What is your job?

I am the Publicist for the Shakespeare Theatre Company. I work closely within my department to promote the productions for the season. I create press releases, such as announcing the cast, and guarantee that theatre critics will attend and review performances on opening night. I pitch stories to various print and online publications, morning news shows, podcasts, and other media outlets. I also coordinate with the stage management team and media outlets to schedule interviews with actors, directors, and designers, and work as an agent for the cast and creative team for publicity opportunities. I make sure events are listed on a variety of local arts and cultural events calendars, and I have been working with other departments within the company to find potential publicity opportunities.

A Publicist creates earned advertising. Unlike paid advertising, I must make the connections with print and online media outlets to get coverage through persuasive pitches and interesting angles. Likewise, most of the “communications” are generated and disseminated in-house, on Twitter, Facebook, and the website. In many theatre companies a Publicist may be in charge of marketing and/or social media, too, but in my position the communications I tend to write — press releases and press statements — are meant to be published in outside venues rather than in-house. 

I am in the Department of Marketing and Communications, which includes many subdivisions and duties — at the theatres, in the administrative offices, and in all outward-facing arenas. My department is concerned with everything including paid advertising; the social media presence of the Company; the overall design and copy of the website; the graphics and artwork of the Company; subscription, package, group, and individual ticket sales, including the box office; retail, concessions, and other sales; in-house publications; bookings and events held at the theatres; and audience services and theatre management.

What made you want to look for career off the tenure track?

Ha! That’s a long story, but the short version is: my husband was tenure-track at a large research university, and well on his way to securing tenure there. I had two previous visiting assistant professorships, and was likely about to embark on another, but I was dreading living apart again.

We decided together to leave academia at the beginning of the last academic calendar. After my first few 2018-19 academic applications went out, I just stopped. We chose a few cities where we would both want to live, to see if we could land satisfying, well-paid positions outside of academia. He had a long hiring process for his current position, and that allowed me the time to refocus my energy into creating resumes and cover letters for other types of positions, specifically in Washington, D.C. 

How did you get your job?

I applied for and interviewed (by phone) at several Washington, D.C., libraries, theater companies, and non-profit organizations. The whole process — especially for those who have applied for academic positions — is so much more quick, transparent, and (relatively) painless. I was happy after the phone interview here, and that made the decision easy.

What kind of job counseling or advice did you seek out?

I made sure to create a Linked-In account, and I think more helpful than the account itself was seeing how others in positions I would want framed their skills. I talked to any and all friends with a PhD working outside of academia, asking for materials and asking them basically the same questions as we have here. I used the resources on The Versatile PhD, Beyond the Professoriate, and other online opportunities. I joined the alumni associations at the universities that granted my PhD and MA. I was making connections and asking lots of questions, doing the homework to learn about different career options. And this may be different for other positions, of course, but I was dropping any real mentions of my research. No one needs to know what my dissertation is about in a cover letter — succinctly stating that I am an expert in Shakespearean performance is enough.

What does your average day look like? What kind of decisions you make?

I usually work 9:30am-5:30pm in an office building, with a few evening events per month. My day consists of drafting, revising, and editing press releases and other writing for the theatre. I send a lot of emails to theatre critics and writers, and I get to have coffee or lunch with these writers so we can discuss potential articles at length. When I have an interview pitch accepted, I also schedule the interview, provide transportation, and inform the actor about the details of the interview.

But there are all sorts of surreal aspects of the job. I have helped members of the Supreme Court onstage for a Mock Trial. I have attended The Atlantic Festival and shared a greenroom with some major celebrities. U.S. Senators have performed jokes I wrote while wearing crowns and capes, and, at this point, I’ve emailed more than one “Dame.”

What skills do you use in your job?

I am still a writer and researcher, but usually in a different capacity. When I am pitching stories, I begin by doing a lot of research to gather details about my topic, but also researching to consider the best outlet for a story. In some ways, it’s even more specific than trying to find the correct academic journal for an article because it’s not just where does this story belong, but also who is the person who will want to write this story.

I get to do a lot of archival work, too, such as finding and pulling previous photographs and articles, watching older productions as research or for audio clips, etc. I really enjoy digging into the theatre’s past to get a better sense of where it is now and where it is heading.

I do also write some materials, such as short essays in our theatre program and copy on the website. It’s an opportunity to take my years of study and distill it into an accessible piece of writing that may be read by up to 10,000 theatregoers during the run of a play. I’ve written mayoral proclamations, a note entered into the Congressional record, and comedy sketches performed by U.S. politicians, as well as ghostwriting for other tasks.

I really love doing that.

What, if anything, might you have done differently during your PhD career to set yourself up to transition into a career off the tenure track?

I would not have continued for the PhD. It’s that simple. Maybe I would have earned a Master’s degree in Arts Administration, Museum Studies, or Library Sciences instead or in addition to the MA in English. I have never been called into a non-academic interview where the PhD was needed, and I believe that for many jobs the PhD made me a less desirable applicant for a variety of reasons.

How do you see your job for your field more generally changing in the next 5-10 years?

The world of print media is rapidly changing, and although there are fewer venues for publication (my colleagues in advertising, too, are affected by this and where to run their adverts), there are always ways to get people talking about theatre and arts. I may just have to get creative!

What advice would you give someone considering entering your field?

I don’t know if I would be interested in all public relations positions, but I am happy working to be doing publicity promoting the arts, humanities, and other non-profit organizations with a mission I believe in.

