SE1 E2: Being Dismissed
Anna Mudde 0:01
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast.
Kristin Rodier 0:04
Anna!
Anna Mudde
Kristin!
Kristin Rodier
This is our first episode! We are recording our first episode!
Western philosophers have separated the mind and body, and here on thinking bodies, we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. We crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
Anna Mudde 0:35
Maybe even a DIT experiment: doing it together.
Kristin Rodier 0:38
Right? A Do It Together podcast, sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy. I am so excited.
Anna Mudde 0:46
I'm Anna Mudde. I'm on the lands of the nêhiyawak, the Anihšinâpçk, the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, and on the lands of the Michif/Métis Nation. It is also called Pile of Bones.
Kristin Rodier 0:56
And I'm Kristin Rodier recording today Amiskwaciwâskahikan homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, The Beaver Cree, The Ojibwe and the Métis. Also called Beaver Hills House. So everyone who submitted a voice to us for our first episode did so on faith.
Anna Mudde 1:18
Yes, they did. They showed enormous amount of faith in us!
Ami Harbin 1:22
My name is Ami Harbin.
Christine Koggel 1:24
I'm Christine Koggel.
Alexis Shotwell 1:26
My name is Alexis Shotwell.
Kate Norlock 1:28
My name is Kate Norlock.
Michael Doan 1:30
My name is Michael Doan.
Kristin Rodier 1:33
For today's episode on Sue Campbell's “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression.” I am going to play voice clips for Anna that she hasn't heard.
Anna why did you want to do a feminist philosophy podcast?
Anna Mudde 1:51
Well, I love listening to podcasts. I listen to them a lot. Sometimes I think it's a problem with my time management, but I love hearing people think in radio format, or new newfangled radio format. And I love feminist philosophy. I love having feminist philosophical conversations. And there are so many works of philosophy that I'd love to return to and think through with you in particular, Kristen. So I'm just delighted to be here. What about you, Kristen?
Kristin Rodier 2:21
It's very similar to everything you've said. I feel like I had to think a lot about what I wanted to do as a philosopher and what I, what I originally came to philosophy for, and it really was a lot of dialogue and conversation, but also deep reading. And I feel like as a format for a way to do this together, that the podcasting is going to be great for that. And if people want to listen to it and contribute to it. I mean, that’s great.
Anna Mudde 2:55
Yeah! All the better!
Kristin Rodier 2:58
I'll just ask our listener. When you think of a philosopher, what comes to mind
…Now? What comes to mind when you think of their feelings?
Anna Mudde 3:09
Such a great question.
Kristin Rodier 3:11
Do they even have them? Are they under their control? You know, I was thinking it's it's just almost a caricature, right, in philosophy, that reason is separated from emotions. You know, we're really thinking about what happens when we go from this, you know, sort of incorrect description and then forcing it on people about when they should have emotions. What kind of emotion, where do you express them, how long they should last? You know, like there's just so many rules about how we're supposed to feel when we're supposed to feel.
Anna Mudde 3:43
Yeah. We're so regimented around emotions.
Kristin Rodier 3:46
Considering the ways in which women, racialized women, disabled and queer people and we speak passionately about oppression. How is that anger used kind of against us, right? And then the bigger question of how do we start really valuing emotions and emotions that have been dismissed? The article we chose for this episode is so helpful, and I'm really excited for this particular article as to a way to kick off our podcast. So we're going to be talking about Sue Campbell's “Being Dismissed.”
Anna Mudde 4:17
Such a great title.
Kristin Rodier 4:18
And I mean, I think we've all been dismissed.
Anna Mudde 4:19
Yeah, that's a human thing, isn't it, to be dismissed? Yeah. We've all had that sort of experience.
Kristin Rodier 4:26
I want you to see how I'm feeling. And I want to see how you're feeling. And I want there to be that kind of, I don't know, reciprocal flow. And so just to introduce the article, we've got a clip. We were able to get a little introduction! So let's hear from Christine Koggell.
Christine Koggell 4:47
I'm Christine Koggel from the philosophy department at Carleton University. I'm so pleased to be contributing to this podcast on Sue Campbell's work “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” published in Hypatia in 1994. At its 25th Anniversary in 2010, Hypatia editors asked readers to nominate the most transformative, groundbreaking and pivotal articles in its 25-year history. “Being Dismissed” made that list. Campbell takes various kinds of strategies. One of them is to attack certain myths. In “Being Dismissed,” she attacks the myth that emotional experience is private and epistemically privileged. And what she argues instead is that emotions are relational, collaborative, expressive. That means that social factors determine whose emotions are judged as outside the norm and viewed as abnormal or unhealthy.
That means that questions about who is being dismissed, how and why, are then made visible and relevant to moral and political theory. And I think that's an important aspect in all of her work. But it plays out in “Being Dismissed” in particular kinds of ways. One of the ways it plays out is to think about the concept of bitterness. Bitterness is often charged against those who are angry about injustices, and they are dismissed in terms of “they are too angry.” “They're just bitter.” “They should forget, forgive and forget, and they should just get past it.” But all of those kinds of reactions on the part of the interpreter to the expressing of emotions, it really is a silencing has a silencing effect. And it illustrates a refusal to listen. And I think that that's what's super important about Campbell's work.
Anna Mudde 7:15
Oh. Oh, Christine. What a wonderful introduction. And actually, I didn't I didn't know that about this piece.
Kristin Rodier 7:24
I thought we would start with a really, you know, a framing example from the piece. Campbell is really drawing on Marilyn Frye here, who is also a feminist philosopher, political philosopher. So would you read this quotation?
Anna Mudde 7:37
Of course I will: Marilyn Frye in “A Note on Anger,” refers to the importance of social uptake to the success of emotions. To illustrate uptake, a concept I adopt in this paper, Frye relates the story of a woman who snapped at a gas station attendant who was monkeying with a carburetor the woman had gone to some trouble to adjust. [quote] ‘He became very agitated and yelled at her, calling her a crazy bitch. He changed the subject from the matter of his actions in the carburetor to the matter of her character and sanity. He did not give her anger uptake,’ [unquote].
