Mary Gregg received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in April 2022 and will begin her lectureship with Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in the fall. She works on oppressive visual humor and how it can be reclaimed to empower those it is used to disempower.
What excites you about philosophy?
Its ability to reach, unite, and inspire persons from all backgrounds and disciplines. As a discipline characterized by critical reflection on the beliefs, assumptions, and principles we often leave unquestioned, philosophy encourages its participants to think carefully about why and how they think the way they do about the world around them in ways they might not have thought possible. In its aptitude for constant reflection and revision, philosophy provokes a useful humility in its thinkers, which cultivates a learning environment marked by openness and curiosity in such a way that even the often unflinching instructor-pupil power differential is usefully broken down, allowing each person to learn, with gratitude, from one another, both in the classroom and beyond it.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
An article currently under review, which focuses on the unique ways in which one can be harmed (and helped) in their role as audience-as-referent. Often, when damage to the visually represented group is discussed, the damage to members of that group is discussed as it pertains to their role as the depictive subject matter—end of story. But, in the case of visual jokes, when the audience member is also the referent of the visual, the visual representation not only shames those who are its referent but also humiliates them so that the purportedly shameful quality is not only descriptively informative but appropriated as a mechanism of amusement for the joke teller and all other listeners except the referent themselves. This paper focuses on the unique discursive damage of the infamously racist illustrations which accompany Helen Bannerman’s book, Little Black Sambo. In this paper, I connect Kendall Walton’s conception of de se imagination with W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to reveal the unique function of the illustration as it informs one who is both the viewer and also a member of the targeted group referenced by such racist depictions.
What are you working on right now?
A book building from my recently defended dissertation on the help of harmful visual jokes. Though a number of philosophers have written important work on antidotes and inoculations as preventative measures, I noticed a gap in the literature on the topic of aftercare and rehabilitation. The book focuses on the harm and help of how a visual joke is communicated, separate from and sometimes in contradiction to what is said. I show that the key to empowering visual discourse lies in its disempowering qualities, i.e, the way it represents its subject and what it calls to mind in its viewership by this mode of representation, exploring how the very mechanism of harm can itself be reclaimed as the tool of re-empowerment, and addressing the way sociopolitical inequities are negotiated in contemporary visual culture, e.g., through visual internet memes, GIFs, and music videos.
Additionally, I have a few articles under review, one of which addresses the further implications of a visual joke’s empowering qualities as they implicate alternative modes of self-representation within and amongst disabled and neurodiverse communities. This work is inspired by representations of disability onscreen, especially as they interact with questions surrounding performed masculinity on film. Chloe Zhao centers just this kind of masculinity-ableism question in her film The Rider, and I’m working to bring this work in conversation with Sahar Akhtar’s work on embedded disability and Tommy Curry’s recent work on racism as a misandrist aggression.
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
The relation between gender identity and parental roles, as each contributes to and is reflexively informed by the particular kind of systemic, intergenerational traumas and modes of oppression specific to the parent-child relation seems to be, crucially, underexplored in the literature. In particular, I’m thinking about how social systems operate on the parental figures and what those systemic expectations, pressures, and toxic norms do to normalize the intergenerational modes of gender-based oppression between parent and child in the painfully heteronormative, binary concepts of “father” and “mother” as they restrict the many ways one can inhabit parental roles beyond this binary.
What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?
Any time I’m able to facilitate my students in such a way that they, of their own volition, become interested in philosophical issues and cultivate an attitude of curiosity and collaboration between and amongst themselves. I take philosophy to be an exercise which is especially skilled at cultivating humility and empathy in its thinkers, so when I’m able to help a student begin to think and engage with others philosophically, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to my student’s learning in this capacity (and inevitably, to have learned a thing or two from my students along the way!).
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.
