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Queered Outrage: Reclaiming Anger amid Facile

Calls for Campus Civility
Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

Abstract
Campus calls for “civility” tend to limit access to legitimate anger expression,
especially for those on the margins of power. By exploring how socially
permissible anger is racialized and gendered, and highlighting anger-infused
queer activism of Stonewall and ACT UP, we identify anger as an important tool
for interrogating facile notions of civil discourse, with significant implications for
campus life. Anger from the margins is a necessary corrective to power abuses,
and its full expression is essential to securing academic freedom. This reclamation
of a supposedly “negative” emotion can motivate truth-telling and institutional
change. Although campus communities prefer to embrace optimistic speech—
think happy Pride rainbows and uplifting calls for diversity and unity—a truly
progressive campus environment requires richer appreciation of and engagement
with speech containing sorrow, ambivalence, anger, and darkness.

Policies and practices to address incivility on colleges and university

campuses, while intended to minimize harmful and hateful speech, all too
often take aim at people who contest the status quo. Aggressive,
intimidating, and domineering speech is often unremarked upon when
the speaker is a powerful, presumably cisgender, heterosexual, white
man. Yet the targets of incivility accusations on campus are, more
frequently than not, those of us with identities and academic pursuits on
the margins of campus life. Our voices are “political,” while hetero- and
gender-normative faculty and administrative leaders remain supposedly

Copyright American Association of University Professors, 2021

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neutral. This equation of dissent with incivility is troubling, and the

current weaponizing of civility discourses to stifle critical speech is a
dangerous development. Inconvenient, dissenting members of our
campus community may readily be cast aside when the campus body
politic favors “civil discourse” over academic freedom and truth-telling.
For campus constituents whose personal and professional identities
shine a light on the historic and current exclusions of “traditional” higher
education, the costs of civility discourses are severe. As the pandemic
persists and as far-right antidemocratic attacks grow more explosive, our
analysis of current civility rhetoric recognizes a longer context of struggle
over higher education’s purpose. Since the 1980s, diminished investment
in public universities, particularly in the liberal arts, corresponds to an
increasingly brown, Black, working-class, and female student body.
Compounding the disinvestment are right-wing anti-intellectual
objections to “woke,” “socialist,” and “PC” faculty and curricula, lately
constituted as a moral panic about “critical race theory” in schools.
Desperate for enrollment, university leaders too often prioritize their
“brand” and placating conservative governing boards and state
legislators, when what is needed is a robust defense of academic freedom.
In this article, we examine anger as a legitimate form of expression,
one that troubles campus calls for civility as inherently good. We explore
how anger and other “negative” emotions are commonly regarded as
poisons to be eliminated if one is to fulfill legitimate personal, political,
intellectual, and pedagogical goals. Queer anger is at the center of our
argument, because even in the absence of overt homophobia and
transphobia, queer and gender transgressive people face extreme scrutiny
about whether we are “nice,” “likable,” or “civil” enough. Misogynistic
tropes and racialized conceptions of anger inform the dismissal of queer
concerns, deemed “unreasonable,” “angry,” or perhaps even “militant,”
irrespective of the speech’s content. We must be wary, then, of societal or
campus norms presented as neutral strategies, as they may blunt the
expression of strong emotions and disproportionately constrain the
expression of students, staff, and faculty from nondominant groups.
Campus speech dynamics mirror those of the broader culture, as
people across the political spectrum undermine the moral and political
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Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

