DISSERTATION
Individuals Resisting Oppression: Allyship and Resistant Subjectivity
What is the proper place of the individual in dismantling structural oppression given the fact that they are both produced by and producing the systems that structure their “worlds of sense”? How can individuals develop their beliefs, habits, practices, and selves in resistant ways, towards social transformation?
One answer comes from allyship discourse: individuals should aim to be good allies. I critique this idea: I think it wrongly directs individuals’ energies towards avoiding complicity in structural oppression. I argue that some amount of complicity in social reproduction is inevitable, and focusing solely on making one’s self no longer complicit encourages methodological individualism and a problematic moral perfectionism. Drawing upon twenty in-depth interviews with social justice actors and thinking through white allyship and male allyship in NYC as case-studies, I argue that allyship discourse is politically myopic: it can distract us from projects of social justice. Worse, it risks re-entrenching oppressive power dynamics.
As an alternative, I develop a novel account of “resistant subjectivity,” thinking about the individual’s orientation to their social justice projects on an everyday level. Here, I assume what Mariana Ortega calls the “multiplicitous self,” an existentially plural subject, as well as feminist Foucauldian and decolonial work on the production of particular types of subjects through discourse and power. By identifying practices individuals may engage in to transform their relationship with the socially oppressive systems that they are embedded in, I develop an account of the subject of resistant politics that is always already multiply located, who is both complicit in and produced by oppressive social reproduction, and at the same time producing resistant meanings or discourse. I end by considering how my revised account of the individual resisting structural oppression applies to the ally’s “duty” to educate others about oppression.
PUBLICATIONS
Book Review on Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, The New School, Volume 43, Issue 2, 2022, pp. 428-433.
“The phenomenology of weight-cycling and participation in diet culture.” Accepted for publication in Critical Fat Phenomenology (eds. Ramanpreet Bahra, Christine Negus & Kristin Rodier).
Coined in 1986 by psychologist Kelly Brownell, “weight cycling”(sometimes called “yo-yo dieting,”) describes the phenomenon of losing weight and then gaining it (and often more) back in repetitive cycles as a result of engaging in prolonged dieting behavior (Brownell et al. 1986; Welsh 2014, 260).This dieting behavior functions as both “remedy” and “poison” in cycles of repetition – as reaction against and prophylaxis from “excess” body weight. However, diets rarely affect long term weight-loss and can lead to weight-cycling (Bombak 2015, 683). Subsequently, the paradigmatic experience of what I call being a “weight-cycler” is that of oscillating between fat and relatively thin(ner) states of embodiment due to participation in diet culture.
This chapter works towards a critical phenomenology of weight-cycling: the experience of shrinking and expanding, of losing and gaining weight, in contemporary western fatphobic society. I expand on and explore the following insight. Since fat people and people who gain weight are interpreted in negatively valenced ways and treated in abusive ways, and since thin people and people who lose weight are interpreted in positively valenced ways and treated in better ways, and since these experiences are bound up in fatphobic diet culture, the oscillating experience of weight-cycling is worth attending to if we are to better understand weight-cyclers’ continued participation in diet culture. From here, I consider first-hand, social-scientific, and fictional accounts of weight-cycling, arriving at three phenomenological features: proprioceptive ambivalence, intelligibility slippage, and anxiety. I try to show how these features can orient weight-cyclers towards continued dieting. These features are neither necessary nor sufficient for someone to be a weight-cycler. My point is not to exhaust an account of the lived experience of someone who weight-cycles. Rather, I’m using phenomenological methods to begin inquiry into the lived experience of weight-cyclers, homing in on similarities in accounts of weight-cycling to do so.
Since most people who lose weight using diets will regain the weight they lost within one year, and further to the point, dieting tends to make people fatter in the long run, the possibility weight-cyclers negotiate is not just a thin future but also a fat(ter) future (Gasser 2009, 39; E. D. Rothblum 2018). This, from a practical point of view, might make them seem irrational. Furthermore, from a fat activist point of view, one might think that choosing to diet is contributing to a harmful and oppressive system. Still, I’m not convinced that people who diet, especially fat people who diet, are either irrational or harmful figures. In fact, I think that there are phenomenological reasons for why fat people often continue to diet and weight-cycle.
PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY
Feminist X-Phi Reading Group Blueprint for the Diversity Reading List, 2023 with Shannon Brick and Tomasz Zyglewicz
Blogpost: “Expressive Prose and Freire’s Problem-Posing Education”as part of a fellowship with Writing Across the Curriculum at City Tech
Public project and podcast: “Imagining a CUNY Without Grades” supported by Transformative Learning in the Humanities at CUNY
Blogpost: “Cultivating a Philosophy of Open Pedagogy” Mina Rees Library Blog
WORKS IN PROGRESS
“’Obesity’ and Healthcare in the Face of Fat Activism”
This paper explores insights from fat activism for the care of obese patients by revisiting two recent medical controversies. It will answer two questions: What role should bodyweight play in scarce resource allocation? Should clinicians encourage the use of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic/WeGovy?
The paper begins by considering two approaches to “obese” persons’ health developed by the fat activist community: (1) the social model of health, and (2) the Health at Every Size movement. The first argues that the thin-centric social world unjustly contributes to making fat persons sick. Under this rubric, it is the social world that needs to change, not fat people. For example, consider the significant iatrogenic impacts of provider weight-bias and the negative health impacts that stem from social stigma and the social determinants of health. The second argues that the pursuit of health is possible regardless of bodyweight, noting the unreliability of the BMI as an indicator of health, as well as facts about health risks being lowered by physical activity, social support, good nutrition, access to medical care, and so forth, regardless of the occurrence of weight loss. Under this rubric, fatness does not necessarily cause ill health: the source of ill health is poor lifestyle, which may or may not affect weight. I explore the answers these approaches offer and the potential limits of fat activist paradigms for discussing the just allocation of scarce resources and prescription of weight loss drugs.
“Social Justice Discourse, Identity Politics, and the ‘Figure’ of the Ally”
Take an ally in the social justice sense to be an individual who aligns with and supports an oppressed group that they don’t belong to in fighting injustice the ally themselves doesn’t face. I begin by examining the recent cultural phenomenon paradigmatically seen in allyship “training” spaces such as Layla F. Saad’s online masterclass “Dismantling White Feminism: A 90-Minute Good Ancestor Academy Masterclass,” and the Feminist Men Project. Call this allyship discourse.
In this paper I argue that allyship discourse posits qn ethical ideal of the figure of the “good ally”: to embody this figure would mean to become no longer complicit in oppression. In Foucauldian terms, allyship becomes a technology of the self, emphasizing individual selves’ moral worthiness rather than the importance of collectively strategizing for liberatory ends under imperfect conditions (Foucault, 1982). I show that allyship discourse produces specific, power-maintaining, modes of behavior and emotion through this disciplinary figure. Examples of power-maintaining modes of behavior are problematic modes of deference and identity politics that have been, in Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s words “elite captured” (Táíwò, 2022). That is, they have been co-opted by relatively privileged members of our social world(s) to benefit the interests of the already-powerful rather than advance collective liberation.
For example, imagine a multi-national US-based corporation drawing on the language of identity in their advertising, and releasing a product line in honor of Black Liberation in the time of BLM. In seemingly attending to structural racism, this company allows its customers to posture as good allies in their consumption practices. At the same time, imagine that their product sourcing contributes to the racist-colonial exploitation of workers in the Global South. Accordingly, this business initiative allows detractors to posture as good allies by refusing to purchase their goods. The company’s deployment of allyship discourse allows its customers to feel good about themselves as they purchase the product that comes from a harmful process. It also allows people who are not customers to feel good about themselves as they refuse to purchase the product. Still, structural racism is not dismantled by the customers’ purchases or their (individual) boycotts. What is produced is a focus on the moral worthiness of the individual who chooses to buy or not to buy from the corporation.