Wow.
Kristin Rodier 8:21
Wow.
We're going to say a lot of wow! I love this example. So. So this woman is, you know, trying to stop the mechanic from monkeying around with something and, you know, yells at her, calls her a crazy B-word. She's put some work into already calibrating this thing. And she's saying to him, don't do it. Don't do it. He became agitated at her and called her a crazy bitch. Change the subject from the matter of his actions, which is what her anger was directed at to the matter of her character and sanity. She didn't give her anger up. Take such an interesting use of that word. What do you make of that?
Anna Mudde 9:03
It's interesting that he's obviously recognizing her upset. He calls her a “crazy bitch,” and starts yelling at her and becomes agitated. And at the same time and this is, I think, what Campbell's really pointing us toward, he's receiving something, right? He's giving some kind of response, but it's not to her anger. He's refusing her anger. Her anger will not get uptake. And so this is a beautiful example for what Sue Campbell is talking about, because there's something about the way that some people's anger is managed, in this case women's anger, that ends up kind of downgrading it or making it something we don't have to listen to.
Kristin Rodier 9:52
Hmm. Yeah. I'm trying to think of an example from my life because I don't think this would happen to me with a carburetor or whatever.
Anna Mudde 9:59
That's not that's not your area of expertise, not your wheelhouse!
Kristin Rodier 10:02
Not really. You know, but if I, you know, like, if I was making a soup, which I do all the time, you know, when someone started adding stuff in it. And I sort of said, hey, you know, I've got the, you know, I'm on it. And then they did it anyway, and I got angry. I would hope that that anger response would be understood for what it is. What I'm there's a there's an increased intensity here around. What I'm asking for. You know, I'm speaking to something that's been crossed or whatever.
Anna Mudde 10:36
Well, I was wondering to whether, like, you're making the soup and I'm just thinking about those sort of varieties of response that we might get. I'm wondering whether you think these are what she has in mind as sort of dismissals, because I can imagine in that situation saying something like, “well, all right, then!” As though, right, I mean, I think the sort of ways that we… I was just thinking about the ways we experience this might be really variously inflected.
Kristin Rodier 11:06
Totally.
Anna Mudde 11:07
Yeah. And might not… I was thinking about the ways that dismissal often happens in a kind of, well, passive aggressive way as opposed to the aggressive way that she's describing here.
Kristin Rodier 11:17
Totally. I was brainstorming a bunch of words that I connect to about this, but that aren't, you know, just overtly being called a crazy bitch, you know, oversensitive. Hypersensitive. Like, dramatic.
Anna Mudde 11:33
Yeah. Yep.
Kristin Rodier 11:34
But I think the larger politics of this is about, you know, the way that it happens along sort of oppressive, oppressive structures, let's say.
Anna Mudde 11:44
Yeah. And so is this connected to the the sort of idea that when we're talking about social uptake is the idea that we need not just express our emotions, we actually need other people to recognize them or even just take them up and maybe make sense of them, or maybe just even make a place for them that doesn't do what the person at the gas station is doing. It's not just about expressing emotions. We need other people to take them seriously, but also just take them up.
Kristin Rodier 12:17
Yeah. And, you know, maybe I was dismissive about the carburetor example because there's so much in there. What's interesting is the dismissal rate is connected to that anger not being not having any uptake, because when it's not given uptake, it's nobody is accountable.
Anna Mudde 12:39
Right. I don't give a fuck. Right? Like…
Kristin Rodier 12:41
[chuckles] Yeah. And it also sort of says – Oh! and that was the other list of things that I wrote down about. This was the “get over it” stuff. One can be to sort of just say like, “Oh, she's always exaggerating,” you know, “she's very emotional,” and takes away any authority you might have over your own experiences. It's all about just “you’re bitter.” And it kind of undermines your memory. This is what's so cool about Campbell's view is this connection between our feelings and our memories, right? So I don't even get to have my memory about the way that it happened, the way that it happened. If all that I'm speaking about is just because I'm a bitter person for some reason, then we don't have to look at the past.
Anna Mudde 13:27
Like, I don't have to have that memory either. Right? I mean, your memory is injured there, but mine isn't affected so much at all, actually, which is a different kind of collective injury, I suppose. It's not true to the situation.
Kristin Rodier 13:44
It's like you won't share my memory with me. And that in a way undermines it. The real big conclusion here around the politics and the ethics of a lot of this is that then no one needs to respond. Right? So if there's no accountability, if the experience didn't even happen and you're to blame, then we don't need a political, collective, collaborative sort of response to the injury.
[soft bird sounds in background]
We have a clip, Anna. The clip is from Alexis Shotwell.
Anna Mudde 14:14
Oh, I'm so excited.
Alexis Shotwell 14:16
My name is Alexis Shotwell. I am beaming in from Unceded Algonquin Lands, Ottawa, Ontario, and I'm so happy to talk about Sue Campbell's work on being dismissed, because I think really Campbell was the best philosopher of feeling of emotion of maybe the last five decades. I just think she should be so vastly and widely more read and loved because she gives just the best account I know of what it means to have others be really important to the feelings we have, what that means politically. I think the fact that there's a lot of philosophers of emotion who have become more ascendant than Campbell tells us something about the history of philosophy and how it dismisses people who are doing exactly the thing that Campbell thought was so important, which is philosophizing at the edges or in the spaces of idiosyncratic feelings, of things that are specific and complicated and politically weighty.
And so her own complex, gorgeous work is one of the things that I think when we read this piece, we can ask, why isn't this central to the philosophy of emotion as we know it today? And let's just make it central now, now that we now that we notice that big part of that for me is really about the centrality of what it means to have other people around us who can help us identify, I feel, take seriously free form feelings, complicated things, things that haven't been named yet, feelings that don't easily fit into the standard boxes of how people think we should be and who we are as feelers. So attending to a minor category like bitterness and attending to the way that it's a feminist question, who gets categorized as bitter, what it means to not give up or bitterness. All of this is such a good example of things that she explored also in so many other works so beautifully. So that part being interpretive, interpreted as political, it shapes our being. It matters how other people respond to our felt states. They actually are shaping what we feel and that shapes who we are. And once you start thinking about it, you kind of can't stop.
