be surprising given that, as Tannen suggests, much of our academic exchange is founded on agonism, which, in its extreme forms, undermines knowledge-making. Agonism asks us to locate fault and prioritize deficit over merit, closing our ears instead of opening them, undermining cultural diversity in the discipline, okaying a lack of respect for colleagues who resist this tradition and its normative values. The majoritarian voices on the WPA-L continually reverted to what Duncan calls “the rhetorical endgame of hate attribution,” draining any position, gesture, or speech act of validity by accusing it of intolerance, incivility, and aggression while framing themselves as misunderstood and besieged. These moments ultimately generated what Ahmed calls the feminist snap, the “I can’t take it anymore” refusal of a patriarchal, racist, ableist inheritance, which “might seem sudden but the suddenness is only apparent; a snap is one moment of a longer history of being affected by what you come up against.” Where the professional listserv became swiftly divided between those normalizing and those contesting systemic sexism and racism in the field, on #WpaListservFeministRevolution on Twitter, the exhaustion of having to constantly bear it even while snapping coalesced into memetic social media disclosures of anger, anxiety, and trauma; expressions of mutual support and admiration; and calls to action. Ahmed identifies laughing at power as a willful and rebellious feminist noise, and perhaps the trollish rhetoric in the backchannel qualifies. Visual vernacular sardonically expressed confusion about offenders’ confusion, signaled mounting “here we go again” frustration, praised posters’ contributions to the WPA-L, acknowledging the risks of posting, or indicated joy and relief when repeat offenders announced they were unsubscribing. This was radically different from the carefully formal rhetoric in many of the listserv posts, despite the public nature of Twitter; many of the same writers who discussed the difficulty of perfecting a WPA-L post to avoid potential backlash were swiftly tweeting their kneejerk gut reactions to WPA-L threads, noting that “It’s almost as if what they really want is someone to center white, able-bodied, straight men in these conversations about privilege and oppression,” or “the audacity of whiteness oh my fucking god.”
Academic agonism has normalized adversarial, intellectualist, sometimes ad hominem discourse as the linchpin of the research enterprise, especially when valorizing dominant epistemic forms over others. In many ways it resembles trolling, with a similar project of training others to suppress emotional response, and to acknowledge that words don’t matter, or matter differently, but this is a baffling position for professional rhetoricians to occupy. How, as members of a discipline that emphasizes critical reading and writing, are we supposed to bear a world where counter-discourses to any discourse, regardless of content, is the currency of the realm? I’ve written elsewhere that “countertrolling means our phrasing, citation, and hate-attribution matters, that our rhetorical strategies should emerge relationally, without sacrificing substance.” If professional forums weaponize the agonistic rhetoric of trolling, from sealioning to loaded language, against the field’s marginalized, precarious, and junior members, maybe we should snap back like trolls, emerging discursively and relationally in conversations and relying on the snark, doublespeak, and memetic references that “out of nowhere” created a feminist collective. The feminist snapping in the backchannel, and the ways in which they leaked into WPA-L posts, amount to a collective refusal to reproduce a world we shouldn’t have to bear, and maybe this is where feminist and anti-racist hope for our professional online spaces lies: in a countertrollish feminist snap that disturbs the venerable sanctity of power with pointed ridicule, turning the violence of power back on itself, finding solidarity in doing so.
Works Cited
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Duncan, P. K. (2017). The uses of hate: On hate as a political category. M/C Journal, 20(1).
Martinez, A. (2020). Counterstory: The rhetoric and writing of critical race theory. NCTE.
Tannen, D. (2013). The argument culture: Agonism & the common good. Daedalus, 142(3).
Vannini, P. (2004). Authenticity and power in the academic profession [Doctoral dissertation]. Washington State University.
