Data Breach

Several years ago, I worked in the department of a provincial University. The only woman in a department of six men, instances of everyday sexism were routine. On one occasion, scheduled by the course leader to give tutorials in his office due to lack of available space, I was presented with the photograph of a topless student above the desk, her face carefully covered with a spreadsheet on a largely empty noticeboard.  

In the context of the university as neoliberal corporation (from corporare, to form into a body) the bodies of students (corpus) are conduits of capital that reiterate women’s historical status as proto-commodity in Euro-American contexts. In this case, the body of the young woman is the site of violent appropriation by an alliance of men who are its aggressive, competitive overseers and authors. The exchange and display of naked students between senior male staff and young male students takes the form of a contract, designed to re-articulate the status quo. Such images can be framed, not as a regime of representation, but as inappropriate propositions that subject actual bodies to a sustained campaign of structural violence designed to disempower them. These acts constitute a willful blindness that attends the representation of certain photographic bodies, mobilized here in the name of free-speech, and sanctioned by being a gift.

In seeking to understand why my boss thought this was an acceptable gesture, a 32-page complaint was levied against me from four of the department’s men. This act of homosocial defence is an example of what happens when, by naming a problem, we become the problem (Ahmed 2012, 150). The complaint demonstrates the levels of absurdity and cruelty that augment hegemonic systems threatened by critical revision, as well as the lengths deployed to resist responsibility by claiming injury.

The subject of the complaint is described using clichés long evolved in the language of gaslighting and misogyny: erratic, inappropriate, unbalanced, aggressive, obscene, unprofessional; frantic; manic; embarrassing; provocative; sexually explicit; unpredictable; obsessed; confrontational. Her behaviour is deemed at one point to be ‘tantamount to harassment’. The re-photographing of this image is highlighted in the complaint as a ‘data breach,’ an ironic reversal- and one of many that characterises the complaint. In an audacious and grotesque attempt to align her feminism with radicalisation, two of the men mention her ‘dancing on the Paris Metro’ on the same day that terrorist attacks were carried out in central Paris.