Anna Mudde 17:13
So this is, I think, such a beautiful articulation and encapsulation of maybe, maybe why it is that we both thought that this piece is so important for me. It reminds me, too, of what Campbell, I think, calls the individuation of feeling being collaborative. And I think what she means is not that we become individuals and that, like, nice atomic sense where I'm cut off from you and you're cut off from me, and you can't touch me in certain ways, but rather that for feelings to be and to sort of emerge – and sometimes those feelings aren't easily articulable and maybe aren't fully articulable at all – and so, to have it be collaborative with others that someone hears us or holds space for us or feels with us, what is going on and why, why those emotions are important.
Kristin Rodier 18:15
And I was thinking about I have a lot of nineties nostalgia…
Anna Mudde 18:19
Of course you do! It was a heady time, Kristin!
Kristin Rodier 18:22
I think one of the reasons is because it was so much more common to go to coffee with someone.
Anna Mudde 18:30
Oh, that's interesting.
Kristin Rodier 18:33
Do you remember?
Anna Mudde 18:34
Yeah, I do. And it was new, I think, to “go to coffee” was with someone.
Kristin Rodier 18:38
And go to coffee and it and really, like, all I remember is sort of, you know, knowing which restaurants would let you sit on a, on a $1.50 cup of coffee. I miss going for coffee because sometimes you would go for an hour. And what I loved about it was you would sort of have your catch-up portion.
Anna Mudde 18:57
Yeah.
Kristin Rodier 18:58
You know, like what? What's new? And then you would have the kind of, like, other, what's bugging our stuff. And then, then I feel like by hour two or three, you're sort of getting to what's really going on.
Anna Mudde 19:11
Yeah.
Kristin Rodier 19:11
And I… And I think that I don't know what's going on until I get there!
Anna Mudde 19:17
I think the expression is something like, “I don't know what I mean until I see what I say,” but to see what you say is in part, right, someone else has heard what you've said. Right? And what does it mean when you say it out loud? And you're also reminding me of the way that sometimes those coffees are long because you're trying to… you're trying to talk about something for which, as Alexis is saying, you might not really have language or concept, or you might not you might only have to describe because you can't say what it what the thing is. Your description of the conversation and going to coffee, though, sort of does remind me that, as Alexis says, that that is sort of philosophy at the margins a lot of the time and yet is such a such a rich part of human life, and trying to live together.
Kristin Rodier 20:11
And it's like discovery. That's what I like about that, is just sort of sitting there and going, okay, all these things happen to me all day. I have no time to sort of think about the impact and when you kind of get through all of those layers and you have someone who is, you know, listening and paying attention and reflecting back, giving you that uptake. You know, there's a kind of digging in, I think that that gets you to a new place for yourself.
Anna Mudde 20:46
Absolutely.
Kristin Rodier 20:47
Well, Alexis says, you know, “other people around us who can help us identify, feel, take seriously our free form feelings,” our complicated feelings, you know, and they can be idiosyncratic. And then the important part of having a feminist philosopher pay attention to that.
Anna Mudde 21:06
Yep.
Kristin Rodier 21:06
And so I'm just going to finish, actually, the rest of what Alexis was saying.
Alexis Shotwell 21:10
The other thing about this piece that I was struck by again just today, rereading it, is the archive that Campbell's drawing on. And this is another reason that I think maybe her work is not taken up the way I want it to be, which is she is paying attention and taking seriously as theorists, people who have not been rendered as doing proper philosophical work. And these are mostly racialized people, people who are written out of the tradition. So black feminists, Indigenous feminists, she gives this careful account of Audre Lorde’s work on anger, which of course many others have done, too. But it's central here. And I think Indigenous, you know, thinking with Indigenous theorists about being dismissed, being written out, these things, the way that she does the work and what she's saying, are seamless. They're they're always together in Campbell's work. And I think this is just such a beautiful model for how we should do feminist philosophy, how we should offer better modes of interpretation to each other, how we should feel.
So yeah. Sue Campbell. So great.
Anna Mudde 22:24
I love that. It makes me form the question “how should philosophy feel?” Which I think about a lot, especially because philosophy often does not feel comfortable for me. This is like reminding me of another example that Campbell gives us from Emma LaRocque, who says, well, white audiences and critics for a really long time dismissed indigenous writers detailing their own experiences by calling them bitter. And once they were dismissed as bitter, they didn't they didn't need to be taken seriously. It's a really beautiful example of what Campbell is talking about in the sort of move from the move from expressing a particular kind of emotion or particular kind of experience is through the interpretive people who are not good feelers and not good, in this case, thinkers either, to write, translating that into bitterness.
Kristin Rodier 23:26
I was actually thinking about what Campbell says specifically. Campbell says, “whether the members of subordinate groups can reclaim anger, whether in particular they can get angry in the right way at the right time to the right people, so that what they are expressing is anger. Does not depend solely on the actions of those these individuals. Viewing the feminist fight for anger in the light of feminist insights about the crucial role of uptake in emotional encounters suggests that in the fight for situations in which our responses are taken seriously and have efficacy, we must deal with the techniques of interpretive dismissal as much as with our own reluctance to get angry.” When we're in that bitter place, we have to dig in and find ways to connect with that anger, right? Because we've been harmed by being made bitter. But the anger is actually expressive and actually it points to something.
Anna Mudde 24:28
I was just thinking about the ways in which certainly in Canada, right, settler politics dealing with indigeneity and indigenous peoples, even just as LaRocque says, detailing their own experiences is so often met with precisely that response. “Why aren't you over it yet?” When it's taken to be something that you should be over. Right? This is another way of, when it is then expressed again, it is bitter, not angry. So “we will not recognize you as angry or not justifiably angry.”
Kristin Rodier 25:05
Campbell really talks about how reconnecting with that anger and finding where that anger is and doing it with others, that that will help you interpret it and understand it and allow for your authority over that experience. She really makes a connection towards hope in the article about anger being a way of defending your own hope.