basis for angry queer outrage, primarily by weaponizing shame, not least
of all shame about anger, sadness, and grief. Pinkwashing, celebrating
diversity, and simplistic campus calls for “civility” and “dialogue” urge
us to look away from deeper problems and inequities. In the face of
pressures to put others at ease, it is more essential than ever to reclaim the
integrity and validity of queer rage, both individually and collectively. In
short, there is something to be learned from angry queer and trans folks
about harnessing shame and grief in ways that are authentic as well as
politically and pedagogically useful, particularly as we witness ramped
up right-wing domestic terrorism, greater surveillance of academic
speech, and threats to higher education’s core liberal arts mission.
Casual and systematic violence against marginalized groups persists
on campus and beyond, from microaggressions to police brutality,
rationalized by patriarchal, white supremacist institutions. In this context,
“diversity” and “civility” converge to drown out and shame dissenting
voices on campus, laying bare an enduring double standard. Entitled men
not uncommonly get a “pass,” their fiery tempers charitably interpreted
as a by-product of learning masculinity in some earlier era, and
potentially forgivable if they bring scholarly prestige to the institution.
Likewise, the task of determining whose anger warrants attention is
steeped in systems of dominance, with cascading effects on those of us
who contribute to a “diverse” campus but who are effectively blocked
from employing anger in the service of ethical, pedagogical, and political
efficacy.
Meanwhile, faculty with nonnormative gender presentation, perhaps
working on the fringes or at the intersections of traditional academic
disciplines, are the unwitting recipients of conduct advice: “Tone it
down,” “Act professional,” and “Be nice.” Our viability at the institution
is tied to good behavior, compounding the heightened vulnerability and
surveillance (including self-surveillance) that marginalized faculty
already face, none more so than contingent and untenured faculty.
Professional reprimands and retaliation inflicted on individuals may be
coupled with cuts and mergers that erode faculty self-governance—with
interdisciplinary, humanities-based academic units grounded in critical
thought invariably at the top of the list. How to employ anger in the
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service of truth-telling and institutional change is a lesson we can adapt

from radical queer struggles of the past, swimming against a current—
especially in pandemic times—that valorizes sacrifice and harmony.
Given the enduring links between heteronormativity and sexism,
queer members of our campus communities continue to encounter
barriers to full membership. We are effectively always interviewing to
have our gender and humanity confirmed, especially if we are gender
nonconforming or multiply marginalized. Such assessments often judge
ostensibly queer people according to stereotypically middle-class
heteronormative traits, the sort likely to be most acceptable to university
administrators. So long as an expressive right to anger is a prerogative
steeped in sexism and antipathy toward effeminacy, the anger of queer
“others” may elicit disrespect, trivialization, or reprisal. Angry speech
might be tolerated in the context of a particular egregious incident, at a
rally, or on a picket line, but in the day-to-day operations of campus life,
even merely frank and assertive speech amounts to “anger” and
“insubordination” and is admonished as uncivil.

From Stonewall to ACT UP: Performative Queer Anger against a

Backdrop of Erasure and Death
Now that higher education institutions house queer student groups,
professionally staffed LGBTQ offices and “safe zones,” and inclusive
curricula of one sort or the other, it is tempting to claim victory over a past
era of homophobic exclusion and view queer anger as a relic of more
oppressive times. Students at our midwestern public university, for
example, delight in how visible and proud the queer campus community
is, seemingly well-resourced and recognized among other identity
groups. Yet we shortchange ourselves and our students when we pat
ourselves on the back for having achieved campus acceptance and settle
for the status quo. Lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion on
campus coexists all too comfortably with administrative agendas to
streamline and eliminate programs and enhance efficiencies. The history,
philosophy, and politics of queer rage, which we can bring to campus
forums and classroom settings, provide a needed corrective to feel-good
5 Queered Outrage
Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

