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July 4, 2006
An interesting article---Academic Whores and Publishing Pimps by Mark John Isola in Bad Subjects. He says:
Anti-sex politics and sex-phobia form the academy's resistance to sex. The former denies the sexual body; the latter denies the sexual act, and their complicity performs a significant act of oppression. In keeping with the function of a discriminating prejudice, this sexism ritualizes a process of abjection (insert Julia Kristeva) by which a larger ideology is justified and upheld. This larger ideology can be detected at the very center of Western Civilization, beginning with Plato's dialectic of existence and being.
Gee that stretches back into the philosophical past, but it can be linked to this:
Brassai, Paris Prostitute, 1933
Isola spells that ideology out:
The academy's refusal of sex upholds the mind/body binary and elevates the mind by subordinating the body. This casts individuals, who make a living with or through their bodies, as other to the academic. The subaltern constituted by this process, the body upon which the academic rests, is the laborer, and the primary archetype for the laboring body is the prostitute. The trope of the prostitute functions to convey, albeit stereotypically, the alienation that lies at the heart of Freudian and Marxist theory, and in this sense, we all fear the prostitute within us.
He then provocatively asks: what does the prostitute tell us, if anything at all, about the academic?A lot is my guess.
The prostitute is not condemned because s/he is necessarily objectified in his/her reality but because the figure of the prostitute reflects the objectification an academic feels in their reality. Indeed, academics are a species of whore, and their pimps are academic journals. Isola says:
Like an archetypal group of whores fighting over a last stash of condoms, academics battle to outdo one another in the publishing prestige game, and the ego games of the conference circuit are well known. Meanwhile, the journal pimps continue to accept submissions with one hand while cashing checks with the other....Let us no longer be academic whores alienated from our labor by publishing pimps. Free the academy; support open source journals.
I concur. Open source journals---Bad Subjects--- have a powerful and productive potential as they promise to empower academics by allowing them to retain rights to the product of their intellectual labor. Open source journals can slash the barrier that bars a person from accessing intellectual work, particularly the intellectual work of the academy, which is locked up in pricey journal subscriptions and inaccessible expensive electronic databases.
Free the academy; support open source journals.
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