The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.
The following is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Rebecca Kukla (@rebeccakukla) which will be released in full on Thursday of next week.
What were your teenage years like?
When I was fourteen, my parents left for Bali and Indonesia for a trip of indeterminate length. Tired of bouncing in and out of school, I decided to stay. This was the era before cell phones or email, and I had no way to contact them and they didn’t contact me. By the time they returned many months later I had already established myself on my own. I got my own apartment in Toronto, supporting myself by working as a barista at the sadly now-defunct Bloor Cinema and supplementing with various transient part-time jobs, and I’ve been self-supporting ever since. Elliot lasted a few more years but also moved out in their teens.
I mean, I think a lot of parents would freak out at the idea of leaving their kids to fend for themselves (not mine, but still). When they got back, were y’all in touch at all?
I ended up staying with my parents here and there for a few months at a time over the course of the following four years. But I stopped taking any financial support from them. They really didn’t notice much. My parents were unreconstructed hippies and were always on some sort of journey to find themselves, and usually stoned. My father was tossed around between countries and caregivers during the Holocaust and for years afterwards, and didn’t really have any parenting models or much parental identity, although he was really fun and inspiring to talk to. My mother was self-centered, abusive, and neglectful.
To be fair, I think I was also more or less unparentable. I couldn’t stand the idea of materially or emotionally depending on anyone, especially if there was risk involved. So I basically just let them wander off. I kept sporadic contact with them during most of the rest of my life, but now I have more or less lost touch with them.
I am a strong believer in chosen family. I have a strong sense of community and rootedness in relationships. I just don’t think of biological or legal bonds as any kind of measure of who I am supposed to keep in my inner circle. As it happens, I am very close with my brother, so he is both biological and chosen family to me. And I am very close with and committed to my biological son, and I hope that will be true for my whole life. Other than that, the people I consider family are not legally or biologically related to me.
At age fourteen, I was more or less done with high school, and briefly tried to make a career for myself in ballet, enrolling in the dance program at George Brown College. After a near-fatal round of anorexia that brought me down to 58 pounds and the realization that I was never going to be femme enough or dainty enough to survive as a dancer, I quit ballet cold turkey.
Jesus. How did things get that bad? Was recovery difficult?
I will say that the entire culture of dance strongly encourages, even valorizes disordered eating and obsessive thinking. I don’t have so much I want to say about “recovery.” It’s a life-long thing. I used to get really annoyed at people who assumed that people with eating disorders are always in a kind of battle rather than simply being “recovered,” but now I realize that that’s entirely true for most of us, including for those of us lucky enough to be at a physically healthy weight.
So, what was the plan?
At fifteen, I applied to University of Toronto, because it was the school I had grown up near; most Canadians did not go through a drawn-out process of choosing a University the way middle-class Americans tend to – we generally just go to our local school. I began that fall as a math major. In the fall of my second year, I took Philosophy of Math with James Brown, and that was my conversion moment, despite my resolution not to follow too closely in my father’s footsteps.
From then on I was certain I wanted to be an academic philosopher. University of Toronto has a huge and excellent philosophy department that has always taken special interest in its undergraduate program. Those of us who were interested in going on in philosophy were professionalized and mentored very early and effectively. By the time I was applying to grad school I had a co-authored publication in Analysis and a single-authored publication forthcoming in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science that I could include in my dossier. I attribute this at least as much to the kind of guidance I got from my undergraduate professors, and their enthusiastic and energetic belief in my abilities, as to any kind of native special talent.
You co-authored that Analysis piece with your dad. Fun?
Yes, it was fun. By then I hadn’t lived with my father for years, and our big way of connecting was through philosophy. This remained true until Parkinson’s Disease made him basically noncommunicative, about a decade ago I guess. It was definitely how we spent quality time together. I learned a lot of my sense of humor, my writing style, and my way of approaching philosophical problems from my dad.
Outside of your parents, did you receive any supervision or guidance from adults?