Anna Mudde 25:31
Uhhh! That got me! In the solar plexus, that! [laughs]
Kristin Rodier 25:38
[chuckles]Anger is a way of defending your own hope! The bitterness charge basically says, “don't hope for that world. Don't hope for that change. Don't wish that that didn't happen or point something out as an injustice.” And it really is that oppressive clampdown that just basically says “this is what is to be expected. You know that. And that's just and it's natural and it's normal.” Right? “So stop talking about it.”
[soft music]
Michael Doan 26:14
Hello. My name is Michael Doan, and I was a doctoral student of Sue Campbell's at Dalhousie University. And today I want to draw attention to a feature of Sue's account of emotion that I worry is easily missed. So in “Being Dismissed,” Sue observes that when someone does something that we call expressing a feeling, she's attempting to articulate or communicate the significance of some occasion or set of occasions within the context of how she views her life. And when we take someone to be expressing a feeling, this is exactly what we take her to be doing, end quote. Simply put, the role of expressing feelings in our group life is to convey what is important or significant to us, and that we can succeed or fail in conveying such importance is, as Sue emphasizes repeatedly, not entirely within our control. Right? Because we're dependent on how others respond to our ways of expressing ourselves, how they interpret us. Some folks may interpret our words, our tone of voice, and our gestures more sympathetically than others, not necessarily because they've had similar experiences or feel similarly. Now, though, that can certainly help.
[soft music plays behind]
Kristin Rodier 27:32
So, Anna, what Michael's saying here is that others are so important for how we get understood and how our feelings get understood. But of course, we only have so many concepts that we use on a regular basis. You know, these emotion categories like anger, sadness, fear, grief. You know, we only sort of have a certain repertoire that we're using with each other. What happens when something can't be packaged into any one of these existing concepts? So Michael goes on to explain what Sue talks about.
[music fades]
Michael Doan 28:04
Often there's no exact label for what I'm feeling, and I may use metaphor or gesture association and so on to try and express significance, end quote. Sue calls these feelings that fall outside of the standard emotion categories “freestyle feelings.” And the point of contrasting them with classic emotions isn't to suggest that only some emotions can be shared, while others are just too idiosyncratic to be communicated and understood. Rather, the point is to remind us that emotion categories are normative categories legitimised by those who have the power to determine what kinds of occasions are or have been of communal significance. By interpreting every expression of feeling as falling into one or another standard emotion category. We effectively limit what it's possible for people to feel towards whom and what leading to significant distortions in what is truly important to each of us, ourselves included. After all, there are many occasions that are personally significant to us or our shared significance that aren't also of broader communal significance. And there are also experiences of communal significance that are not accommodated by basically conservative emotion categories, anger, fear and the like. I think this is a really powerful insight with a range of important consequences. For one thing, it helps to set Sue's account of emotion apart from all others because of its unique explanatory power. No other account of emotions that I'm aware of so much as acknowledges the possibility of what we might call affective novelty, and none are capable of explaining it. That is, they're not capable of explaining the emergence of genuinely new feelings, feelings that aren't uncategorizable, or at least not yet. But that's precisely what Sue is accomplished by developing the idea that the successful formation and individuation of feeling is a collaborative endeavour. You might notice something significant that passes everyone else by, and yet that experience could come to be shared more widely at some point somewhere down the line. Everyone in your community may need to grapple with the importance of this particular aspect of the world to the lives of at least some of its members, unless, of course, your attempts to convey what is important or significant to you are thwarted. Perhaps by the lazy, inattentive lumping of your mode of expression into one of the standard boxes. Entire worlds of significance can be dismissed in this way, and with them the possibility of caring differently about one another and the world around us. Sue helps us to reckon with the fact that we're all midwives of what matters to us, both individually and collectively.
[soft music behind]
Kristin Rodier 31:07
Why would our experiences of the world, which is always changing, always creating new, new opportunities for experience, have [only] these sort of eight or nine or ten categories of feeling that are really possible? You know, what if there's a feeling that no one's ever felt before? As the world changes, the kinds of things we can think and feel will also change.
Michael Doan 31:35
In a short essay on emotion that Sue loved to quote, Frithjof Bergmann writes, quote, “Emotions are very complex. They're subtle and terribly hard to describe, and there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of varieties of them.”
Now, while Sue was certainly fond of this passage. I think it's also important to see how she was pushing beyond its central idea. Yet, it may come as a surprise to learn that there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of varieties of emotions, far more than the ten or 12 standard types that we typically focus on. But what difference would it make to our relationships and our lives if we related to one another as though novel feelings were on the cusp of emerging all the time in very particular circumstances and relations that we are navigating today in a very unique situation. How would we become more careful and more caring in the shared work of articulating and acknowledging our cares for questions such as these? I will be forever grateful to Sue Campbell and the depth of her insight.
[soft music]
Kristin Rodier 33:03
People can't see on the podcast, but there was a point in that last sort of paragraph where I was kind of making [Anna laughing] the rock n’ roll symbol across Zoom to Anna because it's so good. And I'm going to reread it. “What difference would it make to our relationships in our lives if we related to one another? As the novel feelings were on the cusp of emerging all the time? How would we become more careful and more caring in the shared work of articulating and acknowledging our cares?” Wow.
Anna Mudde 33:38
Yeah! I mean, what that reminds me of – or maybe it doesn't remind me of, it puts me in mind of – is a particular posture, actually, like physical posture. An open chest to the extent that that's possible for us, or a receptive face or a tone of voice. Yeah.
Kristin Rodier 34:05
Yeah. And thinking too about like when we are relating to each other, we sort of come with our interpretive resources right around people, and try to fit them in, versus an openness that that something is emerging all the time.
Anna Mudde 34:29
Yes, I think Michael said – I wrote it down – “a lazy, inattentive lumping” that often serves as a shorthand, right, for interpreting one another. We're very busy. We're very busy and important, Kristin! So we need to be able to, like, do this quickly. Always.