diversity campaigns and their investments in neoliberalism and

respectability.
It is partly because queer anger so rarely gets traction, particularly in
professional and educational settings, that accounts of the Stonewall riots
occupy such symbolic power for LGBTQ students, faculty, and our allies.
These are necessary stories to consider and teach, recollections that evoke
the heady image of gender-rebellious people of color, such as Sylvia
Rivera, picking up rocks and fighting back against police harassers,
prevailing—if only temporarily—over the powers that be. Rivera and her
compatriot Marsha P. Johnson were engaged in social justice struggles
alongside and beyond gay rights, and they were far from portraits of
buttoned-up respectability. Grounded in their own experiences of
marginality, they fiercely opposed homophobia, poverty and
homelessness, and racism, and worked to create alternatives for
disenfranchised queens, street kids, sex workers, and hustlers they
organized with, asking, “Why do we always got to take the brunt of this
shit?”1
Although she has been belatedly elevated to prominence within the
LGBTQ movement as a hero of Stonewall, Rivera was the subject of much
consternation, derision, and marginalization in various activist spaces in
her day, never mind the mainstream. As certain gay liberation leaders
adopted respectability politics, and as vocal lesbian feminists denounced
trans femininities, Rivera was repeatedly ejected from movements for her
transgressive self-expression and confrontational style, though she
recounted pridefully that she was able to bring her full “drag queen” self
to Young Lords protests, and she spoke, too, of validation from Black
Panther leader Huey Newton.2 If the queer movement—and the public
more generally—now embrace Rivera in her complexity, glorifying her
angry rebellion against injustice at the intersections of many oppressions,
it bears remembering that the conventions of polite discourse have led

1
Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 107–8,
our emphasis.
2
Feinberg, Trans Liberation, 109; and Jesse Gan, “‘Still at the Back of the Bus’: Silvia
Rivera’s Struggle,” Centro Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 124–39.
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activists, past and present, to disavow similarly intense and ferocious

figures in progressive social movements and on campus.
Reflecting back on the place of outrage in the Stonewall rebellion can
speak to our times and our workplaces, recognizing how some of the most
oppressed and abused minority citizens effectively claimed their right to
a queered anger, uninhibited by any quest to gain authorities’ approval.
Stonewall participants wielded appropriately theatrical “weapons”—for
example, coins thrown toward police—to illustrate their rage. Their affect
was legible as anger, to be sure, but it was simultaneously a performance,
celebration, and catharsis, an embrace of what the straight world would
surely view as excess. The ebullience and irreverence were an effective
interruption of the status quo precisely because they were expressed
through unapologetic collective action. More than simply camp, the
activists exhibited what José Esteban Muñoz refers to as the “artist’s
guerrilla style, a style that functions as a ground-level cultural terrorism
that fiercely skewers both straight culture and reactionary components of
gay culture.”3 It mattered, too, that the events were situated in a historical
backdrop of youth rebellion, antiwar resistance, the civil rights and Black
Power movements, and other liberation struggles that mobilized
marginalized communities of all kinds.
At first glance, the streets of Greenwich Village in the summer of 1969
bear minimal resemblance to universities today. But we might ask,
“Whose campus?” in the same spirit as Stonewall participants questioned,
“Whose streets?” while resisting regimes of control. Joining forces, a
coalition of predominantly poor and working-class Black and Puerto
Rican folks “turned loose all the anger” against “gay oppression, police
brutality, societal contempt,” as Merle Woo put it. Having herself been
ejected from academia, Woo resonated with Stonewall’s revolutionary
fervor. Writing forty years later, she observed how “the undesirables
fought back for being outsiders, for being treated like dogs. They
challenged sex-role stereotyping, racism, and class bigotry. They
challenged the dysfunctional monogamous nuclear family, its patriarchal

3
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 102.
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Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

values, oppression of women and children, and sermons that sex is for
procreation only.”4 Such a wide-ranging revolt against power was not
simply contesting bar raids and police corruption; it was also a connect-
the-dots moment of shared fury against external forces and internalized
inhibitions that constrained both queer joy and queer fury.
Offering a potent contrast with the normative portrait of anger as
violent aggression, the threat of dramatic rage may be anger’s queerest
manifestation. Anger that is uncoupled from, or simply more loosely
linked to, actual or implicit threats to others’ well-being can be productive
of knowledge and also disarmingly confusing. Savviness about
mobilizing one’s anger—and recognizing it as distinctive from the anger
of abusers, homophobes, sexists, and racists—has been critical to activists’
refinement of oppositional knowledge and social transformation
strategies. As Audre Lorde urged in the early 1980s, “We cannot allow
our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less
than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about
the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest
assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us.”5
Punching-up anger of this sort targets systemic inequality and
demands institutional accountability. Further, queer outrage foregrounds
those aspects of identities with shame attached to them, for example, a
trans woman’s embrace of over-the-top femininity or a queer person’s
affectionate adoption of a “pervert” identity. In the spirit of the latter
example, a 1970s-era protester in Houston, objecting to homophobic
police violence, held a placard announcing, “If you think gays are
revolting . . . We are!”6 Shame and disgust can be a darkly humorous
source of reclaimed power for the reviled; given that this form of
expression is hardly well tolerated on campuses or in classrooms,

