Feminist Public Philosophy Beyond the Academy: An Interview with Amelia Hruby

Ashley Bohrer: Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about your philosophical background. What’d you study? Where’d you study it? What philosophical questions peak your interest and why?

Amelia Hruby: I conferred my PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University in June of 2020. I always like to add that I defended my dissertation from my kitchen table and graduated on YouTube in my parents’ basement, which is a weird pandemic event! My dissertation was on the question of feminist aesthetics, bringing German idealist aesthetics into conversation with a few contemporary feminist thinkers—Sara Ahmed, María Lugones, and Audre Lorde.

In the dissertation, I was really interested in questions around aesthetic experience and how it perhaps represented a different epistemological and ethical relation to the world. I saw a lot of resources in feminist thought, particularly these three women of color that I was reading and the ways that they were also trying to articulate a different relation to the world and people in it.

AB: And what are you getting up to now?

AH: So since finishing my PhD, I have been doing a few different things. I produce a podcast called Fifty Feminist States. On the podcast, I interview feminist activists and artists. Before the pandemic, I traveled around the US to do the interviews in person; now I call them from my home and we chat about their activist or artistic work in their local communities. [Since this interview, Amelia has put Fifty Feminist States on indefinite hiatus. You can still listen to the archive of episodes online.]

I also published a book called Fifty Feminist Mantras with Andrews McNeil. The book, an illustrated journal, is really an effort to bring some of the feminist theory I was reading and so deeply engaging with in my dissertation into a different space, one that is about wellness, self-help, and budding political awareness.

And now I run my own business called Softer Sounds. It’s a podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. I help women and nonbinary business owners learn to podcast and create their own shows.

AB: Wow, that’s a lot of exciting work! Why don’t you walk through a little bit more like what it means to distill or apply or explore some of the feminist philosophy themes that you talked about in academic work through the podcast and the journal.

AH: Both the book and the podcast share an overarching goal of feminist consciousness raising. I think many people who go into gender studies programs, or take women and gender studies courses, or learn feminist theory are seeking some kind of feminist consciousness raising for themselves in some way. That’s certainly what I was doing. That’s why I took Gender Studies courses in grad school, because I was hitting this point in my life where I was realizing how much my gender impacted my lived experience. I was carrying a lot of shame, and I was pressured to feeling like it was my fault that I wasn’t as successful or as efficient or as whatever as I was expected to be at times.

Learning feminist theory helped me work through that and start to see that this was not a personal failing; this was a structural problem. But while reading feminist theory unlocked that for me, when I would recommend those things to my friends, feminist theory did not unlock it for them. They would tell me, ‘this is dense. This is challenging. You can’t just hand me Gender Trouble and leave me to figure it out.’ That’s why I started writing feminist mantras. It was really my way of trying to communicate between these two worlds. I think it’s important to take this highly specialized knowledge and see how it can connect to the people you talk to in your everyday life who aren’t academics.

What I learned in writing the mantras is they actually had this other really profound effect, which is that they helped me take everything I learned intellectually and integrate it into my body. So I was able to use feminist mantras to develop a meditation practice and an embodiment practice. They really helped me not just to know feminist ideas, but to feel them.

When I talk about coming to feminist theory with a sense of shame and failure, reading didn’t just make the shame go away. It helped, but it was really the process of writing a mantra, journaling about it, and meditating on it that helped me release the shame.

Let me give you an example. I didn’t talk in seminar for my first two years of grad school. My professors would say, ‘your papers are great, but you don’t say anything in class.’ And it was because I didn’t know how to have a voice in that space. And there was no amount of feminist theory that I could read that gave me that voice. But what did was taking everything I had learned and working it in and through my body and having these really personal reflections on it. I would write mantras and do yoga with them or go for a run and recite them to myself. And over time, I was able to gain the confidence to speak in class.

What I have realized through putting out the book is that this isn’t just happening to me. People are coming to me and saying that they’re having their own unlocking moments, they are able to see places in their own lives where patriarchy is present, where they are holding, for example, internalized misogyny. In working with the mantra and the journal, they’re able to unpack that and work through it.