And so maybe that's part of the posture, is to sort of make space and make… time to slow things down a bit to see what will come up… Yeah.
Kristin Rodier 35:06
I was thinking about one of the main ways I think that we are, you know, one of the many ways that we regulate emotions and sort of put them into lumped categories of dismissal is also just crying.
Anna Mudde 35:23
Oh, yes.
Kristin Rodier 35:24
The way that we respond to crying, I don't know if anybody has done a philosophy of crying.
Anna Mudde 35:29
I don't know either! And like some of us do cry sort of like quote unquote “inappropriately” by these sorts, the sort of… by the normative standards. Well, you know, sometimes when I'm teaching, sometimes I'll be teaching something or a student will say something and I'll have that, like solar plexus thing that I… where you can't quite breathe. And I'll joke with them, and I'll say, “Oh, there's no crying in philosophy, but there is the way there is when I do it,” to try to bring that, to try to bring it in, right? Because it is true, it’s standardly true that there's no crying in philosophy.
Kristin Rodier 36:10
I mean, in my experience, there's a lot of crying in philosophy. [laughs] But, what I'm thinking about how is how there's this kind of like automatic dismissal that comes with it, it's like you're over you're over a tipping point. You know, like you're that that's all. That's all, folks.
Anna Mudde 36:36
Well, and what is the tipping point, right? Like, the tipping point of what? And what you're pointing to, I wonder, is whether, like in the sort of professional context, whether “you're not doing philosophy anymore.”
Kristin Rodier 36:49
And also like who's tears bring response, like who's tears solicit a response, and when and where. I was thinking about, gosh. I think Hillary Clinton might have been running for president. So she was maybe this is like 2008 or 2007, or something. I don't know. But there were two things in the media cycle at the same time, which told me a lot about whiteness and a lot about gender, which was Hillary Clinton was being harassed and a lot of her campaign events. And then in talking about it, she was crying in an interview. And then at the same time, John Boehner was crying about the, you know, for patriotic reasons. Right. And so his tears were of seriousness, whereas her tears were evidence of being you know, a shrieking harpy who could never leave the country and this and that. So it's just kind of the to kind of hit a similar media cycle. And I just remember that as being, you know, there's this there's this whole thing around gendered crying. But, you know, in my experience, I experience a lot of men crying. I just experience it as something that women have to tend to. And that's very important. It's almost a crisis that you have to attend to. Right. To help stop. Whereas like when women do it, it's more dismissed, I guess.
Anna Mudde 38:34
Yes. Yeah. And how… how awful on the other side, to be embodied in a way that crying is a crisis.
Kristin Rodier 38:47
Yeah. That, too, right. Although I didn't think about that.
Anna Mudde 38:52
Yeah, that's… I mean that strikes me as deeply… sad. And yet, right, also very demanding given the context in which it happens, as you're describing. Yeah. Well, and as you say, I mean that's gendered certainly and also clearly racialized.
Kristin Rodier 39:17
White women’s tears.
Anna Mudde 39:18
We know about white women’s tears.
Kristin Rodier 39:19
They move mountains.
Anna Mudde 39:20
They get attended to, don't they? I mean, they do! Yes, they do!
Kristin Rodier 39:26
This is more the second half of the article, which talks a lot about sentimentality.
Anna Mudde 39:32
Oh, yes.
Kristin Rodier 39:33
When I think about sentimental, I think about like the Hallmark channel and…
Anna Mudde 39:40
Sappy. You're thinking, you're thinking about sappiness. Okay.
Kristin Rodier 39:43
Yeah! It's just like regular sort of sappiness. But Campbell’s piece really thinks about who's impressionable, who's whose body takes things in too much or not enough. And. Oh, you had an example of this, right?
Anna Mudde 40:03
Oh, yeah. I was thinking about Robert Boyle, the Boyle of Boyle's Law of Gases. You know, that Boyle! I think about him all the time! Robert Boyle ended up banning women from science experiments when he was doing them at the Royal Society.
Kristin Rodier 40:23
He was banning them. Why? Because they're too sentimental.
Anna Mudde 40:28
Yeah, actually, that's kind of exactly it. So let me try this. We'll see if this fits. So, it's the mid 17th century in England, and this scientist and philosopher Robert Boyle sets up experiments with glass vacuums. He's a chemist. He wants to understand the nature of air, and he sets them up with glass vacuums so that the public, and really we mean the upper classes, could come and watch what is happening in the glass tubes. And this was kind of new because it was suggesting that anyone kind of could know what is scientifically true, could do science. Like, you don't need complex language and logical structures for scientific observation. You need to do logical proofs. He's kind of disagreeing with Thomas Hobbes here, with whom he had a great debate.
Kristin Rodier 41:21
It's fine to disagree with Hobbes.
Anna Mudde 41:23
It's totally fine. He is my he is my intellectual frenemy, as I often say. Yes.
Kristin Rodier 41:28
Okay. Okay. So upper class women are coming to watch science experiments.
Anna Mudde 41:33
White women. Yeah. And is sort of where we get to the sentimentality part because his really famous experiment involved putting birds into those glass air tubes and then removing all the air to make a vacuum. And this was a way of proving that all the air was gone. Because when you remove all the air, the birds will die.
And I guess the science of it was sort of about watching the symptoms. So people who were invited into the lab could watch the symptoms of the bird and could record the time it took for the bird to expire and all that stuff.
Kristin Rodier 42:08
Yuck. Nice science!
Anna Mudde 42:12
Nice science. So the gentlewomen of the upper classes were allowed in to see this; they weren't originally excluded. But a lot of them really strongly objected to this experiment. And this is what gets them banned from the public science experiments, because the idea was that those objections meant that they were too sentimental to participate in science. They were too sentimental, emotional, too connected affectively, to – first of all – observe what Boyle calls “matters of fact”…
Kristin Rodier 42:50
Oh, good.
Anna Mudde 42:51
… and that that makes them unreliable as knowers. So their sentimentality, their – as you're saying – the sort of propensity to turn what is going on around them into emotion makes them unreliable as knowers about matters of fact.
