<Notes from fieldwork>
In CARE's work with the question of sexual harassment in Asian Universities, particularly salient was the deployment of cultural codes and cultural logics to perpetuate acts of harassment, to protect harassers, and to enable in many instances the toxic behaviors of harassers. The culturally coded practices of gendered harassment are ensconced in practices of "saving face," legitimized through Anglo-Christian narratives of harmony.
This work of CARE as an anchor for social justice is tied to my own activist interventions within the academe. For our work at CARE, sites of activist interventions are here and there, in the inside and the outside. Activism inside is salient to the processes of social change. Moreover, activism inside is not accommodating the structure, is not being co-opted into the structure, but is building actively registers for social justice. In other words, a key element of critical reflexivity that serves as a register for the CCA translates into how I/we see my/our role(s) as academics within the structure, as its inhabitants, and the ways in which my/our body can be mobilized to build a register for social change. The urgency of social change is rooted in the experiences with injustice among those at the margins of power.
Therefore, in the authoritarian regime, even as CARE was doing this work, I ensured that I documented each of the instances of sexual harassment that I heard of, created registers for documenting them, and advocated to the academic structures for social change. Noting the imperviousness of the structures to the ongoing calls for change (documented in multiple emails sent and the opaque institution-speak), I co-crafted a white paper, invited a leading scholar of sexual harassment to campus, and submitted the white paper to the academic structures, with a call for urgent change.
Even as I did this, I ensured that instances of sexual harassment raised by students were raised up, and had registers to work from. In one such instance, a student intern had been harassed sexually by the employer. When the teacher-in-charge reported this to me, my first suggestion was to raise it, file a police report, and blackmark the employer immediately. This appeared to be the minimum necessary steps to protect the safety of the student being harassed.
When the teacher-in-charge shared this strategy with the radical opportunist that made a career out of projecting issues of gender justice and projecting themselves as the advocate for gender justice, the opportunist responded, "Oh, the academic structures are fed-up with his social justice (SJ) warrior stance." Raising an eyebrow, with a smirk on their face, the radical opportunist stated, "It is vital to work pragmatically with the university structures. The people in the structures are angry with Mohan for his social justice stances in making issues out of things."
When students worked through the voice infrastructures they actively created to draw attention to the issue of sexual harassment, and the issue emerged on the public space, the radical opportunist quickly turned. This was both now an opportunity to work with the structures to help the structures save face as well as an opportunity to position oneself as aligned with social justice.
This kind of shallow opportunism unfortunately forms the infrastructures of much of radically-pretending Cultural Studies kind of academia today, where positioning onself as radical, without doing the actual work of placing the body on the line, is a key ingredient in one's career trajectory, enabling one to move forward.
This kind of radical opportunism in the service of hegemonic patriarchal academic structures both works as surveillance as well as co-optation of resistance. The instrumentalization of radical activism reflected in this story of academic opportunism that one sees in areas such as Cultural Studies (I mark out Cultural Studies because of the large-scale industry of profiteering established by its institutionalization and by the explicit arguments about institutionalization offered by its proponents) is integral to protecting and perpetuating the oppressive status quo.
The label of "social justice warrior" is conveniently deployed to protect the grotesque status quo. Simultaneously, the claims to social justice are incorporated and positioned as brand appeals to create pathways for personal profiteering.
The ways in which Cultural Studies establishments within universities approach the question of sexual harassment offer powerful insights into the incorporation of hegemonic Cultural Studies in the service of power and control in the university.
The institutionalization of anything to the service of power is just that, accommodating to power.
Postscript: I am sure the careerist opportunist will have some kind of post-structural narrative as an alternative reading of this script!