Guest post on What is the Real Problem of "Me" Studies? (I)

[This is an invited guest post by Audrey Yap.--ES.]

A recent column by Joseph Heath at Toronto discusses the issue of “‘me’ studies,” which I take to be a phenomenon of people studying too narrowly the circumstances of their own lives. This is in part a problem, Heath writes, because it goes against “the broad intent of a humanistic education, which is to gain some understanding of the extraordinary variety of human experience, both historically and in other cultures – to drive home the idea that different people understand and evaluate the world in fundamentally different ways.” And I agree!--Western philosophy in general has too much in the way of “me” studies, namely straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men studying other straight, upper-middle-class, cis, heterosexual white men. This, as far as I can tell, has narrowed the discipline in general, much to its detriment.

But this isn't the problem that Heath sees. Or rather, this doesn't seem to be what he's talking about when he talks about “me” studies. Rather, the problem area he diagnoses has to do with studying the conditions of one's own oppression. Standpoint theory has long argued that those best positioned to understand the nature and conditions of (a particular kind of) oppression are those who are oppressed (in that particular way). Heath disagrees, writing that neither the oppressed nor the non-oppressed are especially well-positioned to study forms of oppression, since both are biased, simply in different ways. He writes that “the inevitable conclusion is that neither are particularly well-positioned, since both will be biased in the direction of producing theories that are, at some level, self-serving, or self-exculpatory.”

But let's consider the implications of this a little further and entertain the thought that a theory's being self-serving is not sufficient reason for dismissing it. If both oppressed and non-oppressed groups are likely to produce self-serving theories of oppression, what does that mean? After all, it is certainly the interest of an oppressed group to stop being oppressed! Similarly, many groups who are not oppressed benefit (at least indirectly) from the oppression of others. In a world of limited resources, if some people systematically have less access to those resources, it follows that the rest will very likely have more access. This means that it's in the interest of a non-oppressed group to maintain the conditions of oppression. Then, if eliminating oppression is one of our goals, the self-serving nature of the theories produced gives us a clear reason to favour the theories produced by oppressed groups over the theories produced by non-oppressed groups. In fact, given that we want to reduce risk, it can even give us a reason to systematically discount the potentially self-serving theories of the privileged groups, or at least hold them to higher epistemic thresholds.

At the very least all this makes Heath's conclusion seem a little less inevitable.

Now despite the fact that I disagree with Heath's “inevitable” conclusion, I do agree with several of his prescriptions, like the thought that we want lots of people from diverse backgrounds to engage with issues of oppression and with each other's ideas on these issues.  So clearly this requires people from non-oppressed groups (people with various kinds of privilege) to confront oppression that they do not suffer. But (as Heath describes it) the non-oppressed do not normally constitute the majority of people who study oppression. One of the reasons Heath considers is that oppressed people are attracted to “me” studies, which are areas that interest them personally. But I don't see why “me” studies should be the domain of oppressed people (which is not an explicit claim Heath makes, but seems to follow from his framing of the issues). After all, it would be equally likely that non-oppressed people gravitate away from studying oppression in favour of issues that seem more reflective of the conditions of their lives. Why, after all, study disability as an able-bodied person, when there are so many other philosophically interesting issues that would never force you to think of the privileges you might enjoy as a result of the body you have? If disabled philosophers studying disability counts as an instance of “me” studies, then so should non-disabled philosophers failing to study disability.

So I absolutely agree with Heath that “me” studies are a problem. But he misdiagnoses its source. The problem is not with the biases of oppressed people studying the conditions of their own oppression. The problem is with the biases of non-oppressed people who ignore issues of oppression in their own work. Much of this stems from the fact that I disagree with Heath's claim that neither the oppressed nor the non-oppressed are better placed to study oppression. Even from personal reflection, I can think of several ways in which I belong to oppressed groups (as a woman of colour, for instance), and several ways in which I belong to non-oppressed groups (as a straight cis person, for instance). It would be absurd for me to claim that I am in just as good a position as a trans person to understand transphobia. Heath's claim that nobody is particularly well-positioned to study oppression might be true in that nobody is perfectly positioned. But the oppressed are at least better positioned than the non-oppressed.

It is also not clear to me that we all live in the same social world that we are studying. We might all be living in a world in which objects tend to fall to the ground when released from a height, and in which humans need to breathe air. But it is not clear that people who use wheelchairs live in the same world as those who do not. After all, what constitutes a straightforward path from a bus stop to a store can look very different to people depending on their membership in one or the other group. Still, while this post has been largely critical of Heath's column, he does raise a very important issue, namely how members of non-oppressed groups can fruitfully participate in dialogues about oppression. This is something I want to talk about in the next post on the subject.

Comments

[Jennifer Baker]

Thanks for this post! I work on virtue ethics and am now looking to George Yancy's account of whiteness to fit those norms into the same old account I've been using. When I've presented the work, I keep hearing: why wouldn't virtue ethicists have criticized the norms of "whiteness" (or dominance/ racism) before? (One person that I know of has, actually, but this is just a question I've gotten from a few times from non-philosophers.) My answer, for why I hadn't, has been that I wouldn't have figured out these norms without Yancy. But now I can say something in addition, like what you explain above. I was doing a form of "me" studies before I looked to the role our ideas about racial identity in practical reasoning.

Thanks for fixing what seemed so off about Heath's focus (though why he doesn't focus on the cowardice of philosophers who won't *ask questions* of colleagues has been bothering me, too!)

Thanks again, can't wait for the next post.

[Tom Digby]

Wonderful, and much needed, post, Audrey! Just one quick point that I hope complements it:  As you know from having read my Love and War book, I think the most powerful route to getting beyond the oppression of women (and mutatis mutandis, other modes of oppression also) starts with transcending what I call "the zero-sum gender game," in which it is presumed that "gains for women as a group imply losses for men as a group, and vice versa." For example, the misogyny that fuels women's oppression also fuels a notion of masculinity that is physically and emotionally detrimental in the lives of men. Hence, the situation may be more complicated than is captured in the assertion that "it's in the interest of a non-oppressed group to maintain the conditions of oppression." However, this complication in no way undermines your suggestion/conclusion that the perspectives of members of privileged groups need to be held to "higher epistemic standards."

[Rachel McKinnon]

Seriously fantastic!

[Christy Mag Uidhir]

Worth noting the presence at least stateside of the pernicious and rather pervasive (especially within the Humanities) implicit assumption that non-white members of the professoriate have research specializations (or even mere research interests) in the academic study of their respective non-whiteness.

[Joe Heath]

Thank you for noticing that I was defending cognitive diversity.

So right now I'm writing a paper on climate change. Is it really your view that this amounts to "me" studies, because it is an instance of a non-disabled philosopher failing to study disability? I feel as though something didn't get preserved amidst all the negations there...

[Audrey]

I don't think it's for me to say what does or doesn't qualify as "me" studies, since I think framing it that way gets the problem backwards. I don't think it's a problem that people study the circumstances of their own lives - I think the real problem is that people neglect the circumstances of lives significantly different from their own.

Climate change is well outside my area of philosophical expertise, but disability is surely relevant to lots of issues in that field. I mean, I think it's taken for granted now that climate change disproportionately affects people based on economic status, so I'd hope there would be philosophers that also account for how it disproportionately affects people based on their (dis)abilities.

[Kathleen Lowrey]

Joe Heath -- you really want to say you are a defender of "cognitive diversity" when in your original post you went out of your way to roll your eyes at the notion of "ableism" and say that no one takes that sort of thing seriously anymore and then double down here on the same "ha ha disability what a crock" *again*? See that shovel in your hand? Put it down and walk away from it.