Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing An Ethics of Care in the University, an edited volume by Erin Pritchard and Delyth Edwards (published by Routledge in 2023) is a collaborative intersectional feminist project that compels us to think and address the ‘public secret’ around sexual misconduct and gender bias in university spaces. Sexual misconduct is used as an umbrella term for sexual harassment and sexual assault, which is informed by an intersectional understanding of different experiences and subjectivities (Prichard and Edward, 2023, 4). As Pratiksha Baxi (2014) writes, public secrets are generally known by people but cannot be talked about, where knowing is essential to its power, equal to denial, where not being able to say anything testifies to its power. The task and life force of public secrets is to maintain a critical relationship where the secret is not destroyed through exposure but is subject to revelations that do justice to it. The book is a site that uniquely acts as what Sara Ahmed (2022) refers to as feminist ears while attempting to find a language to address sexual misconduct in everyday university spaces and liminal academic spaces, such as student organisations, unions, etcetera (Petit-Thorne, 2023).

The book, Sexual Misconduct in Academia: Informing an Ethics of Care in University, stands as a testimony to this. The book is divided into four parts, including a foreword, an introduction, and an afterword. The introduction highlights how victims of sexual misconduct are unable to get justice and how the structures meant to protect victims are co-opted and embedded in patriarchal ideology. While cautioning us against the misuse of hashtag activism such as the #Metoo movement, it argues how it becomes symptomatic of a void of institutional responses. Academia, like other industries, harbours systemic sexual misconduct with little accountability. Keeping a ‘good image’ is a bigger priority for institutions than empowering the victims, which underlines the need for an ethics of care within academics informed by power. The co-editors, both survivors of sexual misconduct during fieldwork, collaborated on this book to form a complaint collective about sexual misconduct in academia. The book is curated through a diverse and experimental set of methodologies, embracing autoethnographic reflections, poetry, and duo-ethnography to explore lived experiences. This book aims to ask these questions below:

Image Source: Sexual Misconduct in Academia (2023, p. 11)

Violence is part of the everyday experiences of people in academia, particularly faced by anyone who is an ‘Other’. Feminists’ call towards an ethics of care and ethical pedagogy can become an ‘other’. Judith Butler argues that the site of recognition of the self and the other is also the site of power where ‘human’ is differentially produced (2004). This process of recognition is driven by desires, and gender is driven by desires: we desire to be. Conversations around the sexual experiences of everyday women and gender minorities are hushed, silenced, and gagged. This creates a dysfunctional mechanism for addressing everyday violence, especially sexual misconduct. These dysfunctional mechanisms become functional for the powerful. Universities in India, especially Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ambedkar University Delhi, have witnessed strong resistance to forming a community against the opacity of ICC mechanisms and the impunity of sexual misconduct by those in power.

In June 2024, Routledge ‘unpublished’ the book after a long-standing issue regarding chapter 12 of the book titled: The Wall Spoke When No One Would: Autoethnographic Notes on Sexual-Power Gatekeeping Within Avant-garde Academia, since June 2023. It offered an autoethnography of the author’s experiences in an unnamed research centre and examined ideas such as “star professor,”  “whisper network,” “sexual-power gatekeepers,”  “academic incest,”  “intellectual and sexual extractivist,” “gaslighting,” and “institutional witch-hunt.” Despite the collective feminist effort to support the book, the book is institutionally unpublished by Routledge.  This is symptomatic of the same problem of complaining Ahmed talks about for women and gender minorities. When they speak, they are shut out or heard just as complaining, keeping away from ‘important work’. In Complaint! Sara Ahmed (2021) shows us how to be heard, as just complaining or always complaining is to not be heard at all, and that to complain is always negative. You kill-joy. You wonder, though, whose joy? The perverted joy of power and authority!

Feminist ears hear differently. It allows for ‘complaints’ to go somewhere—not just round and round in the head. It gets stuck to newer corners and to find newer meanings.  The exclusion from being ‘human’ does not mean erasure for women and gender minorities. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, we are historical beings because we can reflect on ‘history’, and to understand the histories of gendered bodies and experiences in academia, we need feminist ears and complaint collectives. It not only lets women and gender minorities bring forth accounts, including auto-ethnographies, of sexual misconduct in everyday university spaces, but itself becomes a genre. A genre of feminist hearing and complaining: a complaint collective. As Anna Bull (2023) puts in the afterword, this book reminds us of the value of autoethnographic accounts of women. and gender minorities while becoming a genre of its own and “forming a lineage that includes Elizabeth Stanko (1995), Deborah Lee (2018), and Whitley and Page (2015), among others, in making visible the experiential level of how abuse occurs” (226).

References:

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Duke University Press.

Baxi, P. (2014). Public Secrets of Law. Oxford University Press.

Buala. (2023, 20th September). Open Letter to Routledge -Taylor & Francis Group. https://www.buala.org/en/mukanda/open-letter-to-routledge-taylor-francis-group

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. Routledge.

Feministkilljoys. (n.d.) https://feministkilljoys.com/

Feministkilljoys. (2020, August 14). Complaint Collectives. Feministkilljoys. https://feministkilljoys.com/2020/07/31/complaint-collectives/

Feministkilljoys. (2022). June 1). Feminist Ears. Feministkilljoys. https://feministkilljoys.com/2022/06/01/feminist-ears/

The Indian Express. (2024, August 13). JNU Students’ Union on Hunger Strike Against ‘Neglect’ of Demands By Admin. Retrieved September 3, 2024, from neglect-of-demands-by-admin-9510684/

The Indian Express. (2024, August 16). On Hunger Strike Over ‘Discrimination, Punishment Transfer’, Ambedkar University Teachers to Meet V-C Today. Retrieved September 3, 2024, from https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/on-hunger-strike-over-discrimination-punishment-transfer-ambedkar-university-teachers-to-meet-v-c-today-9516806/ 

Twinch, E. (2024, June 24). Publisher Drops Sexual Misconduct Book After Professor Objects. Research Professional News. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-open-access-2024-6-publisher-drops-sexual-misconduct-book-after-professor-objects/

Twinch, E. (2024, July 10). Editors of Sexual Misconduct Book Urged to Fight ‘Silencing’. Research Professional News. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-charities-and-societies-2024-6-editors-of-sexual-misconduct-book-urged-to-fight-silencing/

Viaene, L. & Laranjeiro, C. & Tom, Miye. (2023). The Walls Spoke When No One Else Would: Autoethnographic Notes On Sexual-Power Gatekeeping Within Avant-Garde Academia. 10.4324/9781003289944-17.

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Antarul Haque has graduated with an MA in Sociology (2024) from Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi.