On the Limits of Scholarship

Is “objective” knowledge a sexist idea?

“In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

A recent criticism I received on my research, as a scholar of what I like to call occultural studies, was that it is "too insider and activist oriented” for a certain Western European academic journal that publishes works on Western esotericism. My renderings on the Pombagira, a largely Afro-Brazilian occultural creation of a female enchantress with mystical powers connected to healing and sex, but often placed by (Western) anthropologists, ethnologists and scholars of religion in a patriarchal opposition to her male counterpart—the Exu entity—probably upset, in my opinion, the very same Western modern scientific standards that I criticise in my own work.  

"Stripped of its overly insider perspective, the article would certainly be interesting"—one reviewer from the editorial board declared. I must ask then: is ‘objective’ scholarship in itself a gendered idea? I would like to argue affirmatively. Many feminist and decolonial thinkers have been pointing out how such a patriarchal falsehood (i.e. objectivity) was built on the suppression of subjectivity in favor of male-centric narratives. Similarly to Dostoyevsky’s concept on the inexpressible, as quoted above, the knowledge of women has been historically relegated to the realm of the unintelligible. In this sense, anything novel or remotely strange to the status quo will be rendered by academic conventions as ‘unprofessional,’ ‘biased,’ ‘obscure,’ etc.

You get the gist.

Respectable, serious scholarship has been traditionally connected to taking an objective stance on a research theme: one must have enough distance from their object of study in order to be considered "a serious actress.” Well, I am not one of those. In fact, I find that the idea of being emotionally distant from one’s scholarly practice is reminiscent of mind-body dualism, and can be the driving force behind ethnocentric considerations on what is and is not scientific thinking, something which in itself carries historical roots of a potentially racist evaluation of knowledge (especially coming from Western modern science’s irrefutable patriarchal epistemology of thinking).

To historicize knowledge and lived experience cannot mean, in my view, to strip them of their political value and ideological affiliations. As someone who left a country where neofascism became a fertile ground due to widespread uncritical historical assumptions (from public outcries clamoring for the return of a military dictatorship to attempts at mythologising an incompetent führer, who seems unable even to empty his bowels from his own misery), being regarded as "too activist” does not ring at all pejoratively, in my worldview. It just means I have blood running in my veins.  

By understanding sexism in the intersection with racism, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression from the patriarchal ‘tentacle porn,’ I am bluntly recognizing how "stripping” one’s lived experience from their analytical investigation is the same type of logic which led women to be considered as hysterics, or even the first female scientists to be regarded as ‘evil witches’—simply because the rules they followed were not those written by men.  One must point out the danger in qualifying academic research by stressing that truthful investigation comes exclusively from objective observations of reality; to have any involvement with a subject of interest, in this objectifying stance, is a doorway to dubious, uncertain, and problematic perspectives.

This misinterpretation of knowledge is largely responsible for the construction of a historical binary between winners and losers: the former embodying a ‘masculine’ authority capable of granting jurisdiction and entry visas into the topography of accepted knowledge, and the latter gaslighting a ‘feminine’ ambiguity into thinking of itself as faulty cognition. The limits of scholarship seem to be, thus, delineated in this process of marginalizing passionate, informed arguments as excessive outbursts of debatable political nature, whilst controlled (and disciplinary) scholarship is deemed trustworthy. 

At the end of the day, scholarly research is bound by disciplinary structures which have historically defined editorial decisions and epistemologies of the body. For those of you out there who have already been called "too activist” or "troublemakers” before, fear not! Your truth upsets a traditionally constructed set of beliefs that inform the creation of notions on what is considered civilized, and what is ‘barbaric’. In every thought you utter, there will always be “something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.” 

Photo credit: © Gabi de Luca