Kristin Rodier 43:11
Hmm.
Anna Mudde 43:12
So anyone who was like “too impressionable” or thought to be too impressionable by sentiment was from that point on, banned from witnessing these experiments. And of course, that includes non-European European people – that would have been standard for the time, but also those who weren't the right kinds of Europeans – so: laborers, employees, servants, children, disabled people, ill people. The list is long here. So the reason I was thinking about this example and why it's super interesting is because it starts this sort of chain of events toward research and experimental ethics. But it also is this example of sentimentality disqualifying people from being rational knowers and also from being empirical knowers… like being good, reliable witnesses to what is going on in the world.
Kristin Rodier 44:11
Yes. Like, here, you're paying attention to the wrong thing, right?
Anna Mudde 44:15
Yeah. It's not about the bird! It's about the bird!… But it's not about… it's about the bird!
Kristin Rodier 44:21
And you're having feelings about it, and that's wrong.
Anna Mudde 44:25
That part's wrong.
Kristin Rodier 44:26
You're supposed to pay attention to the vacuum, right? Of the bird dying right in front of you. Right? Terrible. So it's so interesting because, like, the interpretive dismissal here is about what should be of significance, right? Yes. Right. You're supposed to pay attention to the vacuum piece. And you can think about this analogy with emotions, too. Right? So it's like you're paying attention to the wrong feature of your environment. And that the dismissal is to say, you know, look at this other thing or you should be paying attention to this. You see a lot of this in politics. Now I'm thinking about sort of the Indigenous feminists and sort of white settler colonial like sort of enforcing perceptions on what part of the environment is worth making into being significant through forms of interpretation.
Anna Mudde 45:24
Yeah, that seems, yeah, that's a really nice example, I think, of something very much along these lines.
Kristin Rodier 45:30
And you're paying attention to the wrong thing and that shows that you're not a good knower. And so we have to restrict your communication. So now you're banned. You're banned from coming to watch my amazing science experiments because you're paying attention to the wrong thing. So this is really interesting. Like I thought we're supposed to be, you know, emotional and pay attention to like empathy and all that. So it's like you're you're doing what you're supposed to do, but you're also wrong.
Anna Mudde 46:01
Right! And especially for, like, gentlewomen that would have been, right, part of what they were, I imagine, trained to do, right? I suspect in England at the time, right, be the moral educators of the children. But also to care about things like birds and…
Kristin Rodier 46:18
Well, and Campbell is talking about how you know this this period of time you know sentimentality the rise of sentimentality is also when in the sort of Western historical European period where women started to read and write novels.
Anna Mudde 46:35
Oh, yes.
Kristin Rodier 46:36
And uh-oh! They, they had feelings. The they're having feelings with what they're reading and they're putting feelings in their novels. And so there's something here about emotions when they're cause to by something… they're wrong.
Anna Mudde 47:00
Yep.
Kristin Rodier 47:01
Do you see what I'm saying? Like, it's sort of you read a story and it made you have a feeling and that shouldn't have happened.
Anna Mudde 47:10
Which is especially strange because, like, what am I supposed to do in response to a novel? [Kristin laughs] Like, what is the point of the novel? I'm supposed to read it, have a very rational sort of chain of logical thought. And… what?! [Kristin laughs]
Kristin Rodier 47:23
I think it's just supposed to stimulate your imagination.
Anna Mudde 47:28
Oh! [sighs] Okay. [laughs]
Kristin Rodier 47:32
And if you have feelings, they should be by choice. So if as a result of the imagination are being moved, then it's because you made a decision.
[soft bird sounds]
Here's, we have a clip from Kate Norlock.
Kate Norlock 47:52
My name is Kate Norlock. And I read Sue Campbell's “Being Dismissed” because I write about complaining, and I notice some serious overlaps between my interest and Sue Campbell's. She writes about bitterness and emotionality and sentimentality as gendered judgments that block other people's expressions. So, when you call someone bitter, you are making a judgment and it's negative. And I write about Kant and Aristotle. Among other things, I write that they say a real man never complains because doing so is weak and soft. So I'm grabbed by Sue Campbell describing the judgment that someone as bitter or emotional as a negative judgment when you make it about other people. In my experience, people say someone's a complainer the same way it's a negative shut down deal that says the source has a personal trait, which is their problem rather than a problem that we should be responsive to, that we might even be responsible for. It's important that she says calling someone bitter is a strategy to block them. So today, everybody talks about gaslighting, but that's just one kind of block, right? That's an undermining form of blocking someone. This is different, maybe worse or maybe just differently bad. It blocks someone by articulating their emotions before they do, making them legible to others and only this bad way. And also, right, setting the terms for the conversation. So now the person described as bitter has to say whether they are or not and why. But now they're engaging on the terms that the judgmental person set. So I love Sue Campbell's attention to that interpersonal social interaction of articulating and shaping someone's emotional and communicative experience by sort of defining it for them and at their expense. That's important.
I think I disagree with her arguments against owning it, though, like describing oneself as bitter or emotional and defending that as rational. So Campbell's not wild about that, but I like it. One of my interests in writing about things like bitterness and complaining is to reduce their stigma. I see Sue Campbell saying, “Well, when somebody else does it about you, they're going for stigma.” And I'm saying, “Right, but what about those times when we want to sort of proudly own it?” I'm also thinking here of philosophers like Shay Welch, who writes about Madness with a capital M. She talks about life with BPD, that's borderline personality disorder, as one in which she cherishes her empathy, her emotionality, and what she calls her Madness. She offers reasons for valuing them that are eminently rational. So I don't think Sue Campbell is correct that if it's not within my power to affect my circumstances, then they may not provide a rational ground for my actions or responses. I think Shay’s right that we can be audiences to ourselves. We can articulate ourselves and what it is rational to be like or to do does not depend on having the power to change ourselves. I realize what Sue Campbell is concerned about are occasions for dismissing women, and I agree that dismissing women is always bad. But I do think there's more promise and power that Sue Campbell may have granted in grabbing those words and using them before our dismissals do by saying, “Yeah, this is who I am, and I am right to think so.” Thanks.