I thus provide an immanent critique of allyship discourse—that it renders social transformation impotent, precisely because it produces a political subjectivity that is centrally concerned with avoiding individual complicity. This leads us to bad forms of methodological individualism and moral perfectionism, since we focus on agents choosing between bad choices in a pre-given choice structure rather than on changing structures of choice-sets, which is necessary for social transformation.
“The Comparative Effectiveness of Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Bioethics Lecture Delivery on Student Learning in Discussion Board Posts”
Collaborators: Jenny Schiff, Ryan Felder, Joanna Smolenski, Julia Kolak, Paul Cummins, Rosamond Rhodes
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many courses initially planned as in-person experiences were transitioned to online delivery. In this “physically distanced” world, bioethics faculty had to adapt quickly. We combined two groups of existing graduate students from our two FIC NIH funded research programs (eight students from “Establishment of a Master’s Program in Research Ethics at the University of Belgrade School of Medicine”; ten students from “Establishing a Master’s Program in Research Ethics and Methodology in Cluj-Napoca Romania”). We created five new four-week online mini-courses on topics chosen by the Serbian and Romanian faculty: “Justice and Pandemic Diseases,” “Reproduction,” “Pediatrics,” “Organ Transplantation,” and “Death and Dying.” Each mini-course involved required readings, weekly lectures, discussion board participation, and a final paper.
We wanted to investigate the comparative pedagogical efficacy of synchronous and asynchronous lecture delivery for graduate bioethics education. Having two cohorts of students enrolled in our bioethics programs created an opportunity to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of synchronous and asynchronous lecture delivery on student learning as evidenced in online discussion board posts in these mini-courses. Students from the Serbian and Romanian groups received the same lectures and educational materials but rotated participation in synchronous or asynchronous Zoom lectures on a week-by-week basis.
We developed a rubric that raters used to score students’ initial posts in response to questions about lecture material. For the synchronous lectures, students could engage with the professor and each other in real time. The pre-recorded asynchronous lectures were uploaded for students’ own viewing. To optimize students’ learning experiences , we ensured all students had an equal number of synchronous and asynchronous lectures (rather than giving half of them synchronous, and half asynchronous).
It is widely assumed that synchronous lecture delivery is pedagogically preferable and more effective than asynchronous delivery in terms of learning outcomes. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis supports this conclusion (Martin et al. 2021). We anticipated that, for the same discussion board question, students’ scores on posts following synchronous lectures would, on average, be higher than those following asynchronous lectures. Our study shows that, within the confines of our study, there was no meaningful difference in learning outcomes in terms of student discussion board posts when comparing synchronous and asynchronous lecture delivery.
Our study investigates only graduate student learning and learning as evidenced only by discussion board posts (not learning overall). Nonetheless, our findings elucidate pedagogical considerations in the design of online bioethics education.
“On Calling and Being Called Fat” (with Miranda Young)
In her book The Hyper(in)visible Fat Woman, sociologist Jeannine Gailey theorizes the lived realities of “women of size” in the United States drawing on in-depth interviews and qualitative research. Gailey describes how the word “‘fat’ is a powerful word because it is most commonly used to injure or intimidate” (Gailey, 140). She describes, along lines sketched above, how many fat activists want to reclaim the word fat, thereby defusing it so that it can no longer be used to punish, hurt, and humiliate people. People who want to reclaim this word would have it be a simple descriptor, divested from (negative) moral weight, and perhaps also have it take on positive moral valence. (Gailey, 140). Yet, she also details how numerous women of size that she interviewed specifically did not want fat to be part of their identity, these women feel that the word fat is too “deeply laden with negativity” to ever be successfully fully reclaimed (Gailey, Chapter 2, 140).
This political tension motivates this paper: What accounts for the differences in experiences between people when it comes to the use of the word “fat” and experiences of being fat? And what does it mean to develop a political consciousness around an oppressed identity, in this case fatness, in order to imagine new political worlds where that identity is not oppressed? Indeed, how can we, fat people, and also oppressed people at large, navigate resistant meaning-making given that words both have the power to harm and the power to resist?
