https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5012-6072
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ABSTRACT
This article draws on the author’s experiences with alcoholism and mental illness to critique narratives of merit and success in the research university. Theorizing what the author calls economies of misery, the article describes anxiety, depression, and substance abuse as manifestations of the affective surplus that remains after one has achieved what the research university characterizes as success. The article ends with a call to reclaim this surplus and strategize responses to the research university’s cultures of cruelty. Content warning: Descriptions of addiction, mental illness, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Serap Erincin, V. Jo Hsu, Carmen Kynard, Ashley Noel Mack, William O. Saas, editor Robin M. Boylorn, and the two anonymous reviewers for helping bring this project to fruition. This essay is dedicated to Daniel C. Brouwer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), xxviii.
2 Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). Also see: James L. Cherney, Ableist Rhetoric: How We Know, Value, and See Disability (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019).
3 See: Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
4 National Communication Association, 2020–2021 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report, 2021, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_JobsReport_2021.pdf.
5 Dana L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetoric of Therapy (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1998).
6 See: Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15 (2018): 331–36; Lisa B.Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here Is Something you Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 202–09; Jessica Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 410–17; Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women of Color in Academia (Louisville: Utah State University Press, 2012). On homonormativity in the academy and other contexts, see: Alyssa A. Samek and Theresa A. Donofrio, “‘Academic Drag’ and the Performance of the Critical Personae: An Exchange on Sexuality, Politics, and Identity in the Academy,” Women’s Studies in Communication 36 (2013): 28–55.
7 See: Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017); Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).
8 Charles E. Morris, III, “(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R.C.: A Retrospective,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 34.
9 On ephemera in critical practice, see: José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance 8 (1996): 5–16. Also see: Karma R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).
10 See: Robin M. Boylorn, “Killing Me Softly or the Miseducation of (Love and) Hip Hop: A Blackgirl Autoethnography,” Qualitative Inquiry 22 (2016): 785–89; Amber Johnson, “Confessions of a Video Vixen: My Autocritography of Sexuality, Desire, and Memory,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34 (2014): 182–200; Charles E. Morris III, “Sunder the Children: Abraham Lincoln’s Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99 (2013): 395–422.
11 Ragan Fox, “Tales of a Fighting Bobcat: An ‘Auto-Archaeology’ of Gay Identity Formation and Maintenance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 30 (2010): 140.
12 Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2000), 733–68. Also see: Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Performance: Keeping Rhetoric Honest,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34 (2014): 115–17; Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021); Ronald J. Pelias, Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life: The Selected Works of Ronald J. Pelias (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
13 Angel Urbina-Garcia, “What Do We Know about University Academics’ Mental Health? A Systematic Literature Review,” Stress and Health 36 (2020): 563–85.
14 For example, Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 9 (1981): 7–10; Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, eds. Adrienne Aron and Shawn Corne (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017).
15 Boylorn, “Gray or For Colored Girls Who Are Tired of Chasing Rainbows: Race and Reflexivity,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11 (2011): 179.
16 Morris, “(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R.C.”
17 D. Soyini Madison, “The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26 (2006): 321.
18 Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
19 Urbina-Garcia, “What Do We Know about University Academics’ Mental Health?” 569. Also, David M. Perry, “How to Make Grad School More Humane,” Pacific Standard, February 5, 2019, https://psmag.com/ideas/grad-school-continues-to-ignore-students-with-disabilities?fbclid=IwAR0Tiul7VbzwwKomkT9M0CZ4hhYcG-g2W-KLNH3SeBx7IWTQzQaMKzpUymk.
20 Margaret Price, Mark S. Salzer, Amber O’Shea, and Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, “Disclosure of Mental Disability by College and University Faculty: The Negotiation of Accommodations, Supports, and Barriers,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37 (2017), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5487/4653.
21 Urbina-Garcia, “What Do We Know about University Academics’ Mental Health?”
22 Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 7.
23 Price, Salzer, O’Shea, and Kerschbaum, “Disclosure of Mental Disability by College and University Faculty.” Also, Colleen Flaherty, “Aftermath of a Professor’s Suicide,” Inside Higher Ed, April 21, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/21/recent-suicide-professor-sparks-renewed-discussions-about-access-mental-health.
