Women and the humanities

19 November 2015

Women and the humanities: could the growing number of female academics be producing an increase in phenomenological research? Subjectivity as a subject. And I do not mean ‘subjectivity’ as an abstraction, but a specific subjectivity, one’s own. Only women can afford to be so enamoured of their own experience, to investigate it as though it were a mysterious cloud hanging around them that can be objectified through text, made scientific. It is the same aura of unique sensory sensuality with which women seduce men. All women seem to draw from the same source, but then they do their ‘own thing’ with it. This ‘own thing’ makes them interesting and unique and now serves as a research subject. I can say this only because I catch myself doing it. When a female student has a male professor, he will greet her proposal with a kind of amused scepticism. He will try to steer her, but he does not really know these waters, and here the student has an advantage over her teacher. She is actually trying to teach him something about herself, and so, little by little, he will fall a little in love with that unfamiliar way of thinking, which he otherwise does not take very seriously. He will judge it not on its merits but on the mystery that ultimately seems to grow all the greater as the research becomes more coherent. In the end, it will turn out that, academically speaking, there is ‘nothing wrong with it’, if that is possible at all, but that it has said nothing either. Yet something seems to lie behind it, something promising.

A female teacher, on the other hand, could nip the process in the bud, either because she sees through it and would feel dirty participating, or because she does not see through it and considers it ‘unscientific’. She might also encourage it. In that last case, the research will be of a less dreamy, more aggressive kind, as though the researcher is trying to describe precisely that shared source mentioned above.

The person described here might, for want of better ideas, try to make her way in academia, but would constantly be afraid of being found out. Found out for what? For the fact that she has no idea what she is doing.