audience to the audience: the co-taught feminist class

Alex: Hi, Chloë.

Chloë: Hi Alex.

Alex: Thank you so much for agreeing to engage in a short interview with me for the project that I’m doing on my blog, which has morphed in the second half of its short duration (from the election to the quickly approaching inauguration) to be one-on-one conversations¹ about some of the more pressing themes raised for me: how we form groups together, how we are audiences for and with each other, and methods of collaboration that will be of assistance for us as our world changes, soon.² We have a new president after the 20th of January.

I’m reaching out to you because you and I are going to be teaching a CUNY grad class together, Socially Engaged Archives: In Theory, In Practice, a very feeding form of collaboration for me. It’s the second time we’ve done it and a collaboration from which I previously learned a great deal. What will it be like to be co-teaching this class with a large group (20-30!) of CUNY graduate students (from your own SPCUNY, from Brooklyn College’s PIMA, and also MAs, MFAs, and PhDs from across the system)? How are you anticipating our class that begins after the inauguration?

Chloë: We talked about this shift of your project a little bit before coming to this conversation, and it’s kind of fun because inadvertently, I was part of the first phase of the project because you came to my Hanukkah party. We had a conversation then about whether or not we would constitute “an audience.” And then based on a very specific interaction or twist to the evening, we did, and you wrote about that. I don’t know if everybody who attended the party read what you wrote, but I do know at least a few people did and really enjoyed seeing themselves being reported back in that way.

And this reminds me of some elements of the first iteration of the class that we taught where one of the things that I would sometimes do was create a sort of live note taking document during the class. This wasn’t exactly notes in a traditional sense, but a kind of record of emotional responses, shifts in the room tones, or representations of other types of lived experiences that coincided with our learning.

And then subsequently, I gave you a similar sort of gift of note taking and emotional reportage for your 60^th birthday last year. So, I’m coming to this second iteration of our class and thinking about these different ways that reporting or witnessing takes form for me. One of the things I’ve been considering is that a challenge in these moments of political upheaval is of leadership for us, the teachers, where many people, quite correctly, are looking to us to know something that we don’t yet know. And they’re looking to us for information, assistance, guidance, mentorship in a moment where we also feel totally uncertain. And I realized that one of the gifts that I do have, and one of the things that I can bring, even in my own uncertainty is this gift of report-back.

How do these very real moments from our lives and from the rooms that we’re in become part of the experience of being together? How is that a group form of witnessing that kind of equalizes everyone in our seminar across a shift in a political moment, while also maintaining the very unequal relationship in the seminar where we are the teachers and some 18 to 28 people are our students?

Alex: I love that answer. It raises for me—this incredible skill that you have, the live reporting—that you doesn’t just record words but sort of emit how affect is riven, live, to an encounter. When we teach, when we’re in class together, when we are building that dynamic space in a feminist context, I think of that as a very collaborative experience—between professors and students and between students and students—organized by power, as you said, but also letting power fluctuate. It’s live and it dissipates. We all know, as teachers and students, how intense a classroom can be, but it is a temporary intensity. What’s interesting about your live witnessing is that it then also produces a digital record, which has a different function, although related to the class itself.³ And I wonder if you want to speak a little bit more about that tension between the ephemeral and the record, especially given that ours is a class about artists using and making archives and scholars using and making archives.

Chloë: It’s this dual subject position for me which is the hardest part of teaching, where I feel like I’m the performer and the class is the audience. That’s the hardest part. And so in a way, this note taking situation puts me—I’m still in my position of power—but it puts me in a position of less performance within that position of power and more that my power is as the audience to the audience. So it’s like I’m topping from the bottom, right? It’s a huge amount of control to be responsible for this document. But also I’m the bottom. “It’s not my performance, it’s yours.”