So, if anyone were interested in those sorts of position, it’s easy to find some of the outlets now as a current or recent graduate student:

• become a writer or editor for various publications (I did a lot of theatre, book, and music reviews and interviews in my grad-school hustle, and still do an occasional concert review on the side)
• volunteer for a local arts organization as a publicist: help drum up some excitement for new works and events
• do informational interviews about the position (you can contact me, for example)
• study up on the technical aspects of the job (my learning curve included learning the templates for specific writing assignments publicists do, but a good MOOC or some online videos and articles will help with that)

What do you most like about your job?

There are many things I truly enjoy about the job: free tickets for plays (and often at other local theatres, too), knowing that my writing will connect with theatregoers, reading an article that I helped facilitate come out, having weeknights and weekends free to spend with my husband (which wasn’t true when we were both academics), and more.

But, as a very recent example, I spent a long, leisurely lunch with a highly respected theatre critic, and we just chatted about theatre generally. And somehow, I got paid to just have a really great conversation with someone else who is so passionate and experienced in theatre. What could be better than that? 

The post On Track for Success: PhDs Working Off the Tenure Track (Week 4) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

What is your job?

I am Assistant Teaching Professor and English Studies Coordinator. This is basically a hybrid of administration and teaching. I report to the English department chair, but I am also going to be working closely with the new faculty Director of Undergraduate Studies.

What made you want to look for a career off the tenure track?

I applied to tenure stream jobs, too. I cast a wide net.

How did you get your job?

I believe that the clincher was a good job letter and my previous experience working in administrative positions outside academia. It’s a bit ironic that that’s the case, but inter-office skills are often something academics sometimes don’t learn before they are on the market.

What kind of job counseling or advice did you seek out?

I had the opportunity to do mock interviews with colleagues at University of Pittsburgh, and these were infinitely valuable. A good practice run generally involves saying all the wrong things and knowing immediately, as you are saying them, how to fix your answers.  

What does your average day look like? What kind of decisions do you make?

I ride my bike straight uphill to campus, then I check in with the undergraduate coordinator and the administrative specialist. I answer emails, send emails out, check my day planner, make my task list (for instance, today my main agenda is typing up meeting minutes for the Undergraduate Committee meeting last week), and then do whatever class prep I may still need to do, and teach. I also am the go-to for the department’s PR intern, so I make sure she gets what she needs for promoting events, and I check that what I’ve sent her has been posted. I ride home for lunch to walk my dog, too. I don’t have to pedal on the ride home!

I enjoy having the routine of coming in to co-workers who I have to talk to and collaborate with. But I also love teaching, and there are a number of bright students in my classes that have a lot of smart things to say.

What skills do you use in your job?

I teach, so I use the critical reading and writing skills I acquired in higher education. I also use my technical skills — programs and applications that are fundamental to office management, such as Excel (I don’t love it, but I can use it). But the main thing is soft skills — communication in particular. I have a lot of questions, and I have to ask confidently, and also listen to or read answers carefully, so I don’t have to ask again or misunderstand. This sounds so obvious, but it can be difficult when a lot is going on.

What, if anything, might you have done differently during your PhD career to set yourself up to transition into a career off the tenure track?

This is a weird question, because really, the tenure track is usually the goal when you go into a PhD program. Non-tenure jobs can be very exploitative and low-paying. This job, though, is much better paying than the equivalent at most other universities, and it has room for promotion. It also makes a space for someone like me who is a dedicated teacher, but may be a little slower to publish than what is expected for tenure today.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career off the tenure track?

Be open to careers outside the tenure track, work on your job materials and begin professionalizing early, attend job market preparation events, and don’t focus on publication alone.

The post On Track for Success: PhDs Working Off the Tenure Track (Week 3) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

What is your job?

I am the Assistant Director of the Center for Fellowship & Scholarship Advising at Syracuse University. I work under our director, Jolynn Parker, to advise students regarding nationally competitive fellowships and scholarships such as Fulbright, Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Gilman, Truman, and more.

What made you want to look for a career off the tenure track?

At first, it was a lack of tenure track job opportunities in the geographic location in which I wished to live. As I continued to reflect on my personal and career goals, I was increasingly finding that the tenure track didn’t provide the kind of work/life balance that I desired. You can read more about my process in my previous Pub post, “We’re All Smart Enough: A Pep Talk for PhDs on the Job Market.”

How did you get your job?

I initially heard about the opportunity through my advisor, who is friends with the director of my new department. I then submitted an application through the university’s centralized hiring process, and completed two rounds of interviews: one informal, and the other in-person.

What kind of job counseling or advice did you seek out?

All kinds! I worked with my advisor to discuss possible non-tenure track opportunities. I attended career workshops organized by my university’s graduate career services and my department. I attended conference panels and workshops about career development. I followed blogs like Karen Kelsky’s The Professor Is In. And I generally kept in touch with colleagues who had received their degrees but found employment off the tenure track.

What does your average day look like? What kinds of decisions do you make?

On an average day I am at my desk by 8:30am, answering emails and checking out my to-do list. I read drafts of student application materials, and offer feedback on the fitness of its content for the particular application, as well as things like grammar and punctuation. Scholarship application materials (especially personal statements) are their own genre, and so I help students get acquainted with what that genre requires. Then I might meet with students to discuss either fellowship opportunities for which they might be eligible, or their current applications for particular fellowships.