There were always adults in my life who were important to me and supported me in various ways. My Grade 13 chemistry teacher invited me to stay with her for a while when she found out I was between homes and couch surfing. I deeply admired one of my ballet teachers, and she gave me an enormous tuition break once she found out I was paying for my own classes. Once I got to University of Toronto, I formed close connections to several of my professors.
But – and again I think that I am partly to blame for this – I suspect that I’m basically unmentorable. I am self-destructively independent and stubborn, and deeply resentful of any attempt to control or patronize me, even when that’s not really a fair assessment of what is going on.
Where did you apply to grad school?
I applied to Pittsburgh, Princeton, Berkeley, and UCLA. By the time I was in my third year, I had read enough and received enough advice to know that the University of Pittsburgh was my first choice for graduate school.
So, you had to move to the states. Any unique obstacles?
Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, when I was 19, I married my then-boyfriend, largely so as to make it easier for him to move to the States with me when I moved for grad school. He was a brilliant and kind young man, a philosophy student, a near master-level chess player, and an accomplished pianist who had gotten a full music scholarship to university after Grade 11. He also was struck with a massive auto-immune disorder that gave him completely debilitating environmental sensitivities right after we got married. A huge amount of my money, time, and emotional energy over the next seven years went into trying to get him a proper diagnosis and any kind of treatment or mitigation that worked, and trying to accommodate his needs and keep him alive. When he had a reaction, he’d lose chunks of hair on the spot, go temporarily blind, break out in flaming hives, lose his breath, and any other number of symptoms that were objectively terrifying, especially perhaps to people as young as we were. So, much of my path through graduate school was shaped by being a caretaker to very disabled, dramatically underinsured loved one.
It’s really amazing you did that. Any other challenges?
Since childhood, I have dealt with extreme, sometimes debilitating anxiety, as well as a form of clinical depression that some doctors have called ‘aggravated depression;’ when I am depressed I don’t become lethargic or withdrawn, like most people do, but rather angry and volatile, and unmanageably frustrated. I also have a host of sensory processing problems that often make normal activities intolerable and overwhelming and enraging for me. I have extreme misophonia, for example: some sounds trigger an extreme fight-or-flight reaction in me. I have had to leave events I cared about because someone was chewing gum or something. When I was a kid, I had problems with violence and impulse control, triggered by sensory overloads and irritants of this sort.
Was feminism a big thing at Pitt?
Tamara Horowitz, Annette Baier, and Jennifer Whiting were all leading the way in treating feminist philosophy as a dead serious, rigorous, respect-worthy part of philosophy, although they didn’t get much uptake from the men in the department for it. But having three amazingly brilliant women doing feminist philosophy in a top department in the early 90s was simply incredible. And Iris Young, who became my external reader and a crucial person on my committee, was in the School of Public and International Affairs. So feminist philosophy was an important intellectual force in the department, even if it wasn’t as well-integrated into the department culture as a whole as were history, pragmatism, philosophy of science, and the like.
How did your attitudes toward feminism evolve?
Honestly, my attitudes towards feminism before grad school were deeply immature. I thought of it as a kind of dreary and backwards-looking thing to worry about. Graduate school truly transformed me. On the one hand, there were all these amazing feminist scholars, as well as a bunch of brilliant grad students who were fired up about feminist theory, so it became intellectually exciting territory for me. On the other, I was taken aback by the deep gendering of the culture in the department, which I hadn’t really experienced (or at least noticed) before. The department was organized around an intense cult of genius, with Bob Brandom and John McDowell as its ‘superstars,’ even though the women in the department were incredibly successful, exciting philosophers. We were constantly told that if we prioritized anything other than philosophy – what city we lived in, partners, kids, etc. – then we were not real, serious philosophers. My concerns for my husband’s health and the pressures it put on where we could realistically live were treated as trivial, and as signs of weakness on my part. Our placement director, Richard Gale, was a well-known constant serial sexual harasser and everyone just thought it was funny. For instance, when I gave my mock job talk, he took me into his office afterwards for my debriefing, which was supposed to be for feedback and advice. He grabbed me by the scarf around my neck, playfully semi-choked me with it, and said “That was a real fk-me talk. And this is a fk-me scarf. You should wear it whenever you give talks.” And that was the end of the meeting. I was incredibly embarrassed and frustrated, but everyone I told about the encounter thought it was hilarious. So both intellectual exposure to theory and personal experiences on the ground quickly turned me into a serious feminist.
