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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Created by actor and producer Amanda Peet and former Harvard graduate student, Annie Julie Wyman, Netflix’s limited series, The Chair (2021) aired to solid ratings and a respectable standing on Netflix’s “must-watch” list. Envisioned as a work-place comedy-drama set in the industry of the academy (at the fictional Ivy League wannabe Pembroke University), The Chair set out to offer a humorous take on academic life, amidst such non-humorous topics as call-out culture, cancel culture, the #MeToo movement, sexism, racial oppression, and age discrimination, all told against the backdrop of dwindling enrollments, a fight for the relevancy of a humanities education, and the putative relation between education as a business and the university as a site of higher learning. The questions the series raises are critical: Who gets to define the profession? Who gets to take up space in the limited domain of the academy? What constitutes free speech? What happens to “true believers” who enter the profession due to their love of teaching but then go to the dark side of academic administration? What happens to teaching students critical resistance when they turn their resistance against their teachers? Having served as the chair of a department of Gender Studies myself, I watched The Chair with equal parts excitement and dread. I laughed out loud at its slapstick humor and marveled at its capacity to create dialogue that I’m sure I’ve actually said (“These skills are bigger than what you put on a resume!”), but I also found myself increasingly cringing at its limited representational range. All the while, my Facebook page hummed with reactions, my friends and colleagues “triggered” by a range of topics that struck them as achingly recognizable or hopelessly inaccurate. In this presentation, which is both an auto-ethnography about being a media and gender studies scholar/administrator in the context of massive social change and a critical reading of The Chair, I narrate my own viewing experience of The Chair, using it as a spring board to ask what place and what obligation we have in the academy to make ourselves relevant.
“With Gray Hair, I Actually Feel More Powerful”: Age, Embodiment, and the Semiotic Power of Celebrity
Created by actor and producer Amanda Peet and former Harvard graduate student, Annie Julie Wyman, Netflix’s limited series, The Chair (2021) aired to solid ratings and a respectable standing on Netflix’s “must-watch” list. Envisioned as a work-place comedy-drama set in the industry of the academy (at the fictional Ivy League wannabe Pembroke University), The Chair set out to offer a humorous take on academic life, amidst such non-humorous topics as call-out culture, cancel culture, the #MeToo movement, sexism, racial oppression, and age discrimination, all told against the backdrop of dwindling enrollments, a fight for the relevancy of a humanities education, and the putative relation between education as a business and the university as a site of higher learning. The questions the series raises are critical: Who gets to define the profession? Who gets to take up space in the limited domain of the academy? What constitutes free speech? What happens to “true believers” who enter the profession due to their love of teaching but then go to the dark side of academic administration? What happens to teaching students critical resistance when they turn their resistance against their teachers? Having served as the chair of a department of Gender Studies myself, I watched The Chair with equal parts excitement and dread. I laughed out loud at its slapstick humor and marveled at its capacity to create dialogue that I’m sure I’ve actually said (“These skills are bigger than what you put on a resume!”), but I also found myself increasingly cringing at its limited representational range. All the while, my Facebook page hummed with reactions, my friends and colleagues “triggered” by a range of topics that struck them as achingly recognizable or hopelessly inaccurate. In this presentation, which is both an auto-ethnography about being a media and gender studies scholar/administrator in the context of massive social change and a critical reading of The Chair, I narrate my own viewing experience of The Chair, using it as a spring board to ask what place and what obligation we have in the academy to make ourselves relevant.
Bio
Brenda R. Weber is Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar in Gender Studies at Indiana University. She publishes widely on gender, sexuality, media, and the body, including her most-recent book, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism (Duke 2019). With David Greven, she is the co-editor of Ryan Murphy’s Queer America (forthcoming Routledge).