I work on publicizing workshops and information sessions hosted by our office. I might also be managing a writing workshop where students conduct peer-review to help each other revise their application essays. I coordinate with other campus offices and departments to organize events. If needed, I update our website. I post to our department Instagram. At some point, I eat lunch (usually at my desk) but I also often take an afternoon walk with a coworker. And then I’m out the door at 5:00pm!

We are currently busier than normal due to the many fellowship and scholarship deadlines in September and October, so I have been completing about one hour of work at home in the evenings. But it’s temporary.

What skills do you use in your job?

I use my writing, editing, and teaching skills daily, as well as my skills in multitasking and managing projects over a long period. I also make great use out of my event planning skills. My experience with WordPress also came in handy, as that is the platform that houses our department’s website. The skills I had to pick up were largely content-based. I needed to (and continue to) familiarize myself with the scholarships and fellowships that our office advertises to students. I also needed to reframe my pedagogical strategies for the product-based nature of our work.

What, if anything, might you have done differently during your PhD career to set yourself up to transition into a career off the tenure track?

I would have been more honest with myself early on about what I did or did not like about the work I was doing in graduate school, and seriously considered alternative careers. I also would have conducted informational interviews with individuals who had the types of jobs I wanted off the tenure-track to get a better sense of how I could build my resume for those careers.

How do you see your job or your field more generally changing in the future?

I am in a growing profession (something new after being on the English tenure-track job market!). Fellowship and scholarship offices will continue to grow as more universities realize the value of our service, as well as decrease the number of tenure-track faculty — the people who used to informally do the kind of work that fellowship offices now provide. Since that problem isn’t going away, I actually look forward to the creation of more offices like ours at Syracuse University, especially at institutions with underserved student populations.

What advice would you give someone considering a career off the tenure track?

Informational interviews! If you want to continue working in a university setting, look for the types of jobs offered at your university or the kinds of universities you want to work at. Then, reach out to the people who hold jobs you’d be interested in.

The post On Track for Success: PhDs Working Off the Tenure Track (Week 2) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This month, we’re interviewing people with humanities PhDs who once found themselves in this very position, asking similar questions regarding their future. All are now working full-time off the tenure track. Their answers to how do I get a job? are as diverse as the career options available to PhD students. But one of the most important strategies to finding out how to get a job you want is to interview people who are already working in the field.

To start, we interviewed Dan Moseson, an alumni of the Religion PhD program at Syracuse University, where in 2018 he defended his dissertation on how the concept of “religion” functions in the field of contemplative studies, a close cousin of the mindfulness movement. Now, he holds the position of Graduate Career Coach in the Career and Professional Development Center at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City.

What is your job?

My main responsibilities are providing one-on-one career guidance to graduate students, presenting to classes and other gatherings, and designing campus programs to further graduate students’ degree completion and entry into the career of their choice. I’m assigned to the Colleges of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Architecture and Planning, and also serve two graduate programs in the College of Education. Our office serves most of the university, with the exception of a few colleges, so we have a large number of career coaches with different specialties, some of whom are also in Assistant Director roles over coaching, programming, and marketing.

What made you want to look for a career off the tenure track?

Partially the job market, partially the realization that my best and most gratifying work was in creating programming for graduate students, some of it focused on career development. Another important factor is what happens when a city boy like me is left to set his own schedule for nine years outside a major metro area. I got very into hiking, outdoor photography, and generally moving and doing things outside while I lived in Syracuse, and had great opportunities to be involved in radio broadcasting and political advocacy as well.

I think I just have too many interests to devote my life to research 24/7. On a recent Saturday, I helped reroute part of a hiking trail way up in the Rockies above Salt Lake City, and it was just the best. I’m hoping I can continue to conduct and present research, though I don’t yet have a concrete plan for striking that balance. 

How did you get your job?

By applying on the internet, cold, which is the wrong way. The way to get a job is networking and informational interviewing, which I didn’t do very much of. I do not think I would have gotten my current job without the experience I gained creating programs and serving in student government at Syracuse University, and the concrete accomplishments I was able to point to on both of those fronts. Especially for humanists, if you want a career outside the classroom after graduation, you have to be involved outside the classroom before graduation.

For example, I assume most folks reading this have been passionate about social justice since roughly the moment of their conception, and a city like Syracuse has plenty of need for people willing to get their hands dirty and change some things. If you hang around long enough, you’ll also gain a variety of useful experiences in communication and organization, which act as evidence of what your skills in speaking, writing, project planning, and critical thinking can accomplish on the ground. Plus, you’ll likely enrich your own scholarship and actually help some people, too.

For folks at Syracuse University, I would look for opportunities to get involved through the Office of Engagement Programs at Hendricks Chapel, the Syracuse Center for Peace and Social Justice, and whatever else you know about. I hear there’s an election of some importance coming up, as well. All these experiences count, if you know how to talk about them. Your university’s own career development center can show you how.  

What kind of job advice did you seek out?

I worked extensively with Dan Olson-Bang, Director of Professional and Career Development in the Graduate School at Syracuse University. I consulted with him on every aspect of career exploration and the job search. In the process, I learned many of the skills I now teach to graduate students at the University of Utah. I was also lucky enough to have a very transparent, collaborative relationship with my dissertation advisor, who was very supportive of my using my PhD training to build a career that works for me. 

What does your average day look like? What kind of decisions do you make?