24 For example, Bernadette Marie Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture; Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68 (2018): 254–66; Olga Idriss Davis, “In the Kitchen: Transforming the Academy through Safe Spaces of Resistance,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 364–81; Communication Affiliates Committed to Antiracist Communication, “Antiracist Manifesto in Communication,” https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfgymeXeNUFzITLy2G5_8seuwX-ibduxpXb_JG3-cu5qMOcfQ/viewform; Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”; Katherine Grace Hendrix, “There Are No Awards for Surviving Racism, Sexism, and Ageism in the Academy: Contemplations of a Senior Faculty Member,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2021): 246–62; Ronald L. Jackson, II, “So Real Illusions of Black Intellectualism: Exploring Race, Roles, and Gender in the Academy,” Communication Theory 10 (2000): 48–63; Kent A. Ono, “A Letter/Essay I’ve Been Longing to Write in My Personal/Academic Voice,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (1997): 114–25; Karla D. Scott, “Gatekeepers, Grace, and Getting Tenure: A Womanist Wa/onders to Sing a Black Girl’s Song,” International Review of Qualitative Research 12 (2019): 258–62; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105 (2019): 465–76. Also see: Carmen Kynard, “Letter to my Former College President and Provost: Why I Left,” November 12, 2019, http://carmenkynard.org/letter-to-former-college-president-and-provost/; Louis M. Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020); Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, eds. Gabriella Guitiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012); University of California COLA Movement, Strike University, https://strikeuniversity.org.
25 Robert Mejia, “Forum Introduction: Communication and the Politics of Survival,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 360–68.
26 See: Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Fleur Jongepier and Mathijs van de Sande, “Workaholic Academics Need to Stop Taking Pride in Their Burnout,” Times Higher Education Supplement, March 4, 2021, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/workaholic-academics-need-stop-taking-pride-their-burnout.
27 Barbara J. Jago, “Chronicling an Academic Depression,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31 (2002): 738.
28 Bernadette Marie Calafell and Shane T. Moreman, “Envisioning an Academic Readership: Latina/o Performatives Per the Form of Publication,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29 (2009): 126.
29 For example, Ian Bogost, “America Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience,” The Atlantic, October 20, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/10/college-was-never-about-education/616777/.
30 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Westminster: Penguin, 1976).
31 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007).
32 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006).
33 Marx, Capital. Also see: Dana L. Cloud, Steve Macek, and James Arnt Aune, “‘The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra’: A Reply to Ron Greene,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39 (2006): 72–84.
34 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
35 Gilmore, Golden Gulag.
36 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206.
37 “Academia Is Built on Exploitation: We Must Break this Vicious Circle,” The Guardian, May 18, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/may/18/academia-exploitation-university-mental-health-professors-plagiarism.
38 H.L. Goodall Jr., “Casing the Academy for Community,” Communication Theory 9 (1999): 467.
39 “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” American Association of University Professors, https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure.
40 Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs, and McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite”; Mejia, “Forum Introduction”; Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems.”
41 Stacy L. Holman Jones, “The Performance Space: Giving an Account of Performance Studies,” Text and Performance Studies 33 (2013): 77–80.
42 See: Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4 (2002): 368–98.
43 David Matthews, “If You Love Research, Academia May Not Be for You,” Times Higher Education, November 8, 2018, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-research-academia-may-not-be-you?fbclid=IwAR3k-7UCfIPbOMbVmp4s_1VIN7SdFfKWS_ph-VNBTDPAbXP-zZi9nYtd13g.
44 Jamie J. Hagan, “Why Most of Us Won’t Get Tenure,” Inside Higher Ed, December 9, 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/12/09/solving-tenure-problem-requires-real-institutional-change-essay; Yasmin Nair, “Class Shock: Affect, Mobility, and the Adjunct Crisis,” Contrivers’ Review, October 13, 2014, http://www.contrivers.org/articles/8/Yasmin-Nair-Class-Shock-Adjunct-Crisis/?fbclid=IwAR3LAyn9jEKG_gej5u30gfNq21BSs-zYh4NlD_V7L5_nrLEoyoP8D_tY90U; Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
45 Calvente, Calafell, and Chávez, “Here Is Something You Can’t Understand,” 206. Also see: Kamden K. Strunk, “Demystifying and Democratizing Tenure and Promotion,” Inside Higher Ed, March 13, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/13/tenure-and-promotion-process-must-be-revised-especially-historically-marginalized.
46 Jack (formerly Judith) Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); David Matthews, “Capitalism and Mental Health,” Monthly Review 70 (2019), https://monthlyreview.org/2019/01/01/capitalism-and-mental-health/.
47 See: Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
48 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?,” 414. Also, Lisa M. Corrigan and Anjali Vats, “The Structural Whiteness of Academic Patronage,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 220–27.