[soft bird sounds]
Kristin Rodier 51:11
Well, and I think that I think it's if there's possible you know, she was just saying that Campbell is not wild about owning it, but not that it's, you know, bad or something. But I guess the point the point that I really see at issue is, is what's going to be politically effective and what's going to get you a fair interpretation, or not necessarily a fair interpretation, but one of these sort of caring and collaborative interpretations that we can make. And I guess it is worth worrying about what do we do when that's not available?
Anna Mudde 51:51
Right.
Kristin Rodier 51:51
So, you know, and I was thinking about the way that people talk about spite. I'm doing this out of spite and how spite is this kind of reclaimed motivator. Right? I think a lot of times what we're doing is we're going we're going doing something despite what the oppressive circumstances would normally dictate.
Anna Mudde 52:16
Yes… Right!... Yeah. Or I mean, maybe there's a sort of power in saying, “I know it's this and I'm doing it anyway.” So like, naming that, from the get go.
But even without naming it… I wonder. First of all… well, two things: I wonder whether it is, if we're talking about being able to be an audience to yourself, whether that is maybe something that's not universal. I don't relate to that very well. And maybe that's an undeveloped capacity or an underdeveloped capacity in me. Maybe I could learn to do that better. I've been I've been working on that for a long time. And I'm still… [laughs] I think it's still not… it's not natural to me in some respect. But the other thing I was thinking about is it's true that we can say to ourselves, for instance, “that makes sense; given what happened, that makes sense.” We can learn to say that to ourselves. I'm not sure that we learn to say that to ourselves first. I suspect we might learn how to say it to others first. And so I can see that sort of pushing both ways. We might be able to say “what rationally means here is ‘I can make sense of it.’”
Kristin Rodier 53:34
Yeah.
Anna Mudde 53:36
And not, it is rational under the terms of, right, philosophical standards of reason. And maybe we also have different community standards of rationality in that case. Maybe. I think there are certainly there's a case to be made for saying that there are feminist standards of rationality. I don't know what those are, but I suspect that that's true. And within different community contexts, going back to what Michael Doan was saying about the sort of collective vernacular of feelings, it might be that within different community contexts there are feelings that make sense, that are not part of the dominant structure. So it might be that “that makes sense,” right? And if that's what we mean by rationality or reason, well, that doesn't seem objectionable to me, and I sort of wonder what Sue Campbell would say about that.
Kristin Rodier 54:28
That I think that it's possible that there's like a sort of prism on a different aspect of the problem going on here. But I do think it's kind of interesting to think about, you know, whatever these techniques are that let us untie the knot.
Anna Mudde 54:49
Yes.
Kristin Rodier 54:50
Or does that sort of reinscribe any of those terms that are causing that that dismissal in the first place? Like I guess I'm curious, will that dismissal just go somewhere else?
Anna Mudde 55:01
Right. Yes. Because… you have questions about whether it's possible to push against oppressive structures from within oppressive structures.
Kristin Rodier 55:16
Yeah. That’s where I get all the time. That's where I get stuck.
Well, I do have one last clip. [soft music fades in]
This is our final clip from Ami Harbin.
Anna Mudde 55:28
Wonderful.
[music fades out]
Ami Harbin 55:35
My name is Ami Harbin. I was a student of Sue Campbell's. She was one of my doctoral supervisors.
So when I think about being dismissed, one of the lines that really stands out to me is the last sentence of the article where Campbell says, “Because of the relation of feeling to significance, when our feelings are trivialized, ignored, systematically criticized, or when they are extremely constrained by the poverty of our expressive resources, this situation can lead to a very serious kind of dismissal. The dismissal of the significance to a person of her own life in a way that reaches down deeply into what the significance of a life can be to the person whose life it is.”
So, I love this quote, and I it makes sense why it's the last of the article because it's so beautiful and so powerful. And I think it really speaks to something that always blows my mind about Campbell's work, which is her view of feelings as actually being formed through expression. So according to Campbell, if you don't get to express the feelings that you have and if people don't take them up well and interpret them well, you can actually not have the feelings in the same way, and you might not have the feelings at all. So usually lots of us think that, you know, first come the feelings and then we express them to others. And that's how it works. But on Campbell's view, no, it's actually through expressing the feelings to other people that the feelings get formed at all. And so that means if people don't interpret your feelings well or if they respond badly, if they dismiss your feelings, if they say, you know, oh, you're just being sensitive, you might actually not get to have those feelings in the same way. This view has always been mind blowing to me. I have read Campbell's work so many times and every time I'm still blown away by this claim because it really speaks to the power other people have in our emotional lives and indeed the power we have in other people's emotional lives. Right? We really depend on each other in terms of having our feelings interpreted well.
Anna Mudde 58:07
Oh my gosh. So those questions, Kristin, that you started off with about philosophers and their emotions, these sort of, yeah, atomistic rational people who maybe don't even have emotions.
Kristin Rodier 58:24
I know they might not have emotions, but it's so much deeper than that. It's like they have emotions and those emotions depend on others. So having them, understanding them, having them recognized all of this is we're dependent on each other for that.
Anna Mudde 58:43
Right. So, we're getting this really interesting and maybe unexpected answer here from Ami. Like, not only are our emotions philosophically thinkable and relevant, but they're also things we can't ask philosophers about as individuals because if we depend on each other for having our feelings interpreted well, and as Campbell says, for having our feelings kind of manifest at all, even philosophers are subject to that.
Kristin Rodier 59:17
Yeah. And just to connect that back to Kate's worry, right?, we have this idea of “are we fundamental dependent on other people in this way, or can we be an audience to ourselves?” Like, can I as myself sort of talk myself through my own emotions?
Anna Mudde 59:37
Yes! And what a beautiful way of putting it that Ami's giving us here, coming from Sue's work.