4
Merle Woo, “Stonewall Was a Riot—Now We Need a Revolution,” in Smash the
Church! Smash the State! Forty Years of Gay Liberation, ed. Tommi Avicoli Mecca (San
Francisco: City Lights, 2009), 283.
5
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1981): 8.
6
Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown, We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in
the History of Queer Liberation (New York: Ten Speed, 2019), 84.
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 8
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teaching about it affords a unique opportunity to interrogate

respectability politics.
A queerly reconceptualized anger, then, invites us to open our eyes to
the nuanced subjectivities motivating the acts of vulnerable, debased
others. It resists the rush to “unity” in many college campus diversity
discourses. Reckoning with the discomfiting anger of artist, writer, and
AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, for example, offers a lesson on
confrontation not associated with incipient violence toward others. As he
explained, “The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a
frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal
with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD
THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO
REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”7
Wojnarowicz’s anger is political to be sure, but it resides in the same
creative well that gave birth to his art. It is of a piece with his
consciousness of, and grief about, his impending death and the broader
devastation in gay communities of the 1980s and 1990s.
Further lessons about the power of queered anger can be explored in
pedagogy highlighting the activism of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power, founded in 1987, better known as ACT UP. As Michael Warner
explains, the organization “made possible a politics directed against
shame and normalization, and aiming at a complex mobilization of
people beyond sexual identity.”8 Hinging as the movement did on
shattering the myth of gay docility and refusing to plead for mere
tolerance and inclusion, activist artists and intellectuals embraced
stereotypes about queer identity, sometimes pushing them to darkly
comic campy limits, through choreographed displays of rage in expected
as well as “sacred” sites, from streets and city halls to churches and
shopping malls. Such dramatic transgressions—especially “die ins” with

7
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York:
Vintage, 1991), 113–14; emphasis in original.
8
Michael Warner, “Queer and Then: The End of Queer Theory?,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, January 1, 2012, https://www.chronicle.com/article/QueerThen-/130161/.
9 Queered Outrage
Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

people lying en masse in the streets—were unabashedly theatrical,

political, and grounded in searing, grieving consciousness of death.
As has been the case with so much activism before it, part of ACT UP’s
success depended on stripping away the veneer of contentment and
assimilability demanded of marginalized groups by the modern state. The
protests worked—sometimes exceedingly well—not just because they
made members of the dominant culture physically afraid (many believed
erroneously that HIV could be transmitted by casual contact), but even
more so because their accommodating masks were replaced by a
confrontational performative fury and sorrow that could be jarringly
disarming. Susan Stryker explains that “one strategy was simply to erupt
into visibility in the everyday spaces of city life through how one
dressed”; biker jackets, combat boots, political T-shirts, tattoos and facial
piercings, and Day-Glo stickers of Queer Nation screamed for attention.9
So, too, the bomb with a lit fuse that was the Lesbian Avengers logo.
Queer activism during this period was, quite literally, deadly serious, but
it was also grounded in performance and expressed through style and
affect. This was anger, but it was an anger with an aesthetic informed by
grief, shame, and death.
Articulating desire—sexual, political, and otherwise—has been an
important piece of a “gay agenda,” that hateful coinage of the Far Right
that militant queer activists dare to reclaim. Zoe Leonard’s provocation in
the early 1990s, “I want a dyke for president,” captures how activists of
the day rebelled against modest goals and moderately paced social
change. This determination reverberated in the emergent body of queer
theory, as Warner describes: “a broadening of minority politics to
question the framework of the sayable; attention to the hierarchies of
respectability that saturate the world; movement across overlapping but
widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a
series of margins that have no identity core; an oddly melancholy
utopianism; a speculative and prophetic stance outside politics—not to
mention an ability to do much of that—through the play of its own

