markets oneself. The large number of young people who presented papers at Oklahoma—many of them willing to pay a $95 registration fee and endure the humiliation of potentially tiny audiences at multiple sessions (there were seventeen simultaneous sessions on Sunday morning at 8:30)—testifies to the sense that putting a “Cultural Studies in the 1990s” label on your vita is worth an investment in exploitation and alienation.
I do not mean to belittle the impulse behind the willingness to cooperate with that kind of structure. The unpredictable realities of the job market are terrifying enough to more than explain graduate students and young faculty members signing on for the odd honorific anonymity that being on a large conference program entails. But I also think there’s good reason to bring these realities into the open and subject them to critique.
Indeed, the job market in cultural studies—at least in English—gives a pretty good indication of how the discipline is going to take up this new paradigm. In 1989 a graduate student at Illinois—a specialist in feminist cultural studies with a degree in communications—interviewed for cultural studies positions at MLA. It was quite clear that many departments hadn’t the faintest idea what cultural studies was. It was a way to ask the dean for new money by pointing out an area where they needed to catch up and a way for interviewers to make a display of ignorance look like canny interrogation: “So what is all this cultural studies stuff about anyway?” What better way to ask uninformed questions than in the role of job interviewer? Who cares what serious cultural studies job candidates might think? The search committee has the power and the money. If the answers are confusing or slightly threatening, the candidate will be out of the room in twenty minutes anyway. The committee, of course, has the only last word that counts—the authority to recommend who gets offered the job. Some departments in effect conducted fake, exploratory cultural studies searches as a lazy way of finding out between cocktails a little bit about what the young people are up to these days. As the Illinois student found out, it all comes down to the final question: but can you fill in when we need someone to do the Milton course?
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