And I think that shift, maybe queer, maybe feminist—all of those things given my own subject positions and life experience‚ can demonstrate the many positions of artists who are working with archives. The archive is shaping and informing the work, but also the artist, in a way—through what we’re calling remix in our assignments, or reinterpretation; what we teach through focusing on annotation or citation; what we do through all of these different ways of dealing with classifying and scrambling information. All this hands-on archival work puts a huge amount of power in the hands of the archivist/student where they are making their own intellectual or creative stamp that actually controls how information flows. And this is maybe my, I don’t want to call it an art project, but it’s like my project within our class, to be continually demonstrating that through my own weird behavior.

Alex: That’s not weird. But I think the other thing about anticipating what we will do when we’re going to be teaching after a new president is in place, part of the beauty of that for me is that of co-teaching (when it works) and collaborating (when it works), which is that all the power is not mine. All the agency is not mine. All the responsibility is not mine. And the experience becomes more flexible for that reason. And I think we’re going to need a lot of flexibility in whatever is coming next, to the point where I can see us rewriting the class as needed

Chloë: Oh, we could be throwing the whole thing out. But I am open to seeing not exactly what is needed, because I don’t think people will know what they need. But in working across the shifting times to figure out what’s changing.

Alex: And so these practices of flexibility that are responsible and responsive and that are caring, I’ve always thought that the feminist classroom is a model for so much of what can be good in the world. So many of the decent and thoughtfully engendered ways of being in the world I have found expressed in feminist classrooms, whether I’m the teacher or the student.

Is there anything we haven’t mentioned about what we are calling, say, a co-taught feminist class, that is a model for how to prepare and think about being in groups?

Chloë: Can I talk about Aristotle?

Alex: Well, yes, that would be you being weird.

Chloë: Great. Okay. So I have read some Aristotle sometime ago. What is well known among people from the theater and performance stripe is the Aristotelian idea of theater and the role of catharsis in theater. The specific spatial relationship between the performer, the audience, and catharsis. That catharsis is something that exists spatially between the audience, which watches the play on stage, the stage, and then somewhere arcing up into the middle. Maybe where the stage lights are is emotional catharsis. And I think retooling this for the feminist model is to state that all of those things are intermingled, but also that they’re a lot more complicated.

So that spatially what’s happening is (this is going to be hard to describe in writing in a blog, but what I’m doing with my fingers is I have two fingers and then they’re intermingling with my other two fingers. And then it’s like that wiggling of my two fingers from each hand together is the space of catharsis, but also is my hand. My fingers are bumping up against each other.)

And all of this is impacting the ways that witnessing and performance and group management come together that are fundamentally changing in real time. And I think it’s this desire to create affinity that is somehow defined and established and unchanging. That has gotten a lot of us seeking solidarity into trouble.

I talked recently with Aruna D’Souza about her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, which I have not yet read. But in talking to Aruna about the ideas in her book, this idea of imperfection, I think is both politically helpful and somewhat troubling to a lot of people right now. It’s like feeling out how to deal with this imperfection, or the ripples created by the commingling of performer, audience, and catharsis in the same moment. This is very much what’s at hand for us in our classroom and kind of globally, in what you are calling the “interval,” and then what comes after.

 

 

1. This is my fifth such interview. The first four are with my boyfriend (about the intimate audience, writing, and depression in the interval); the second with Michael Mandiberg (about being audience to another’s need, as that person is careproviding for a partner undergoing chemo); the third with Aymar Jean Christian (about his work on the African-American cookout as a model for community and mediamaking); and the fourth with Dan Fishback (about his show, “Dan Fishback is Alive and Unwell and Living in his Apartment,” and what this raises about alienation and solidarity practices with the chronically ill and those in Palestine). ↩︎
2. Here is a summary, “4 questions and 21 audiences at the new year,” of the writing I did from November 20 to January 1, 2025 via the first rubric for my self-imposed practice where I blogged, seriously, about every audience I put myself into. ↩︎
3. I have taught this course, based in my VHS Activism Archive, four times at CUNY. Twice before with fellow Brooklyn College professor, Jenn McCoy. Iterations of the class are held in and transform the archive (see Archive of Past Courses pull-down menu). ↩︎