There isn’t an average day. Sometimes I’m meeting with students and planning grad events. And sometimes I’m taking photos for undergrads’ LinkedIn pages, slinging snow-cones like nobody’s business, or trying to get four cornhole boards and assorted other lawn paraphernalia to stay in the back of a moving golf cart. That’s another way of saying my job offers opportunities to be involved in a lot of different endeavors, from professional development retreats to career fairs, networking events, and community partnerships.

I’ve had a lot of autonomy (after some basic training) in how I approach my meetings with students, set my appointment hours, and design programs for groups of students.  I review most of what I do with my supervisor, but in that process, my ideas usually get refined, rather than vetoed. 

What skills do you use in your job?

I think the graduate students and the faculty in my program taught me how to be a good collaborator and mentor. I need those skills to get students to trust me enough to listen to what I have to say. The PhD-specific skill I use most is close, critical reading, and attention to how a piece of writing is working at different scales of focus. Sometimes I’m making small tweaks to a resume or cover letter, and sometimes I’m reworking the whole document in a short timeframe, hopefully in a collaborative process with a student. It’s delightful. 

It also probably also helps (as Chris M. Golde of Stanford’s graduate career center argues) that I have some idea how universities work and empathy for how grad students and faculty experience things.  Maybe there’s an attitude there, too. My grad program encouraged creative, interdisciplinary thinking and gave me the space to try it, in research and in student programming. I think some of that has carried over to this role where, fortunately, I also have a lot of autonomy to try new kinds of programming for graduate students. So, there is a kind of experimental attitude I work from. I’ve always been that way, but my graduate program definitely encouraged it. 

What, if anything, might you have done differently during your PhD career to set yourself up to transition into a career off the tenure track?

I would have done more informational interviews. This is the first thing I encourage in nearly every student meeting and presentation I conduct. You can get a solid primer from Harvard Business Review, a little more nuance in the New York Times, and some strategies and common pitfalls from Inside Higher Ed’s Carpe Careers blog.

How do you see your job and field changing in the future?

My guess is that it will expand. A byproduct of the demand for concrete career outcomes is a focus on professional development and internships. (Employers generally value hands-on experience above education, despite the baseline necessity for a bachelor’s to gain access to any halfway desirable job.) I think this is especially true for graduate education, which doesn’t appear to be slowing down, at least anecdotally, despite the ever-increasing uncertainty of the career outcomes. Of course, if the economy really tanks or Congress follows through on taxing tuition credits, all bets are off.  

What advice would you give someone considering a career off the tenure track?

To quote from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ “poppy” but excellent career development book Designing Your Life: “try stuff.” You’re almost certainly getting to try teaching — do you like it? Probably. Can you make a career doing it at the university level? Hard to say. You may want to explore other possibilities for doing the things you like doing in graduate school — through informational interviews, job shadowing, internships, volunteering, or even part-time work. My colleague Rob Pearson at UT Dallas has a great article about that.  I also recommend reading Inside Higher Ed’s “Carpe Careers” blog on the regular. It’s written by members of the Graduate Career Consortium, the professional organization for people who do what I do, and it’s filled with excellent practical advice for building the career you want.

What do you like most about your job?

The one-on-one conversations with students are just great.  I’ve always loved working collaboratively to improve communication, especially written communication.  It’s funny — here I am, the person I considered least likely to be working with grad students at an R1, doing just that in a staff position. An ironic and excellent turn of events. Also, I have some really superb colleagues in the Career and Professional Development Center and across The U. They’re as smart and collaborative and unassuming as the folks I went to grad school with. When I got here, there was also an immediate effort to help me feel included, socially as well as professionally.

In general, don’t underestimate the admin side of the university. I get to watch the leadership in my office tackle dauntingly complex problems of communication and organization, like managing huge career fairs and leading a highly competent, critical, and independent staff of higher ed professionals.  See if you can arrange an internship, volunteer gig, or just a few days of shadowing with someone in a director or assistant director role in a campus office, and hold onto your socks. 

The post On Track for Success: PhDs Working Off the Tenure Track (Week 1) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Keep an eye out. We’ll be turning our “Closed” sign to “Open” on Tuesday, September 3.

(Writers new and old are always welcome to contribute. Check out our submissions guidelines.)

The post Welcome back! appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

“Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.”

Every year, I make a feminist New Year’s resolution: apologize less; shut down more mansplaining; take up more space. Sometimes I mean this last one literally: I’ve learned to square my shoulders and stake my place in crowded subways, and to combat manspreading on airplanes by enbyspreading right back at them. But I also mean it figuratively: I wear blue lipstick to meetings, speak forcefully in focus groups, and take up many pages on this site talking about asexuality.

I identify as nonbinary, but I still have to navigate a society that sees me as a woman, and treats me like one. My resolution to take up more space was inspired by Roxane Gay, who describes in her memoir Hunger the expectations that American society still maintains for women:

“that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society” (13).

Fat-shaming is just one of many ways that women’s bodies and how women use them are relentlessly policed. Women are instructed to “fit in,” fitting into narrower and narrower categories and spaces until they virtually disappear.

Fiercely loving one’s body and leaning into its unruliness (as Melissa’s post discussed last week) is the antidote that some women have taken to combat the toxicity of the white male gaze. When I teach the concept of unruly women to my gender and literature students, we talk about the ways that such women don’t fit in: they’re fat, they have curly hair, they’re loud and laughing, they take delight in food and/or sexual pleasure — in general they take up space.

Conscious unruliness was on spectacular display during the swearing-in of the 2019 cohort of the US Congress. While none of the new members elected in 2018 were fat — evidence of the continuing marginalization and devaluation of fat bodies in America — the women taking their oaths of office were unruly in other ways, especially in their dress.

