On Living with Affect Alienation within a “Master’s House”

Abstract

On Living With Affect Alientation Within A “Master’s House” Jacqueline M. Hidalgo (bio) In the above essay, Judith Plaskow pointedly describes how Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion’s (JFSR) commitments to inclusion as well as the board participation of Black women and women from other minoritized backgrounds do not, in and of themselves, necessarily “alter the white supremacist ethos within which they operate” (4). I read this and remembered the “brick wall” that Sara Ahmed describes as having an impact on university diversity workers.1 Something about the academy, which JFSR names as one of its two spaces of accountability, remains white even as people who are other-than-white participate in a space and try to alter it. A brick wall remains that cannot be dismantled. I have sat on the JFSR editorial board since 2017, though I have never approached JFSR as one of my primary scholarly commitments. Perhaps that has to do with my attendance at that June 2017 conference, “Making Alliances, Breaking Taboos, Transforming Religions.” From that first evening I sat at dinner, trying to make conversation with a white Christian theology graduate student, I felt as I often do in feminist academia, like an “affect alien.”2 This feeling is not quite like impostor syndrome, which I also often feel. It is a strong sense that my very way of being is somehow offbeat, like I have the wrong feelings and express them the wrong ways at the wrong times. I have never been certain if that experience is a symptom or a cause of my feelings of alienation in academic spaces. Institutions must have a diverse leadership, but it is also worth paying attention to who feels welcomed even if they are not an invited panelist or a member of the leadership. [End Page 35] To the credit of the organizers, enough remarkable invited panelists were also affect aliens, and I rarely felt alone at the conference. In the academy, I often feel like I benefit most not from official panels or purposes but by being brought into proximity with other minoritized scholars, connecting with them in off moments. Some key panelists reflected critically, in different ways, on the limits of the very terms of the conference, such as “alliances” or “taboos,” words that sparked my unease from the beginning. I struggled, as I so often do, with the inadequacy of language and with its coloniality. So many of us speak English, whether as a first or second or third language, as a consequence of colonization, and Black scholars and writers in particular in the United States have found ways to disrupt dominant English, to signify on the colonizing and enslaving legacies in English. As scholars, though, we are trained to wield English as a weapon. Plaskow references how, in order to make it through graduate school, we all had to learn to employ the “master’s tools” and to think with and through “the master’s perspective.” I imagine somehow that when Audre Lorde wrote “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she was signifying on the coloniality of English, adeptly working through her own affect alienation inside a house of masters (a humanities conference) and the immobile brick wall, a construction of space, theme, and time that was alien and alienating, one seemingly dominated by a white feminism that never questioned its own power dynamics.3 As an intellectual class migrant, I am still let into certain rooms, granted a visa as it were, sometimes because I have juggled the master’s tools and sometimes just as a consequence of passing. I benefit from enough privileges that I rarely have to face open hostility, and yet both open and covert anti-Black hostility persists in academic spaces. During one small group conversation at the 2017 Feminist Studies in Religion conference, a white scholar questioned the notion of Black women’s epistemic privilege, suggesting they would then dominate and silence others. This comment was like the fantasy of reverse racism. When had any of us who are not Black women ever been in an academic space truly dominated by Black women? I certainly have never been so...