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The title of this Comment on the recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences (“the Report”) recalls Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989) because the Report—a 30 page, lightly cited essay on the ostensible demise of facts and evidence in the Humanities and Social Sciences—traffics in a kind of misreading of the concept of “contingency” that invokes debates on “objectivity” from an earlier time. Much has been said on this Report on social media, in an excellent rejoinder by Agustín Fuentes, one of the several mis-cited anthropologists featured in the document, and in the present collection. A theme across this criticism is the Report’s extremely narrow, caricatured representation of debates, disciplines, and attendant academic associations. Both the AAA and the ASA are cited as promoting a “progressive left” agenda at the cost of actual scholarship. (That both memberships have supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement in recent years implies that the Report’s authors have this specific example in mind of the “progressive left.”) My focus here is on what the Report misunderstands about contingency in relation to gender identity, and why this is of concern far beyond the auspices of gender-based research in Anthropology.
The authors of the Report claim to be defending objectivity and evidence, yet they ironically begin with a clearly stated ideological position against what they consider to be scholarship-undermining preoccupations. These include anti-racism, feminism, and socialism (page 12). The lumping of these “positions” with queer and transgender work almost reads like a Red Scare text from the early 80s, a period from which the authors draw generously when they do cite their claims. If the Report’s authors substantiate their attacks in the main text by selectively and incorrectly citing work that invokes Critical Race Theory, they use the footnotes to target critiques of binary gender. Surprisingly, in all of their critiques of “relativism” (which in the Report seems to mean a belief in that which is anti-factual, made up, and incorrect), they never cite work from Anthropology that shows how different lifeways, which include distinct systems of gender and sexuality, have coexisted across vast geographical scales, and continue to do so. This kind of work has animated the discipline from its beginnings.
Instead of an even superficial engagement with the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality, the Report’s authors claim that “Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense” (footnote 13). The seethingly polite phrase “in every sense” conveys its meaning through the implied italicization of the word “every” (wink wink). This almost coquettish reference to genitalia is an unfortunate use of an all-too-familiar trope that reduces transgender people to our physicality, literally to how we urinate and copulate. Beyond the reductive ignorance that such a phrase betrays, the deeper problem here is that the claim is wrong. Gender and Sexuality Studies, within and outside of Anthropology, is not organized around a single “political project,” least of all around the project of trans rights. Transgender advocacy draws from the much wider oeuvre of Gender and Sexuality Studies which attends to social categories, including but certainly not limited to those that pertain to gender and sexuality per se. The field examines the contingency of frames and categories that make the physicality of the human form intelligible as a social entity. That these categories can be read through the lens of politics or materialism is one of many perspectives vested in this field. Scientific rigor in the field means disaggregating gender norms, gendered categories, and reproductive physiology through the contingencies of these frames, where these contingencies include overlapping critiques of racialization and class, at minimum. It does not mean conflating human reproductive capacities with a transhistorical understanding of gender, as the Report’s authors do repeatedly and freely. What the authors of the Reportsurprisingly and obviously misunderstand is the concept of contingency itself, which has never meant “invented from whole cloth.” To suggest otherwise verges on disingenuity, especially at this point of time in intellectual history.
It is historically and politically significant that the thread of gender in this Report consistently targets transgender women. The impossibility of transfeminine being is what is at stake in the Report’s platforming the claim that transgender women are not women. These works are factually incorrect and politically dangerous, yet defended—in the footnotes—as signs of academic rigor. It bears noting that these kinds of claims are wrought from an elision of transmasculinity and, indeed, an elision of the contingencies of gender, race and capital writ large. These elisions are somehow rationalized through an argument against “postmodernism” that includes an explicitly anti-Kuhnian position (page 20). This is remarkable because to deny that knowledge undergoes paradigmatic “Kuhnian” shifts is like arguing against the discovery of anti-retroviral therapies or epigenetics.
The Report’s authors themselves say that truth, reason, and knowledge are “rhetorics.” This places the Report’s defense of what the authors term “objectivity” squarely in the realm of ideology. If these kinds of claims to objectivity have been thoroughly discredited by rigorous scholarship in the past, they are particularly dangerous to make today. Fuentes notes the Report’s McCarthyist recommendation that the Humanities and Social Sciences be surveilled by panels of “experts” in order to curtail “progressive left” excess. The present Comment points to another danger embedded here—that this Report reproduces anti-transgender claims that resonate with a growing bent against academic freedom. There are real debates scholars are having currently, e.g. on the hyper-individuation of politics and materialist critique. This Report is less an engagement with those debates than it is an exercise in reclaiming an unmarked “objectivity” that has long been shown to undermine scholarship itself.