I started the podcast for adjacent reasons. It was also about feminist consciousness raising, but I think the piece that I found as I worked myself and with other people through mantra work is that it is a self-help or personal development process. And to me feminism can never just be that. Feminism is not just an internal sense of: ‘I’m going to invest in myself or improve myself.’ That’s not what it’s all about. That work is really necessary. But I think that you do that work in service of being able to show up and build movements in a way where you can contribute in a healthy and generative manner.

If you’re not doing your own work, you can often show up in those spaces and be really harmful. So the mantra work does that inner work, but I wanted to start the podcast because I was working with these people who are doing great feminist consciousness raising on their own or in small groups, and then never connecting to bigger, grassroots movements where they live or in the country.

I really wanted to make clear to people that feminist activism is happening everywhere. No matter where you live, there is some type of grassroots or mutual aid group that is serving the community and thinking about gender in some form, which to me makes it feminist. The podcast really does the work of uncovering a lot of activists’ labor that is so beautiful and so exciting, and sharing it with people.

The pandemic has made a lot of mutual aid work way more visible to people, which is an awesome impact. When I started the podcast, people were astounded that I could find a single feminist in somewhere like Idaho. But, of course I could! Something I try to convey through the podcast is that grassroots feminist work happens everywhere, and you can and should plug into it as you’re able.

AB: I want to go back to the idea that you can sometimes read a thousand books on feminist theory, and you can know those lessons intellectually, but knowing feminist theory intellectually is not quite doing it, which points to something perhaps like the insufficiency of feminist theory as such. Is that unique to feminism? Is it like true of philosophy more generally? How do you think PhD programs would be different if we were teaching feminist philosophy in this more holistic way?

AH: I think that the vast majority of institutions at large and certainly universities think of feminist philosophy as a body of work or as a content area. And they are in no way interested in considering it as a pedagogical approach and understanding and unpacking what it means to not just teach the content, but also to implement it.

I don’t think that’s unique to feminism. I think we can see this happen in different disciplines, particularly disciplines that were championed by people from the margins of the institutions, including for example disability studies (and the fact that it’s called disability studies is maybe also part of it).

But you’ll have a disability theory class that’s taught as a three-hour long seminar with no break, that’s taught in person in an inaccessible building on a college campus that’s only affordable to a select few. It seems so obvious to me when you’re sitting in that classroom, you are learning about accessibility in a completely inaccessible space. I feel similarly in many feminist spaces.

So when you’re in a feminist theory class that doesn’t pay attention to the body or people’s embodied needs in that space, that is focused on the grade you’re going to get at the end—these are all things that, to me, go directly against the values and lessons of the texts that you’re reading in those courses. If you’re a person who comes into that space to find a reprieve, if you show up to that philosophy, to that theory, because you’re immersed in shame and self doubt and you get this like beautiful salve in what you’re reading and then you have to digest it in this space that is like counter to all of that—I think that’s really hard.

I really realized this in my own process of writing a dissertation. I was reading feminist thinkers in the way I had been taught and trained, which was a very analytical—in my opinion, masculine, patriarchal—approach to doing philosophy. It was like, ‘I’ve got to take these creative complex thinkers and break them down and figure out the categories of their work and align it so I can make these arguments.’

And it was really hard for me to realize I was doing that. I had mentors and colleagues who pointed it out to me, too. But I felt like I had no resource to figure out how to do something else. Mentors would say that and then no one could help me see a different path forward.

Which is why public philosophy working with these concepts outside of academia is so important to me now and much more interesting. I felt like I hit a dead end in this entrenched way of doing philosophy. I couldn’t see another way of doing it in the academy. So I took the content I love, and I’m trying to work with it and embody it and implement it elsewhere.

AB: What would it mean to teach all philosophy in a feminist way? Beyond some of the easy fixes we’re often given like adding women to syllabi (and then talking about them in exactly the same way that we already do in philosophy). What would it mean to teach political philosophy or epistemology or medieval Arabic philosophy in a feminist way?

AH: The first thing that comes to mind is that we would engage and treat people’s embodied needs in classroom spaces. Ignoring the body, of course, is an age-old critique of philosophy as a discipline. There’s plenty of philosophy that works to undo that.

But when I’m talking about how I have to sit in a classroom, it becomes very quickly clear to me that my mind is much more valued there than my body. For example, I was deeply uncomfortable in a lot of chairs had to sit in throughout grad school. And there was no leaving the classroom during the lecture. Maybe you were allowed to eat in class, if the professor was ‘cool’, or maybe there was one short break. During a three-hour class! But, I think that even if we are worried about the mind/body divide in content, in the practice of the classroom, the mind is what comes first.

I think to teach in a feminist way, first and foremost, we have to start bringing bodies to the fore. Feminism isn’t only about the body, but I do think it’s concerned with our bodies and understanding our material lives. In this sense, sociopolitical context also has to come into the classroom. I think, in philosophy specifically, we also have to come up with much better ways to grapple with the harm that comes from reading the Canon and all of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that’s in it. I’m not saying necessarily that we need to stop teaching the Canon—my dissertation has a whole long chapter on Kant!—but I do think we need to begin to incorporate harm reduction practices in our pedagogy.

AB: Do you have any examples of incorporating harm reduction approaches to teaching? Could you say more about what you mean?

AH: Yes, but I want to preface this by saying that I’m not trained in harm reduction as a method. That said, over the five years that I taught at DePaul, I really did try to shift into a more harm-reduction approach. When I started teaching, I built a lot of boundaries and firm policies into my syllabus because I had a big fear of not being taken seriously. So I was trying to project an authority that the university told me I have, but in no way, concretely supported. It felt like being thrown into a classroom and told you were the professor. And all the students are told that as well, but I mean, when I started teaching, I was 24. Many of my students were older than me. So I started with a kind of hard approach to boundaries and teaching (which was very necessary for me at the time), but over time, as I learned different ways of claiming authority in the classroom and became more comfortable in my role there.

I think I really did start to build classroom spaces and assessment policies, procedures that allowed my students to show up as their whole selves, not just their best academic selves, but their whole selves that are messy and complicated and have families and have jobs and need support. And how do I do that in a way where they aren’t expecting me to give them so much support that I can’t offer? Because I’m also a human with a messy, complicated life and overextending support can get slippery pretty quickly too.

So in terms of specific things I did: I got rid of penalizing people for late papers. I got rid of timed assessments in classes. I started building in revisions on pretty much all the papers that they could turn in. I really tried to build in as much flexibility as I could. And I included in every class some type of major assignment that was not a test or a paper. In most of my courses, those were zines. This allowed students who don’t write or test well to show up in a good way.

In terms of contextualization, I taught a whole syllabus on mass incarceration and included my incarcerated pen pal in the class. My students wrote to him, and he wrote back to them. We also did a lot of listening to podcasts and documentaries. I felt like being at DePaul University, a private school with predominantly white classroom spaces and me being a white instructor, it felt especially important to bring context into my classes. What I learned is that this approach invited students to do that too. So when I was bringing in these real relationships that I had with people who live messy, complicated lives, my students were able to show up in that way too. They were able to talk about friends and family members of theirs who were incarcerated, and they were able to give their real thoughts and feelings about safety.

We were able to really go into those conversations together. That was the best class I ever taught. My students loved it. At the end of the course, we took a class photo, and I sent it to Naphtali, my pen pal, and I still have a copy on my desk because it was such a transformative experience for all of us.

AB: I think that’s something super interesting about public philosophy, in bringing in texts and content into the philosophical classroom that are not traditionally thought of as philosophy.

Zines, podcasts, letters. Sometimes we think about correspondence as philosophy, but only when it’s between a famous philosopher  and someone (like Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia). That ‘counts,’ but not letters with a pen pal in prison. I’d love to hear your perspective on what philosophy gains from thinking about these alternative kinds of texts as philosophy.

AH: Yes, so in that incarceration class, we were also reading a bunch of philosophers. We read John Stuart Mill, we read Foucault, we read other academics like Michelle Alexander. But the context here is important. If you are sitting in a university classroom reading for example, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, but you never ever encounter anyone who is in a prison or has been incarcerated, I think it is highly problematic. If you’re learning about incarceration and it only ever stays on the level of like an abstract, theoretical thing, but you don’t ever encounter someone who’s experienced the violence of incarceration in their life, I think that’s a form of violence. There are tons of people who publish on Foucault but don’t ever talk to people who are in prison. I think that’s just wrong. 

I’m not trying to say that I have all the answers. I have one pen pal who I’m very close friends with and talk to regularly. One of the best things about this course is that I sent him all the readings on the syllabus. So I printed out a whole copy of Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? and sent that inside. And somehow it got in—which I was really surprised by!

