As my cursor hovered over the “join” icon on Zoom, I braced myself to enter what I have often experienced as a hostile world. Academic philosophy, a space in which my demeanor has been derisively described as “so chipper,” where friendliness is crowded out by cold affect, where “manly courage” and masculinist garb signal rigor and good scholarship. Relaxing the muscles around my mouth, I put aside my smile along with the parts of me geared towards human bonding and care. Immanuel Kant might have said that I had put on my beard.
After we were introduced to the space, you (Tekla) unmuted and told us that you wanted to share an access request. Even as I retell it, traces of the excitement I felt hearing your words rush to my fingers. In organizing and mutual aid spaces in Chicago, we often started our meetings asking if anyone wanted to share access needs—but I had never even seen that practice in academic spaces. You shared that because of your MS induced generalized anxiety, you could not receive critical feedback and needed everyone to be kind and complimentary towards you and your contributions. In that moment, I felt my beard melting as I smiled with excitement and furiously typed “Thank you so much for sharing your access needs! So glad you are here with us!”
I told you in the email I sent right after the meeting: in voicing your access need, you transported me to a crip world where we are humanly bonded; where ableism is exposed as a farce and we affirm that each one of us has different needs and that we need each other to create access. As we reflected on this moment of care, the concept of access intimacy resonated with both of us. Disability justice activist and scholar Mia Mingus describes access intimacy as a unique kind of intimacy felt when others understand her access needs and are enthusiastic about meeting them. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the excitement I felt when you shared your access needs. Perhaps because we are taught to see disabled people and their needs as annoyances that we have to deal with in order to be compliant. But as you’ve helped me reflect on my access excitement, I’ve come to understand that I was eager to meet you in a space where we could voice our needs and create access with each other. I was excited to honor and meet your needs, and I was also excited about how the anti-ableist culture you were inviting us to co-create with you would meet my needs. Your very request met my need to create caring spaces where we acknowledge that we are more than argument making machines.
As I write this, I worry that readers will dismiss this entry as “too emotional,” too saturated by personal sensitivities to describe anything objective or important about the culture in academic philosophy and disability justice. I hear the voices of those who deny the exclusionary character of the field because, after all, they have always felt welcomed and supported. My world of philosophy is one where young women’s lives are shattered and snuffed out by sexual harassment, where professors hop from one department to another, leaving behind a trail of title IX investigations terminated with condescending and violent phrases like “It was a misunderstanding—he just really cares about you.” It clashes with a mythical world characterized by meritocracy of the intellect that is just not for the faint of mind.
But despite the fear of judgment and ridicule, I share our stories because what I felt at that meeting was more than affinity, it was the possibility of life saving queer kinship. To someone who has experienced sexual harassment in academia and lost people to the same, to hear someone voice their access needs felt like a lifeline to a different world in which we care about each other and refuse to sacrifice our well-being, refuse to put aside the parts of ourselves that need care, refuse to conform to a culture that creates insurmountable barriers to access for many.
Maria, I’m filled with empathy and gratitude for the vulnerability in your account of how you felt when you clicked the “join” button to enter the Zoom event. I had similar feelings of trepidation, as I braced myself to enter the space of academic philosophy: an ableist space where access needs are not expected, encouraged, or welcomed. I’d had negative experiences interacting with academic philosophy, in which I was sometimes dismissed as not a “real” philosopher because of my Ph.D. in musicology rather than philosophy, and my disability-related lack of an institutional affiliation.
When the meeting began, people started introducing themselves with the usual self-congratulatory bragging points: books they’d published, affiliations and positions that they held, awards they’d received. You hadn’t yet introduced yourself, so I didn’t know that the virtual space contained a fellow ally for social justice. As the round of introductions proceeded, nobody expressed any access needs. The organizers didn’t even bring up access needs as something you could share when introducing yourself. What I noticed in that moment resonates with what Deaf scholar Stephanie Kerschbaum has theorized as “dominant dis-attention”—the tendency of ableist mainstream culture to “ignore the complexities of access.”
Determined to advocate for my needs as a disabled scholar (and human being!), I voiced my request, asking my fellow attendees to be extra encouraging and non-critical because of my MS-related anxiety disorder. As I explained my disability needs, I was afraid—afraid that my access needs wouldn’t be respected in this space, and that I would be viewed as unphilosophical and overly emotional.
Then the transformative moment occurred: you supported my access request with your warm and lovely message in the chat. When you posted those warm words of co-advocacy in the chat, I felt suddenly safe and supported in my needs. You transformed my individual request into a shared community of access. Many professional spaces, within and outside academia, are governed by ableist norms that can be productively unsettled when someone speaks out about the inaccessibility of those norms for their disabled bodymind. My access needs, and my requests to have those needs met, subvert academic norms of confidence, resilience, and rigor. But in order for this subversion to work, to be joyful and liberatory, we need solidarity. And we need friendship. You offered me both of those in that lovely moment.