Ami Harbin 59:46
And then in that last line from the article, you know, sense having and expressing feelings is key to creating and finding significance in our lives, if we don't have sympathetic others to hear our feelings and interpret them well, we can actually be damaged all the way down to the level of not being able to create or find significance in our lives. Right. So taking other people's feelings seriously and being a good interpreter for them matters that deeply, all the way to the level of creating and finding significance in our lives. I love this in part because for me, philosophy has always been about helping all of us, you know, find and create significance in our lives. That's part of the reason that I care about philosophy at all. It's because I think it helps us do that. And so this claim from Campbell that actually one big way that we help others do that is by being sympathetic interpreters for their feelings, right? Actually hearing them and witnessing them rather than dismissing them. I feel like that really shows the importance of doing that, that the power of responding well to other people's expressions of feelings. Of course, feelings are not enough. Right? We need to also survive and have enough food and have somewhere to live and not be attacked and not be in war conditions and all of that, in order to, you know, find and create significance in our lives. So there are many other things that need to be done and that are important, but also paying attention to people's feelings matters. This is one of the pieces that we need in order to find and create this significance.
[soft music plays behind]
Kristin Rodier 1:01:35
What's so beautiful about it is that it starts from something so small and so personal and intimate, and it has this broad reach through all of how we understand ourselves and what we're doing here anyway. And it's just beautiful, you know? And that's kind of why I thought this would be such a great article for us to start, you know, with a podcast about thinking bodies.
Speaking of techniques of dismissal in grad school, I think, you know, doing feminist philosophy, I remember someone who doesn't do feminist philosophy sort of saying to me, “Why do feminist philosophers always draw on their personal experience?” And I thought, “Oh my gosh! Well, because we're honest about the fact that we're doing it…”
Anna Mudde 1:02:25
Yes! I was going to say, “you still think you're not doing that?! Oh, that's so interesting!”
Kristin Rodier 1:02:31
I know it's sort of a return to meaningful life philosophy. That's kind of what I like about it, about feminist philosophy, is that that it has that aspect to it. You know, there was nothing else where I thought that that was really going on in the same way.
Anna Mudde 1:02:46
My earliest experiences of that were sitting on my own in the stacks in the library,
realizing that people had language for the things I couldn't name. That in itself actually seems like part of what Sue Campbell is talking about is that feminist philosophy, when it is done well and is working well, can help us in the ways that Ami is describing. I mean, maybe what Sue Campbell is saying about feelings is also true of thinking, especially if we reject the idea that thinking and feeling are ever separable, never clearly delineated.
[theme music cuts in]
Anna Mudde 1:03:41
Ah, well, I've had such a nice time thinking with you, Kristin. And with our listeners who made it so far! Thank you!
Kristin Rodier 1:03:46
God, me too! Our listeners made it to the end of our first episode! We made it to the end of our first episode! And I'm so excited because I know that you're getting voice clips right now for our next episode, which is on “Throwing Like A Girl” by Iris Marion Young, and I can’t wait.
Anna Mudde 1:04:08
And, on that note, if you'd like to contribute or give us ideas for our next episodes, please go to our website thinkingbodiespod.com. We're open to ideas, and as we said in the beginning, this is a DIT experiment, so we're happy for the feedback and participation.
Kristin Rodier 1:04:22
Absolutely. So I will just say thank you to Alexis Shotwell, Ami Harbin, Christine Koggel, Kathryn Norlock, and Michael Doan. All the references for what we discussed on the podcast today are on our website. Thank you so much, also, to the Amplified Podcast network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created. This is such a thrill to have done this with you, Anna.
Anna Mudde 1:04:50
Oh, and with you, Kristin! People can also, I think, find us now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. So check us out!
Kristin Rodier 1:04:57
Okay, great. I'm glad I Googled how to outgrow your podcast! [laughs]
Anna Mudde 1:05:05
[laughing] I'm very glad you did too!
Kristin Rodier 1:05:07
Did we do everything? I think we did everything.
Anna Mudde 1:05:08
I think we did everything! Yay!
Kristin Rodier 1:05:11
Ouhhh! My goodness! [Anna laughs]
[theme music rises]
Christine Koggel 1:05:15
Hypatia editors asked readers to nominate the most transformative, groundbreaking and pivotal articles in its 25-year history. Being dismissed made that list. It shaped Sue Campbell's thinking over the decades to follow. Three books: Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings, published in 1997. Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars, published in 2003. Our Faithfulness to the Past: The Ethics and Politics of Memory, published in 2014 in the Oxford Series called Studies in Feminist Philosophy and published posthumously, co-edited by Raki Jacobson and myself.
Show notes
Special thanks to our contributors, Alexis Shotwell, Ami Harbin, Christine Koggel, Kathryn Norlock and Michael Doan. Also, thank you so much to the Amplify Podcast Network, Stacey Copeland and Hannah Mcgregor, for all of your mentorship. Also, gratitude to Megan Dean.
Article:
Campbell, Sue. “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” in Hypatia vol. 9, no. 3 (Summer 1994) pp. 46-65.
Other works referenced:
Bergmann, Frithjof. “Understanding Human Emotions,” in Bowling Green Studies in
Applied Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 1-17, 1979. https://doi.org/10.5840/bgstudies197911
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. “A note on anger.” In The politics of reality: Essays in feminist
theory. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press.
LaRocque, Emma. 1990. Preface to Writing the Circle, ed. Jeanne Perreault and Silvia
Vance. Edmonton: NeWest Publishers.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The uses of anger: Women responding to racism.” In Sister
outsider. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.
Potter, Elizabeth. Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2001.
Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178165/leviathan-and-the-air-pump
Welch, Shay. 2023. “‘Am I safe enough for you now?’ BPD and the forced erasure of personal identity,” in The Philosophical Forum: A Quarterly 54(4), pp. 333-350. https://doi.org/10.1111/phil.12348
Sound:
Pres, Josef. 2024. “Piano loops 128 effect octave long loop” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/josefpres/sounds/723002/
Seth_Makes_Sounds. 2024. “Brainstatic v1”, Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Seth_Makes_Sounds/sounds/730699/
Garuda1982. 2024, “large meadow with nature sounds and nearby city background noises” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Garuda1982/sounds/737002/