But to the question of is correspondence valid in this philosophy class: correspondence is the only way that someone who’s in prison can communicate with us. I’m not allowed to have a video visit with the whole class, not allowed to record a video visit that I have one-on-one, but letters are still allowed. I felt like it would have done such a disservice to the students to allow them to think that they could learn about prisons from Foucault—as I had been allowed to. I wanted to do better than that. And because I had a pen pal who was really excited about it and who loved those students and wanted to talk to them, it became a really collaborative effort.

And all of that said, you don’t have to have a pen pal to bring the voices of people who are incarcerated into your classroom. There are award-winning podcasts (like Ear Hustle for example) that are recorded in prisons. It’s not that hard, there’s no excuse.

AB: What I’m picking up from what you’re saying is that there’s something really empty about a model of philosophy, even political philosophy or philosophy about public issues that takes itself to be external to those issues, that assumes we can have distance where the world is just an object of study.

AH: Yes, but I think also specifically in public philosophy about incarceration, it isn’t just a case of thinking that philosophy is external. If you are outside of prison, you have power over it. People who are incarcerated don’t have that power, and people at universities who study incarceration do. So that distance has very real power and violence. And as instructor, if you allow your students to do public philosophy in this way, you give them the impression that this is an acceptable research practice. You produce these really intense, really smart, but super entitled students who think they, as people who read The New Jim Crow, know a lot about incarceration. I know because I was this person for many, many years, so this is self-reflective critique. Reading The New Jim Crow can give me some context and help me argue with a family member at dinner, but I’ve never been incarcerated and I can’t know what it’s like and I can’t claim to.

AB: I really appreciate the valuation of direct experience in your answer, and I wanted to raise another question about how experience can and should inform what we teach. There have been several controversies in previous years about men teaching feminist philosophy courses or white instructors teaching classes on philosophy of race. I’m wondering if you could say a bit more about how to navigate the relationship between expertise that is academic in some way (gained through reading, writing, conversing) and lived experience.

AH: I think about this a lot. I’ll start outside a university setting and then we can go into the teaching and expertise part. But I think about this a lot when I think about how people become feminists. I think that there are these very different paths of how some people become feminists because they have such horrific lived experiences of patriarchal oppression that feminism is a literal lifeline.

Other people become feminists because they find it in school or in theory. I think for most people it’s a little bit of both. In my own life, feminist theory helped me understand a lot of complex feelings of shame and self-loathing that I had. But I still think I had a pretty intellectual coming to theory because of how much privilege I carry being white and so well-educated.

So whenever I’m talking to feminists, I always really try to hold space for the equivalent value of lived experience and theoretical knowledge. I think that that does not happen so often in university settings. I think that theoretical knowledge gets valued above, beyond, and over lived experience.

I don’t think you have to have a lived experience to study or teach something. But I’m not sure you can ever claim to be an expert in the theory of lived experience that you have no part in. So it’s not that I have no problem with many people teaching outside of their lived experience. I suppose teaching is a certain type of claiming expertise, but I think you can create classrooms that really do produce a horizontal generation of knowledge that don’t produce the same power-over hierarchy.

But I think the real question is: is studying and teaching those things doing service to others? Or is it harming others? And I think that depends on each instance. 

So if you’re a man in a department full of men, and no one is teaching feminist theory, it probably does more service than harm to teach feminist theory (depending on your syllabus and your attitude, of course). But if your next hire comes up and you don’t advocate for someone who has lived experience of gender oppression to get a job, then you’re still part of the problem.

I’m just always weighing that balance of service and harm. I think about that when I teach Philosophy of Sex and Gender at DePaul, which is an intro-level gender theory course. When I teach Simone de Beauvoir or other white feminists, I feel like I have shared those lived experiences and can express that in the classroom. When I teach black feminists or I teach trans theory, I am very aware that’s not my lived experience, but I don’t stop teaching it. Because it’s super important to teach! But it can’t stop at just teaching those texts. It’s also important for me to advocate for people who live those experiences to be a part of the Academy if they want to, and to be able to teach that if they want. It’s also important for me to advocate for them not to have to teach subject matter around their lived experience if they don’t want to.

AB: I wanted to ask you about your decision to not pursue a formal academic career and bring your PhD in feminist philosophy elsewhere.