49 Agathangelou and Ling, “An Unten(ur)able Position.”
50 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”; John Warner, “Academic Hazing?” Inside Higher Ed, August 6, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/academic-hazing.
51 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (London: Minor Compositions, 2013), 117.
52 Arthur P. Bochner, “It’s About Time: Narrative and the Divided Self,” Qualitative Inquiry 2 (1997): 431.
53 Bochner, “It’s About Time,” 422.
54 Matthews, “Capitalism and Mental Health.”
55 Calafell, Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture; Bernadette Marie Calafell, “When Depression Is in the Job Description #realacademicjobs,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 6 (2017): 5–10.
56 Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).
57 Mejia, “Forum Introduction.”
58 For a similar meditation, see: Stephanie A. Shields, “Waking Up to Privilege: Intersectionality and Opportunity,” in Presumed Incompetent, 29–39.
59 On intersectionality, see: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99; Cindy L. Griffin and Karma R. Chávez, “Introduction: Standing in the Intersections of Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, eds. Cindy L. Griffin and Karma R. Chávez (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012): 1–31.
60 Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 2020; Gina Kolata, “More White People Die from Suicide and Substance Abuse: Why?” New York Times, November 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/insider/more-white-men-die-from-suicide-and-substance-abuse-why.html.
61 Bochner recalls similar experiences with paternal mortality. He writes, “At the moment, it didn’t matter that as a child my relationship with my father had been so troubled and destructive or that he had grown old and fragile before I could come to terms with the fierce and violent father of my youth.” Bochner, “It’s About Time,” 419–20.
62 See: Lore/tta LeMaster, “Suicidal,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 22 (2022): 391–95.
63 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”
64 At several points throughout this essay, I speak in the first-person plural. This is a coalitional move that I hope illuminates avenues through which those who suffer most from the research university’s cruelty might come to resist together. But I do not presume a coherent or universal narrative of experience, nor the possibility of indefinite coalition. See: Chávez, Queer Migration Politics; Eve Tuck, Mistinguette Smith, Allison M. Guess, Tavia Benjamin, and Brian K. Jones, “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 3 (2014): 52–74.
65 Báez and Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies”; Dana L. Cloud, “‘Civility’ as a Threat to Academic Freedom,” First Amendment Studies 49 (2015): 13–17.
66 Madison, “The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography,” 320.
67 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.
68 Matthews, “Capitalism and Mental Health.”
69 Bousquet, How the University Works.
70 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. Also, Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”
71 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp P, 2018).
72 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”; Lore/tta (formerly Benny) LeMaster and Meggie Mapes, “Refusing a Compulsory Want for Revenge, or, Teaching against Retributive Justice with Liberatory Pedagogy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (2020): 401–09; Bryan J. McCann, Serap Erincin, Ashley Noel Mack, and William O. Saas, “When We Come Together, We Build Theory: Working the Second Shift in the Undercommon Enclave,” Journal of Autoethnography 2 (2021): 113–18; Price, Salzer, O’Shea, and Kerschbaum, “Disclosure of Mental Disability by College and University Faculty.”
73 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work. Also, Atilla Hallsby, “Intimate Spaces of Mental Wellness,” Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 55–66.
74 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?” 413.
75 On matters of power, subjectivity, and mental health and addiction, see: Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics; Gordon Coonfield, “Mapping Addicted Subjection: Toward a Cartography of the Addiction Epidemic,” Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 80–113; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon, 2010).
76 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. Also see: la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
77 McCann, Erincin, Mack, and Saas, “When We Come Together, We Build Theory.” On coalitional politics more generally, see: Chávez, Queer Migration Politics.
78 Holly Hassel, “Governance as Activism,” Teacher-Scholar-Activist, September 13, 2017, https://teacher-scholar-activist.org/2017/09/13/governance-as-activism/; Bryan J. McCann, “Boundaries of Engagement: Rethinking Scholarship, Activism, and the Academy,” in Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, 2nd ed., eds. JongHwa Lee and Seth Kahn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 11–25.
79 Samek and Donofrio, “‘Academic Drag’ and the Performance of the Critical Personae,” 29.
80 Carmen Kynard, “‘All I Need Is One Mic’: A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Y’all Confuse This Stuff),” Community Literacy Journal 14 (2020): 5–24.
81 Tony E. Adams, Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 130.
82 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 149. Also, Charles E. Morris and John M. Sloop, “‘What Lips These Lips Have Kissed’: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 1–26.
83 Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 71–2.
84 Hatrick, “How to Outlive the University?”