After her swearing-in, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted in detail about her inspiration for her suit and accessories on the Congressional floor that day:

In two ways, Ocasio-Cortez changed the narrative by being unruly for her oath of office. The first is in how she deliberately crafted her appearance to not conform to expectations for a Congresswoman. She did not don stud earrings and a “neutral” lip color, aesthetic choices that would have suggested femininity, yet restrained femininity — the kind of femininity that doesn’t threaten feminine gender norms and also doesn’t threaten the predominantly white masculine space of the US Congress. Instead, she accessorized how she always has, as a woman of color from the Bronx, for the express purpose of visibly bringing her identity onto the Congress floor rather than disappearing.

The second is how Ocasio-Cortez leans into the stereotype that women put a great deal of thought into how they dress by tweeting about her decisions, rewriting the stereotype by demonstrating that those decisions aren’t vapid or shallow. Her choice to wear white to her swearing-in, she explains, is historically and politically informed, designed to “honor” women and the socialist and matriarchal values of community and connection.

Speaking of community, Ocasio-Cortez was not the only woman inducted into Congress this month who refused to disappear. Of the many women recently elected to Congress, one of the two Native American women, Deb Haaland (D, N.M.); and two of the three Arab-American women, Ilhan Omar (D-Min.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), wore the traditional dress of their respective heritages to their swearing-in ceremonies. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the first bi member of Congress, took her oath of office in a boldly patterned floral skirt. In community with Ocasio-Cortez and her gold hoops, these women disrupt the norms of “professional” Congressional attire by visibly signaling their unruly femininity together. By taking up space, they make space for nonwhite and non-male bodies in the US Congress.

Clothing isn’t the only way these women signal their unruliness. Congresswoman Tlaib swears, and refuses to apologize for it. Congresswomen Sharice Davids (D-Wis.) and Haaland were photographed in a forceful, emotional hug on the Congress floor. When right-wing commentators criticized Ocasio-Cortez for her college dance video, she responded by recording herself dancing at her Congressional office, using her body in ways that bring joy to herself and her followers and vexing those who want her body, and her politics, contained.

One Twitter user made the connection between how Ocasio-Cortez is photographed with her mouth open — laughing, speaking, shouting, her voice unruly and unrestrained — and how that pose captures for conservative media the threat of a powerful woman. She cites a lecture by author and journalist Rebecca Traister:

“This is the image of the woman who we’re told scares us the most: the one who has her mouth open in loud and assured complaint. It is the angry woman who is the big threat.”

Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Sinema, Davids, Haaland, and all the other unruly women of the 116^th Congress demonstrate new meaning to the feminist maxim “the personal is political.” By unfurling their unruly bodies and taking up space in the US Congress, they signal that they are a threat to white patriarchy — and they intend to make good on that threat.

Ashley O’Mara is a PhD student in the Syracuse University English program, studying celibacy and asexuality in literature after the English Reformation. O’Mara also writes creative nonfiction and listens to Mashrou’ Leila, and has very strong opinions about hummus. Read more at ashleyomara.com.

The post “Fitting In”: Taking Up Space in the 116th US Congress appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This article below was the first time that I would publicly write about asexuality. I was not out when I wrote it. But response to this post was positive, and the editor of our web magazine (know as Metathesis at the time) began to show gentle allyship towards me. Over the next few years, I came out to more of my classmates, then to my students, until finally I just started being out professionally.

I wish I could say that society has radically changed for aces since 2014, but it hasn’t really. Our small achievements — ace characters in pop culture, a new definition added to a dictionary, a dating app — feel like enormous victories, if only relatively. What has magnified that feeling, though, is the community I’ve acquired from being out. Finding other aces at school, online, in other cities, and even among my best friends has happened only from taking the risk of being ace in public.

Thank you, Pub, for helping to blaze that trail.

— Ashley O’Mara

Coda: Asexual Awareness Week and the Future of Queer Theory (31 October 2014)

(view the original post)

Last week, I completed the Safer People, Safer Spaces training my university offers to learn better ways to be an ally, whether you’re a member or a supporter of the queer community. One of the activities we did involved matching vocabulary words (like lesbian, heteronormativity, drag, M2F) to their definitions and then discussing what we learned and what confused us. One of the words was asexuality, and to my surprise, no one had any questions about it!

In most settings, this is definitely not the norm. Even though, as one blogger pointed out, the US is home to more asexuals (or, as some prefer to be called, aces) than it is to Muslims, breast-cancer survivors, and Yale graduates, asexuality is not on most people’s radars. Even those within the LGBT community are sometimes unaware of asexuality as an orientation — indeed, the “A” in LGBTQIA+ more often stands for “ally” than “ace.” Thus, Asexual Awareness Week (this year, October 26–November 1) occurs at the end of LGBT History Month. Today, I’m going to sketch out the ways the conversations I see happening inside the asexual community might shape the queer theory of the future.