Could you tell me a bit more about the inspiration for Mass Hysteria? How does being a parent inform your philosophy?
I think almost all of my writing grows pretty directly out of life experiences that puzzle or interest or frustrate me. I found being pregnant so very weird. There was this sudden, massive, large-scale social interest in my body, and in this new person it was producing. I was suddenly bombarded with very specific, often pseudo-quantitative, rules for how I was supposed to eat, move, feel, look, listen, sleep, have sex – no domain of my life was immune from regulation and demands for self-discipline and self-surveillance. I was expected to count kicks, write down what I ate, show up for various screens and tests providing images and reports on the inside of my body, show up on a regular schedule at the doctor’s office, the birth “class”, the ultrasound clinic. Strangers were suddenly touching me, commenting on what I ate and drank, and so on … I was a perfectly healthy 30-year-old woman and abruptly I felt like my body was unrecognizable, like it was not mine but this kind of very dangerous and important public property. Moreover, it was clear to me that there was no science behind most of these rules, or the science was so distorted by ideology as to be unusable, so I started getting really interested in what we think of as risky and why, and how we communicate and impose risk judgments.
So on my maternity leave, and during my sabbatical after that, I wrote a book about it. At first it was supposed to be just a diary, then a novel, then it morphed into nonfiction, but I was not at first conceiving of it as a scholarly book. But I am so deeply trained as a philosopher and a scholar that I guess that’s just how I work through things in writing. It’s a quirky, very interdisciplinary book that bears the marks of having started as a personal diary. One thing that I am proud of is that many women, both academics and non-academics, have contacted me to tell me that Mass Hysteria helped them a great deal during their pregnancies; it helped them manage socially imposed fear, and their sense of being overwhelmed, invaded, and alienated from their bodies.
Awesome! Have you considered revisiting these issues? How does philosophy inform your parenting?
I am now the mother of a 17-year-old who is an undergraduate and almost an adult, and I have started to toy with writing a sequel. The policing of the bodies and activities of children and teenagers, as well as the demands we place on mothers, and our bizarre cultural belief that somehow mothers have this magical, nearly absolute power to produce “good” or “bad” people through our mothering choices, is interestingly continuous with but different from our regulation of pregnant women and mothers of infants. I’ve violated so many socially enforced “rules” of mothering, and I’ve given my kid so much more freedom than is “acceptable,” because I’ve never seen any convincing evidence for most of the prescriptions we are all supposed to follow. I’ve gotten interested lately in just how willing we are to impose restrictions on the agency and mobility of children and teens without any real evidence or any justification other than vague ideological sound bites. I’ve followed something like a “least restrictive environment” principle in parenting my kid, imposing rules and following parenting norms and traditions only if I could find evidence that convinced me there was a serious risk in doing otherwise, and always taking seriously the idea that neither I nor anyone else has the right to thwart my son’s agency and autonomy unless doing so is manifestly important for protecting his well-being and safety.
You’re working on a MA in geography, is that correct? What is that all about?
Yes!! It’s incredibly fun! I am doing an MA in urban geography at CUNY, through Hunter College, advised by Marianna Pavlovskaya, who is one of the towering figures in feminist urban geography and in “critical GIS studies”, which is roughly the critical study of the digital production of representations of spatial information. I started working on a book on urban spaces, which will be coming out from Oxford University Press at the end of next year: City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make One Another. It’s a totally interdisciplinary book, drawing on phenomenology and philosophy of place and the body, geography, ethnography, urban planning, and cultural studies, at a minimum. I really wanted it to be philosophically rich but also firmly planted in concrete urban reality and in empirical work on cities. I started reading a bunch of urban geography and urban theory on my own. It was really fun, but the more I read, the more I realized that no matter how ‘smart’ you are, trying to figure out the lay of the land in a discipline that is not your own without guidance is really disorienting. You can’t tell where what you are reading is situated in the larger literature, what debates it has in the background, etc. I also got more and more interested in the empirical side of things the more I read. So I decided it would be maximally fun and intellectually efficient, and good for the book, to just do the MA. Georgetown has been supportive; they pay part of my tuition and the department has been great about letting me schedule teaching around my classes and the like.