AH: I was very ambivalent about whether or not I wanted to enter academia when I began grad school. It was not an obvious path forward to me. There are no academics in my family. I didn’t know any other than my college professors. The idea of getting a PhD wasn’t presented as a really great life path, so I was always pretty ambivalent about it.

And then as I did continue through grad school and see the path forward in academia, it was just too hard to go through the process of trying to get a job in this market. And I had way too many skillsets that were easily marketable outside of academia. So I went that path instead.

The other reality is that throughout grad school, I always had to work other jobs. By the nature of my financial situation, I had to keep a foot outside of academia so that I had money to pay bills and have health insurance. And I did not just adjunct extra for that. I worked other jobs at other places, and as a result, I was pretty familiar with what it took to get a job and how much money you got paid for having a job. 

When I compared that with what it took to get an academic job and how much you got paid for becoming a lecturer or an entry-level position, or if you were lucky enough and the world deigned to give you a tenure track job, it was just not tenable. It was not financially tenable for me to live at the poverty level and have no insurance and no lifeline, because I’m adjuncting while spending years trying to get a job. While I was in graduate school, I watched almost every person who finished their dissertation go into this cycle. And looking at that, it was an obvious choice to leave, because I need decent health care, and I didn’t want to live a life where I was moving every year and living away from my friends and my family for the hope of getting a job at some point.

I am so happy for my few friends who made it through that struggle and did land in really good places. I love seeing their academic careers blossom. But that doesn’t cancel out the real grief I feel for the many, many more friends I have who are trapped in this cycle of poverty with a PhD. Having a PhD doesn’t make poverty any better.

So I opted out, and I love what I do now. Even at my dissertation defense, many of the faculty members on my committee told me how much of a loss it was to the profession and to the discipline and to potential students that I was leaving. But that just wasn’t worth it to me because of what I would have lost to stay.

AB: Do you have any advice for current grad students or recent PhDs who are thinking about trying to do what you did, taking a robust philosophical education and use it outside of a traditional academic context? Or advice for people who teach in and run graduate programs for how they could better help and support their graduate students who want to make a similar choice?

AH: For students, who are really feeling this crunch, the best thing I did in grad school was create and maintain a community of peers outside of academia. When you enter grad school, it is so tempting to make academia your whole world. But my post-academic career would not have been possible for me if I had not resisted that in many, many ways. I had friends in the program, I went to events, and I did service to the department, but I also had to work outside of it. And over time, I made close knit communities of friends outside of it. Those connections were really important for me moving on and getting a job outside of academia.

I would tell grad directors that the financial reality of being a grad student is hard. I want them to advocate for raises and benefits for their grad students. It is nonsensical that so many grad students teach and research so much and get paid so little. I mean, I guess it’s not nonsensical and it’s precisely the exploitative logic of capitalism. So for every grad director out there who’s ever published anything adjacent to Marxist or social justice critique, if you’re not constantly finding real material ways to make your grad students’ lives better, that’s a disgrace.

The other thing I’d like to say is that my mentor, Dr. María Del Rosario Acosta López, really supported me in being a whole person in grad school. Not many dissertation directors would have listened to my podcast or invited me to talk about it on campus, invited me into her activist work in the city and applied for a grant to get me paid to do it. So I just want to say too that she should have been much more compensated for going so above and beyond. And to others in the University, this extra work she was doing for me was so invisible. To me it made the utmost difference that she supported everything I was doing and that she saw clearly the reality of the job market and how much opportunity I had elsewhere. And she still worked so hard to help me get my dissertation done, so I could graduate with that degree and not just walk away without it.

I think so many students like me, who’ve got something going elsewhere, they just walk away from their PhD because there’s no one to support them. No one tells them that it’s valuable for them to finish even if they won’t become an academic in the traditional sense. Because it is valuable! It’s valuable for everyone that more women, people of color, and anyone from a marginalized background get PhDs. But there’s just so little support to help those individuals trying to make that happen.

I think the thing that I just keep reminding myself is that you can be wicked smart outside academia. It’s just as valuable. And not just as a set of skills to help you make money, but you can be smart and valuable to your community and the relationships you’re in. Institutions want you to forget that, so that you will accept their devaluation of your labor. Getting out of that academic equation has done the most for my self-worth. It’s reminded me that I am valuable, and I have a lot to contribute. And that other people can see, recognize, and appreciate that, too.