Only a handful of scholars in the humanities are doing research on asexuality studies.¹ Nevertheless, the language of asexuality as it exists in the everyday praxis of aces has been invaluable to helping me reconsider the ways we think about desire and relationships in texts. Because asexuality — that is, the absence of sexual attraction — does not preclude the formation of other attractions, aces have developed a vocabulary set to describe those experiences. They distinguish between sexual, romantic, affective (“friendly”), and aesthetic attraction, and the different conditions under which these occur and the objects that these take. For instance, “homoromantic” describes someone who falls in love with those of their same sex or gender; a “demiromantic” is someone who falls in love only after a long friendship; an “aromantic” doesn’t fall in love, but might desire intense friendship.²

These desires are not new, and certainly aren’t limited to aces: John Henry Newman’s romantic friendships look very much like the intimate relationships of a homoromantic ace, but the chaste “seraphick love” that John Evelyn and Mary Godolphin shared in the seventeenth century could be conceived of as a queerplatonic relationship of two otherwise sexual people. What is new is the way these words examine phenomena whose existence and uniformity have been taken for granted.

Sometimes, the impulse to name certain desires can overwhelm the desires themselves, but what I think these concepts highlight is the plurality of ways in which people form attractions and desires, and that their objects need not be so neatly aligned. For instance, considering the ways in which Doyle’s John Watson might be simultaneously heterosexual (marrying and having a child by Mary Morstan) and homoromantic (in romantic love with Sherlock Holmes) helps us to grasp how a person can desire two objects in different, non-competing ways. In a way, asexuality has done for romance and sexuality what Judith Butler has done for gender and sex, by uncoupling one from the other (pun intended).

But the asexual community, of course, is not without its controversies. Some people don’t think that asexuality should be lumped into the LGBTQ+ “alphabet soup” because it’s technically not a sexual orientation but rather a not-sexual orientation. This, I think, ignores the great potential for intersectional solidarity, as homoromantic and trans* aces face oppressions that are very similar to those faced by their allosexual counterparts, and heteronormativity limits the experiences of sexual nonconformists indiscriminately.

Some have also criticized how white the movement is, with writers of color like Alok Vaid-Menon describing how to claim asexuality as an identity feels like a betrayal of their race. Some identity communities have long been de-sexualized as a means of discipline and disenfranchisement. Thus, self-describing as asexual plays into these enduring stereotypes, which certainly need dismantling. The asexuality leadership has been surprisingly self-reflexive about how race and gender authorizes (or fails to authorize) the perceived legitimacy of certain sexual orientations. At the same time, however, it’s no less important for us to question those structures that make sexuality compulsory, while we remain sex-positive.

I think the definition that we had to match at training put it best: “Each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.” Just delete “asexual” and you’ll have described everyone. As queer studies develops, we’re thinking more plurally to account for the many and colorful ways that our experiences and identities intersect, shaping our selfhoods and our positions in our communities.

Notes

1. NWSA’s Asexuality Studies Interest Group and the conference panels it has coordinated has been my primary source for asexuality studies in the humanities.
2. The Huffington Post put together a handy simplified infographic to depict this.

Ashley O’Mara is co-editor of Broadly Textual Pub and a PhD candidate in the Syracuse University English program. She studies celibacy and asexuality in literature after the English Reformation. In her down time, she writes op-eds and listens to Mashrou’ Leila. She has very strong opinions about hummus. Visit her website to learn more.

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(CW: pet death)

For a year, two of my colleagues shared an office across from mine. They were best friends, and they stocked their space with craft beer and a reclaimed yellow armchair, squishy and velveteen, and spent their office hours in conversation together. Maybe it was because my own best friend lived abroad and my office lunches were pretty lonely, but this scene instantly became my image of hashtag-friendship-goals.

Except with cookies instead of craft beer.

Friendship is extremely important in ace communities, both on its own and as a comparison point for describing the other kinds of relationships an ace might want to participate in (romantic, queerplatonic, etc.). Meanwhile, food is an important part of my friendships. If I am friends with you, I will bake for you at some point. We will go out for ice cream and lunches, and linger talking over tea. For me, sharing food is a manifestation of how our relationship is mutually sustaining. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing, since Catholics experience communion with the divine through bread and wine. Maybe it’s an ace thing, since so many of our memes describe food as better than sex.

Exhibit A(ce).

What might be my favorite Sherlock fic describes Sherlock and John’s asexual relationship in a way that draws upon this nourishing sensibility:

Marvellous feeling, this. […]

Beside him in the bed, John is sound asleep.

Companion. Late Latin. Literally; bread-fellow. Same with the Germanic equivalent; meal-mate. Etymological identicality—another joy. Replaced an older word meaning travelling partner. John was both. A companion at the breakfast table and on the train. Gefera. Wayfarer. Gemate. Eating at the same table. Mate. One of a wedded pair. Com-pan-ion. With bread.

— Canon_Is_Relative, “Comfort”

*

My bunny, Toffee Touchstone, died a year ago this week. During his long illness, I spent a lot of time calling the Cornell Companion Animal Hospital, but we also spent a lot of time together watching Doctor Who. We watched the Tenth Doctor struggle with the romantic expectations others placed upon him, and fight (unsuccessfully?) to save the last member of his race in the hope that one day he might be converted from evil. We watched him mourn the loss of his Companion Rose and find new friendship in his Companion Martha.

Toffee mooning the Daleks.

When we weren’t watching Doctor Who, Toffee’s and my relationship — perhaps not surprisingly, given the interests of bunnies — revolved around fluffy cuddles and food. A lot of the food portion of things, especially when he was sick and nauseated, involved keeping him supplied with fresh snacks that he liked: parsley, cilantro, kale, crisp young endive, and dandelions picked from the yard (through the snow, if necessary). It involved racing around the carpet for treats and sorting the weeds from his hay. It involved coaxing him out of the kibble cupboard when he jumped into it and very carefully cooking so as to minimize the unnatural smell of fried onions or warm bread. It involved luring toddler Toffee into my lap with parsley bribery, and coaxing adult Toffee into climbing onto my back – to give me a massage – with a handful of dandelions between my shoulders.

