11 Ambivalent Contingency and Queer Exuberance; Or, My Five Years on the Market

Abstract

11 Ambivalent Contingency and Queer Exuberance; Or, My Five Years on the Market Douglas S. Ishii (bio) I am an unpartnered gay man of color who has taken four full-time contingent faculty contracts. After receiving no job offers my first year on the market, I signed on in 2014 as a last-minute hire as a visiting assistant professor of Asian American media and history at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2015, I became an inaugural chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2016, I began as a one-year visiting assistant professor of Asian American humanities at Northwestern University, and then secured a three-year, nonrenewable lectureship there after a national search. The voguish uptake of Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure (2011) in this period celebrated failure as politically pure and morally righteous, which poked my ever-present fear: actually being a failure. I accepted only full-time employment, and was willing to relocate for work. Over the years, I became more certain of the life of the mind and more discouraged of my chance to live it. With each new gig, I found solace in making a life for myself: friends, lovers, community, routine—a home. At the end of each contract, I abandoned that life to follow the fleeting promise of permanent employment. When Northwestern would not provide a secure future, I accepted an assistant professorship at Emerson College in Boston in 2018. However, in 2017, I had declined a tenure-track job [End Page 297] offer—then my first and only one—to gamble on a longer contract at Northwestern and the chance to keep living the life I had built around it. Hearing my decision, a treasured mentor and friend told me to consider that, regardless of how unstable and sometimes unhappy my nonwork circumstances had been, I turned down what so many others sought. So, why did another contingent faculty contract feel more like a life than a tenure line? To reckon with the interdiscipline, as part of professional academia, this essay reflects back to theorize ambivalent contingency—a mitigated agency based in not only structured precarity, such as higher education's administrative regime, but also constrained privilege and the wish for a future. In the casualization of higher education, contingency names temporary, contract-based teaching personnel. However, Sara Ahmed meditates that to be contingent, which shares an etymological root with "contact," is linked to "the sociality of being 'with' others, to getting close enough to touch."1 What makes the discourse of failure so touchy is this unreachability, what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism, "a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic."2 I do not know how it feels to ascend early to the tenure clock. But I do know how it feels to be told, "We are so sorry to lose you," by someone who did not support my retention. I also know the cut of those words: "You're not tenurable." Yet, as Vivian L. Huang and Summer Kim Lee reiterate, though contingency may make us lose touch with a future, it also enables "the insistent act of reaching out toward another for survival and more."3 For me, as for many, this act was sustained by love—for ideas, collegiality, students, and the profession. Although love has been mobilized toward ideological mystification, Keguro Macharia argues, "Love is more than tolerance, more than equality, more than freedom. It is an embedding, a valuing, a possibility, a 'risking,' a demand."4 Love's embeddedness, this ambivalence within contingency, exceeds the liberal individual—the hero of job market stories, for example—to illuminates social ecologies beyond academic capitalism. Against at-times totalizing accounts of cruel optimism, ambivalent contingency is not a grand theory of academic labor. Adjunct faculty organizing has forced us to confront the numbers: more than 75 percent of faculty are off the tenure track.5 Nevertheless, Rani Neutill's 2015 quit lit essay, "Sixteen Years in Academia Made Me an A-Hole," outlines a familiar conversation between contingent and tenure-line faculty: contingent...