According to Kant’s Anthropology, anxiety about public speaking can only be overcome by practicing in low-stakes situations: “For as Hume says (who himself was affected by this weakness—shyness about speaking in public), if the first attempt at audacity fails, it only makes us more timid; and there is no other remedy but to start our intercourse with people whose judgment concerning propriety matters little to us.” However, from my perspective as a disabled person who has anxiety in public spaces, I know there is another way to feel safe that never crossed Kant’s mind: we can speak comfortably in high-stakes situations if someone is there to support our needs. You were, and are, that person.
Tekla, as I read your words, the excitement I felt during that first zoom meeting resurfaces. After that first meeting was over, I rushed to send you an email that transformed into our growing joyful killjoy camaraderie. Our joyful killjoy scheming has been replete with knowing glances, processing, critical theorizing, sharing tools, and so much more. We have practiced new forms of communication, iterative processes to make sure your perspective and desires are accurately conveyed to others, deconstructing paternalism, and protecting and affirming each other in what feel like affective minefields.
In our email exchange, you shared with me your experience of ableism and sexism in this space, and I offered to advocate for you. As I advocated, emails went unanswered and I tried other avenues of communication, pushing through the fear that I was burning bridges and closing doors (it feels unvirtuous to voice such concerns, but they are real psychic pressures that keep us from addressing harm when our jobs depend on not disturbing the status quo). Along with feet dragging, mansplaining, minimizations, and eyerolling, there was also eagerness to learn and gratitude for the time we invested in explaining and educating. But there was an overwhelming sense that I was getting in the way of the real work.
As folks who engage in transformative justice practices know, apologies are often iterative processes. But this expansive understanding of what it takes to address harm is displaced by cultures obsessed with productivity. When I advocated for a second apology focused on acknowledgement rather than justifications, I was told that “often people just don’t see eye to eye.” I understood that we should just move on to programming. Unsuccessfully choking back tears of frustration, compounded by embarrassment at how much I was affected while others remained focused on the business at hand, I insisted that we slow down and take further steps to repair. Cue the eyeroll—I was not adhering to the unspoken rule that says we are supposed to think and write about power, not waste time addressing its wounding manifestations in our interpersonal interactions. I was in the way.
I was anxious to report back to you that your requests were returned to me contorted beyond recognition. Instead of agreeing to not do the thing which you said would harm you, folks “agreed” to do the thing in ways that, they judged, wouldn’t harm you. This response had the form of an agreement to create access but, by a slight of hand, they had expropriated your authority to determine what would meet your needs, establishing themselves as the rightful judges on the matter. I was defeated after that meeting where your access request was nominally accepted and substantively denied. But you held loving space for me to process what happened. You too, my fellow feminist killjoy, are familiar with the eyerolls, and as I watched you smile knowingly on my screen, the sting of those inhospitable interactions dulled. Even as we experienced the resilience of ableist spaces, we were well on our way to creating access and community for ourselves, dreaming of how this community would grow!
Noticing that I was mostly emphasizing how eager I was to meet your needs, you asked me whether it was just about meeting your needs or whether I felt that my needs were also being met at that moment. I was stumped. Yes, absolutely! There are needs that you met for me at that moment and yet, I am still not clear on what they are. I’m not in the practice of thinking about what I need in academic spaces—in fact, the work often requires a practiced disconnection from my needs. But being in community with you has helped me practice otherwise. Even writing this together has given me clarity on my need for a space where we can voice our different needs for care and access. A need for spaces in which and people with whom to process harm. A need for articulating what I need from academic and intellectual interactions while rejecting dominant norms that are harmful to many. And I have begun to articulate how these needs connect with the effects that a traumatizing academic culture of gender-based violence and harm have had on my mind/body.
Our friendship has helped me get curious about my needs. When I was preparing to give a paper at a conference I told you that I was worried that people in the audience would respond with some version of “Kant’s moral theory has a priori grounds, so everything you just said about race and gender doesn’t actually matter.” You asked me if I felt comfortable asking the audience not to give me that kind of feedback. I said maybe. I did not go through with it. What would it take to transform our culture?
What would be possible if we voiced our needs?
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.
Maria Mejia
Maria Mejia is assistant professor of philosophy at Elon University. They work on decolonial feminisms, critical pedagogy, history of moral philosophy, Kant, and critical canon studies. Her current work addresses heterosexism, racism and colonialism as structuring forces in Kant’s philosophy as well as epistemic violence in Kant scholarship. Maria organizes with abolitionist and immigrant groups in North Carolina and is working on incorporating histories of student organizing and the work of abolitionist revolutionaries into her teaching and scholarship.
Tekla Babyak
Tekla Babyak holds a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University and is currently based in Davis, CA. She is a disabled independent scholar-activist with multiple sclerosis. Her research focuses on disability studies, German and French philosophy, and nineteenth-century classical music. Current and forthcoming publications include articles in 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Music Analysis. She serves on the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Disability and Accessibility and is also the Alternate Officer for the American Musicological Society's Music and Disability Study Group. Her multifaceted career includes freelance developmental editing and offering lessons in classical piano and music theory.