But our relationship also included sharing food. You couldn’t peel a banana for breakfast without a bun showing up at your feet for samples. Eating blueberries meant picking out a few to share. One of my most favorite memories is of sitting on the floor to eat my apple after a long day on campus, and having Toffee join me for a few bites.

Toffee and me, sharing an apple.

In Toffee’s last months, I found a solution to my struggle to name our relationship. My grandmother (who would pass away a couple months after Toffee did) always told him to “go find your mama,” a name which never sat well with me. Gendered attributes in general make me cringe, but a mother–child relationship just didn’t make sense to me for us. “Pet and owner” was even more alienating: these terms relied on capitalist hierarchies, and just didn’t capture our emotional symbiosis. How to describe me and my food-sharing furry friend?

We were the Doctor(al student) and her Companion.

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The problem with asexuality, as I’ve discussed before, is that it is hard to talk about on its own terms — even in a grammatical sense.

For example: If you’re homosexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted to people of my same gender.” If you’re pansexual, you can say, “I’m sexually attracted to all genders.”

These are positive constructions: I do experience attraction to x. But if you’re asexual, the sentence structure use is a negative construction: “I don’t experience sexual attraction.” Etymologically, it’s a negative identity: it literally means not-sexual. I’m not-something. This is Parmenides’ dilemma: the Greek philosopher’s famous poem describes how the goddess told him not to contemplate “not-being,” for it is categorically impossible to fathom that which is not. No wonder then, that asexuality is always rendered in terms of allosexuality. As we saw in journalism and in fanfic, an asexual person is always compared to an allosexual norm in order to describe the ace’s asexuality.

Parmenides suffering the effects of contemplating “not-being.”

But what if that weren’t the case? Asexuality obviously exists independently of allosexuality, so how might we describe it in its own terms? One scholar who has boldly gone where no Greek philosopher has gone before is Benjamin Kahan, the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life. Although contemporary discourse about asexuality is careful to distinguish celibacy (the abstention from sexual behavior) from asexuality (a state of being which exists independently of sexual behavior that a person may or may not practice), Kahan uses celibacy to describe what we might otherwise call asexuality. At first, this seemed an unnecessarily confusing choice, especially since Kahan dedicates his last chapter to aromantic asexuality. But I came to realize: casting celibacy as only a religious or political choice assumes that that person would otherwise behave “normatively” sexually. Such a rhetorical move erases the very real potential that celibates do not, in fact, repress any sexual desires, but instead desire their own celibacy — perhaps in the same way that aces might desire their own asexuality.

Desiring celibacy? Say what?

Popular images of celibates — priests and nuns, spinsters and forty-year-old virgins — represent celibacy as anti-sexual frigidity, a cover for sexual “perversity,” or the pitiful pining of total losers, but never something desirable in itself. However, Kahan argues that we’ve been approaching celibacy all wrong when we imagine it as the opposite of sexuality. Asexuality, when its existence is recognized, has at least managed to be classified as one of many sexualities like bisexuality and heterosexuality, even if that classification is complicated by its etymology: not-sexuality. But celibacy, Kahan argues, is not not-sex; it is another mode of doing sex. I would argue the same is true of asexuality. By re-sexualizing nongenital attractions, we get closer to understanding asexuality as a positive construction. We might be able to answer what it is that aces want — what pleasures they’re attracted to in a nongenital sense, if not sex with other beings or objects.

Come, let us enter together the door to new a/sexual possibilities.

This is the driving force of Kahan’s argument. His book underscores the importance of “understanding celibacy not as an absence or as a stigmatized identity but in positive terms as an attractive identity with its own desires and pleasures.”[1] If we apply the same principle to asexuality, it becomes imperative to reorient hegemonic ideas about asexuality. We must look beyond the language of lack and assumptions of asexuality’s opposition to erotonormativity, and instead locate what it is in and of itself. What does asexuality look like when it isn’t compared to another sexual orientation? What do aces want?

To answer this, I suggest looking at how Kahan grapples with answering a similar, though distinct, question: what do celibates want? When he says that celibacy is a form of sex, Kahan is careful to distinguish celibacy from kinks; although celibates (like aces) can have kinks, celibacy and asexuality are not coterminous with kinks. For Kahan, bringing nongenital attractions back into the realm of sexuality seems to mean recognizing other, asexual attractions on equal footing with what we’ve historically known to be sexual attractions — not as a substitute for or deferral from sexual attraction, but a sexual attraction because it offers the same kind of fulfillment that normative sexual attractions do. Essentially, Kahan wants us to expand the definition of what qualifies as attractive desire to include the attractions of the celibate. Specifically, Kahan writes, “rather than desiring something lacking and trying to obtain it” — for instance, desiring a sexual relationship and going for it — “the celibate desire is the reiteration of celibacy itself.”[2]

What does the celibate want? To be celibate. To maintain their celibacy, to revel in their identity. What does the ace want? I would tentatively suggest the same. Perhaps aces want to be ace.

Kahan’s argument about celibacy might not fully answer what it means to be asexual. Reiterative desire is only one kind of nongenital attraction, and there’s a possibility that pulling asexuality back into the realm of normative sexuality erodes some of its characteristic queerness. But by insisting that we consider what celibacy is on its own terms — positive terms — Kahan’s argument show us the possibility of self-definition, and positive asexuality.