How’s your mental health nowadays?
I now recognize retroactively that when I was a child and teenager, ballet was my self-medication; I used it to exhaust myself and thereby regulate my emotions. I’ve slowly learned that the one and only way that I can effectively manage my depression and regulate my emotions is by physically exhausting my body every day. And it takes a lot to exhaust me! So I am extremely physically active. I commute by bike, and I walk miles a day. I usually run every other day as well, and I try to include one long (10+ mile) run a week. I am just mediumly good at it. I am not built to be a runner, physically or temperamentally, but I plug away at it regardless. I compete in powerlifting and boxing. Over the summer I was lifting almost every day, because it was less convenient to box. Normally, I also box almost every day. Training for a physically demanding sport like boxing constitutes necessary mental health care for me.
You helped start a non-monogamy Facebook group. What would you say to somebody who suggests non-monogamous relationships become exploitative? That we don’t have the cultural tools to manage those relationships?
Exploitative compared to what? We have a very, very long history of fundamentally exploitative and even violent purporting-to-be-monogamous relationships, no? The tools we are given by the culture to navigate mono relationships are pretty deeply corrupt and crappy, in my view, and – maybe even more importantly – the norms for negotiating monogamous relationships are typically absorbed implicitly and uncritically and in a scattershot fashion, because they are just the water we swim in as a culture. In my experience, people who are trying to build ethical non-monogamous relationships are exceptionally thoughtful and explicit about all aspects of these relationships – consent, communication, respect, boundaries, etc. We have to be, because there aren’t default norms in place. And there are plenty of tools out there. People in intentional, cultivated non-monogamous relationships tend to go to seminars, workshops, camps and conferences with other like-minded folks, and so forth. So actually we are typically getting much more sex and relationship education than most people, who generally just fall into socially normative forms of relationships.
Touché! Great answer…
I can’t make big general statements, of course, and I am sure, given the dazzling spread of human variety, that there are plenty of exploitative non-monogamous relationships out there (including of course authoritarian polygynous relationships in the context of strict religions and the like, but that’s a completely separate thing from ethical non-monogamy). But I’ve been dramatically more exploited in my presumptively-monogamous relationships than in my non-monogamous relationships. The only exploitation I’ve experienced with respect to non-monogamy has been the sexualization, objectification, indirect threats, and insults I’ve received from anonymous trolls on philosophy blogs.
What’s the difference, if any, between science and philosophy? If there is no difference, and one is a naturalist, why not just do science? What unique things do philosophers bring to the table?
In general, I try to resist all gatekeeping and border policing in philosophy, and I don’t believe in pithy or theoretically unified answers to questions about the difference between philosophy and other things. I think of philosophy as a loosely connected and loosely bounded grab bag of conceptual and argumentative tools, helpful technical concepts and distinctions, theoretical lenses, texts and textual traditions, and approaches to finding and thinking about problems. Together, this grab-bag makes us particularly good at questioning basic assumptions that may not be justified, drawing distinctions that are being conflated, and giving subtle readings of the discursively shaped world around us. Trained philosophers tend to share a bunch of these tools and skills with one another, but the boundaries are completely porous and hopefully expanding. I don’t see any sharp distinctions between philosophy and science, but scientists in general have better skills than we do at collecting and analyzing empirical data, and we generally have better skills than they do at making clean conceptual distinctions and questioning presuppositions. Good epistemic practices, in my view, are always fundamentally social and collaborative, and we need all these skills and all the people who have them to be in conversation with one another and building upon one another in order to figure out things worth figuring out. That’s about as systematic an answer as you’ll get out of me!
Thanks Rebecca!
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.
