Ann J. Cahill is a professor of philosophy at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. Her research areas focus on feminist philosophy and philosophy of the body. She has written two books in philosophy, Rethinking Rape (2001, Cornell University Press) and Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (2011, Routledge).
What excites you about philosophy?
Two things, really. First, despite its reputation as being overly abstract and disconnected from the realities of life, which, let’s face it, is not at all undeserved, philosophy for me has always been a place to ask the most pressing of questions about human living: what does justice look like? How are we to live with each other? How do our conceptual frameworks shape our sense of reality, and how does our materiality shape our conceptual frameworks? Who are we, really? Those are the philosophical questions that compel me, and I find them utterly implicated in social relations of every sort. Second, philosophy is really challenging. It takes every synapse I’ve got and all my concentration to make philosophical sense out of anything, and I like the sensation of having to exert my attention in such a focused way.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
It’s interesting to me that this is such a challenging question – which tells me that the gendered politics of pride is alive and well. I’m not sure that I can point to just one thing that tops the list, so let me give a few. I tend to think of my first book, Rethinking Rape, as part of a group of philosophical works (including Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self) that brought the question of sexual assault back to the forefront of feminist philosophy after some decades of neglect. So I’m proud of that.
Anytime I get to experience a student developing new skills, insights, and knowledge in my classes is an utter delight; maybe my proudest moment as a teacher was when I was teaching argument diagramming to a critical thinking class, and there was one student who was really struggling with it. I had just started experimenting with a step-by-step method of teaching the material (read more about that approach here). One interesting aspect of that pedagogy was that if a student didn’t grasp the material of a particular step, they couldn’t continue on with the rest of the material. In this case, that meant that I had to come up with new ways of teaching the material until this one student learned it. And he was so determined – he just wouldn’t give up, and I was damned if I was going to give up if he wasn’t. So we tried method after method, and I kept emphasizing that we were looking for a way into the material that worked with his way of thinking, and we were going to find it eventually. And we did! It took him months, but he did learn the skill, and he and I both learned a lot more than that in the process. I continue to think of him as one of the best students I ever had.
Okay, just one more: I’m proud that I got the National Endowment of Humanities to support a Summer Institute on that I directed almost two years ago. The topic was “Diverse Philosophical Approaches to Sexual Violence,” and I had to apply for that grant four years in a row before it was accepted. In fact, when I applied for the fourth time, I had pretty much convinced myself that they would never accept it, and had resigned myself to meeting the more modest goal of providing the NEH staff with a yearly opportunity to consider some of the philosophical aspects of the phenomenon of sexual violence. So I was stunned when the application was actually accepted. It was an enormous undertaking, and there are definitely aspects about it that I would do differently if I did it again, but I’m proud of the intellectual connections that the institute fostered, and the work that its participants have produced and will produce in the future.
What are you working on right now?
I have a couple of projects going, and I’m really fortunate to have a full-year sabbatical next year to work on them. During the summer, I want to dive into a project that for now I’m referring to as an intellectual history of Title IX. I want to understand in better detail the role that Catharine MacKinnon played in expanding Title IX to cover sexual harassment and sexual violence, an expansion that could hardly have been imagined when the legislation was first passed in 1972. Although MacKinnon’s influence on legal matters regarding pornography is well researched, her influence on Title IX has barely been mentioned, yet she advised the Yale law students who filed a suit in 1977 arguing that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. I want to dig into that court case, as well as the details of MacKinnon’s theory of sexual harassment, and ask what elements of her philosophical approach made it into Title IX policies and practices, and which didn’t. Although I have criticized MacKinnon’s philosophy in my work on sexual assault, I find myself wondering whether the current turns in Title IX cases (where many of the complaints filed with the Office of Civil Rights over the last several years have come from male-identified students who have been found responsible for sexual assault, and who have claimed that they have been discriminated on the basis of their sex by their institutions) might demonstrate that MacKinnon’s ideas were overly watered down as they made their way into legislation and policies. Or maybe it’s the case that they weren’t well-suited in some other way to addressing gender-based violence in education – I’m not sure. I want to find out, and I suspect that one of the results of this project will be a softening of my own criticism of MacKinnon.
Secondly, I’m continuing a larger project on the ethical and political meanings of voice as an embodied, human phenomenon. I’m struck with how little feminist philosophy of the body has engaged with voice, which tends to show up primarily as a metaphor (we’re encouraged to find our voice, to bring more voices to the table, etc.). I’m working with Christine Hamel, a voice and speech professor at Boston University, to bring the insights on voice developed in the world of theatre studies to feminist philosophy, and vice versa. We just published our first article in Voice and Speech Review, and I’m working on another that will be aimed more directly at a philosophical audience. Although there’s very little on this topic in feminist philosophy, there are some great sources in musicology and sound studies, so I’m diving into those at the moment, and working on developing an approach to vocal justice that maintains a strong focus on both the racialized and gendered body and mundane aspects of vocalization and sound. Again, I’m lucky to have a full-year sabbatical to dedicate to developing this work.
What’s your favorite quote?
Alice Walker, The Color Purple: “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.”
What cause or charity do you care about most?
For the last two years, I’ve become involved in a local nonprofit that works to support immigrant and refugee members of our community, and to build strong connections between residents who have lived in our city for many years and new arrivals. That work is contextualized, for me, in a growing and urgent concern about the xenophobia that is present in contemporary political discourse. I’m particularly worried about how that xenophobia is related to current instantiations of white supremacy, and how the ways in which US citizens are being encouraged to view immigrants and refugees – as dangerous, dirty, and threatening – could soften the ideological ground in an increasingly dangerous way. Such an effect could make policies that would intensify even further the violence and marginalization targeted at citizens of color all the more palatable to members of racially dominant groups. (Just to be clear: the anti-immigrant policies are ethically deplorable on their own grounds; I don’t mean to imply that they’re only problematic in relation to future policies and practices. But the fact that they are an item in a white supremacist to-do list is important.) For me, struggling alongside immigrant and refugee neighbors to counter disastrous, oppressive policies is a way of recognizing the interconnectedness of anti-racist political struggles.
As part of this work, I help to organize trips from my town (Greensboro, NC) to the detention center that most of my community members who are detained by ICE are sent to, Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA. People who go on these trips drive for eight hours each way, usually two days in a row, for one-hour visits with people who are detained at Stewart. Sometimes they’re able to meet with people from Greensboro, and sometimes not; but in every case, they come away with a deepened understanding of what the increased levels of detention and deportation have meant for our community. Although I haven’t been able to go on one of the trips yet, I’m proud to be part of a small advocacy group that has already organized five trips since November 2017, and has another six scheduled for 2019. I don’t harbor any illusions that such episodic, first-person interactions with the detention and deportation system are in and of themselves sufficient to halt the appalling anti-immigrant sentiment that has risen once again the US. But I do think that the act of witnessing is an important one, and if members of my community are going to be rounded up and imprisoned with wanton disregard for their human and legal rights, the least I can do is take notice, and help others do the same.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