[1] Benjamin A. Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 3.

[2] Ibid., 69.

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(CW: discussion of sexual violence in fanfic.)

Can I tell you a secret? I knew the titular character of BBC’s Sherlock had become one of the mascots of the ace community before I even watched the show — and I defended his reputation as such before I watched it, too, as evidenced in a text conversation between myself and my best friend:

Best Friend: Omg, you have to watch Sherlock. They’re so gay.

Me: No Sherlock isn’t! He’s supposed to be asexual!

Judging by the events of series four (spoiler alert), we both might have been a little optimistically defensive of our interpretations of Sherlock’s sexuality; but I think I was justified in my devotion to Sherlock-as-ace. Until Archie’s Jughead last year, and Bojack Horseman’s Todd this year, aces had no authentic canonical representations of themselves to turn to in popular fictional media (let alone celebrities).[1] So we appropriated other characters for ourselves. No other fictional character had given voice to the experiences I considered uniquely ace quite like Sherlock did: his quick jump to defend himself from what he perceived as John’s eventual sexual advances by claiming “I’m married to my work” (“A Study in Pink”); his refusal to recognize Irene’s overt sexual advances by protesting “Why would I want to have dinner if I wasn’t hungry?” (“A Scandal in Belgravia”); and his deft evasion of imaginary-John’s insistent questions about his seemingly absent sexual desires by insisting that “Nothing made me” the way that Sherlock is (“The Abominable Bride”). In my eyes, Sherlock actively distances himself from the erotonormative expectations of the people around him, like I do, and I loved him for it (platonically, of course).

Asexuality is A-okay.

However, for all the refusal of normative sexuality that Sherlock performs in the BBC series, there exists a perversely normalizing trend within asexuality-themed Sherlock fanfic. When I ran out of new Sherlock episodes to watch, I found a thread on the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network’s message board, wherein users recommended ace Sherlock fanfic that they had come across. Although I would later read fics featuring other interpretations of Sherlock’s sexuality (inspiring this earlier Metathesis post), the first few Sherlock fics that I read all featured an ace Sherlock, and, in one case, an ace John. But, with one notable exception, these first few fics also featured its ace character experiencing some form of sexual harassment or violence.

In one graphic fic, Sherlock tolerates tacitly unwanted sex with John out of fear of losing his companionship. In another fic, college-aged Sherlock evades his boyfriend’s sexual contact one too many times and gets called a freak. In a more light-hearted fic, Sherlock recounts narrowly escaping losing his virginity at a brothel after his brother pressures him into visiting one. In other fics, Sherlock feels that he’s a dysfunctional human for being ace and denies himself platonic intimate contact for fear of sending mixed signals. Although these fics and those like them generally end happily or at least peacefully, with John understanding and affirming Sherlock’s asexuality, or John and Sherlock negotiating their sexual boundaries together, this upbeat ending can come only after a moment wherein erotonormativity’s current stranglehold on sexuality is reasserted — indeed, normalized.

Maybe there is something unique about the BBC series that affords the exploration of how dominant ideas about sexuality make aces vulnerable to sexual harassment and violence; for instance, I haven’t yet dug very deeply into Doctor Who’s limited selection of ace fic, but so far, I haven’t experienced the same phenomenon. Perhaps where Doctor Who institutionalizes some nonsexual companionships and allows for alternative — albeit alien, in both senses of the word — normalized ideas about human behavior, Sherlock’s long refusal to directly address Sherlock’s sexuality encourages fic writers to render Sherlock’s cryptic rejection of sexual advances as discomfort with his asexuality. Whatever the cause of this trend in Sherlock fic, it reproduces some of the narratives about asexuality that I described last week. Asexuality is, however briefly, depicted as freakish: subhuman, antisocial, pathological. Furthermore, ace Sherlock must find a way to educate his companion about his asexuality, often in terms that privilege his companion’s sexual needs and desires over his asexual needs and desires. Erotonormativity haunts these fictional narratives as much as it does real life.

The show doesn’t really disabuse people of this norm, either.

Understandably, fic writers looking to positively represent asexual experiences want to show their characters contending with, and eventually overcoming struggles that are common to the ace community. These often include the threat of so-called reparative rape when erotonormativity says that everyone should want sex; the miscommunication that occurs when erotonormativity codes otherwise nonsexual gestures as sexual innuendo; and the internalized doubt and dismissal of one’s asexual desires when erotonormativity insists an allosexual partner’s sexual desires must be catered to, because asexuality is outside the norm. This is, after all, the general state of affairs aces have been told to anticipate from those who are not asexual, and art has been known to imitate life — especially when ace writers are looking for a space to test out reactions to situations and ideologies that they might face in their lives outside fiction writing.

But fanfic is, of course, fiction. Many fics already have an extremely distant relationship to both reality and the canonical source text they’re drawn from. Why not imagine a world wherein asexuality is normalized, aces don’t have to explain themselves, and their desires are privileged? I’m concerned that “asexual experience,” insofar as experiences can be generalized, is becoming characterized only in relationship to erotonormativity, perhaps in a similar way to how queerness is sometimes characterized only in opposition to heteronormativity. What would it look like to accept asexuality on its own terms? This is what I’ll be exploring the rest of this month for Metathesis.

[1] Technically USA’s Sirens featured a canonically out ace, but we’re all still applying brain bleach to erase that representation from our memories.

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