9
Susan Stryker, “More Words about My ‘Words to Victor Frankenstein,’” GLQ 25, no. 1
(2017): 168.
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style.”10 By taking seriously intellectual, pedagogical, and artistic

expressions of anger and longing, whether playful and comic, or sad and
sober, queer thought challenges the dualisms separating intelligent,
creative, collegial professors and students from their rage and their
impatient demands for justice.
If we think of the power of rage and anger primarily in terms of
individual motivating emotions, as part of a personally redemptive
narrative, we will miss much of what is noteworthy about queer rage.
ACT UP is distinctive for its embrace of darkness and death, and a
collective righteous anger at the then-commonplace notion that gay
people, especially sexually “promiscuous” ones, quite simply, didn’t
deserve to live. This was a time, then, of queer people claiming their very
right to life against a backdrop of suffering and death resulting as much
from public indifference and hostility as from the virus. As Vito Russo put
it, surviving was a goal but so too was wanting “to be around to kick their
asses after it’s over, to say who’s to praise and who’s to blame. . . . Because
these are brave, courageous, beautiful people who are dying.”11 Another
way of explaining it is that “mourning became militancy within the
movement,” and militancy demanded accountability.12
Bold queer provocations tested the limits of conventional, civil
political discourse. An ACT UP protest in New York in 1990 at the
appearance of President George Bush captures the times. The protesters
carried coffins through the streets emblazoned with slogans like
“Republicans Kill Me,” “Killed by Bush and Helms,” “GOP = RIP,” “Fuck
You, George!,” and “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We Hate the Fucking
President!” And although deaths from AIDS lent tremendous gravitas to
this protest, the movement carried forward an almost giddy strand of gay
activism, inspired by radical feminist protests and the zaps of the early
days of gay liberation. In their highly teachable collection of queer
liberation images, Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown point out that

10
Warner, “Queer and Then.”
11
Quoted in Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and
Gay Equal Rights (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 294.
12
Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 9.
11 Queered Outrage
Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

the approach was “‘playful, mischievous, and dead serious’ allowing

‘good guys’ to publicly embarrass the bad guys.”13 Collectively the book’s
images and captions illustrate a queer ethical framework—a redefinition
of “good guys” and “bad guys,” lovers and haters, in stark opposition to
the conservative metric of so-called family values.
In order to fully appreciate the political savvy at work here, we must
question the dualism separating strong feelings like anger and grief from
intelligence, rationality, and the capacity to deliberate and make change.
After all, the emotional work of AIDS activists was at times “manifestly
calculated and instrumental,” as sociologist Deborah Gould observed.
The New York ACT UP chapter, at its first meeting, discussed converting
a Gay Pride parade to one for “Gay Rage.”14 Likewise, critics interrogated
“Gay Shame” in publications and gatherings, including a 2003 University
of Michigan conference, exploring the limits of pride as a unifying
principle for twenty-first-century gay politics and community. The
founding of the academic journal GLQ similarly originated as an academic
publishing outlet meant to “startle, surprise, upset” and “transform,” as
described by founder David Halperin.15
As queer and trans access to academe and other liberal institutions has
grown in recent decades, censure and self-censorship, too, persist when
“unity in diversity” is the order of the day. And, of course, successfully
avoiding the “angry” label can be an ongoing matter of life and death for
people of color in a violently white supremacist culture, one in which
murders of trans women of color are an epidemic. Yet our queered
outrage—expressed through our pedagogy and in our campus
involvement—remains a vital asset for contesting racist and transphobic
violence, sexual harassment, gerrymandering, and other threats to liberty
and democracy in society at large.

13
Riemer and Brown, We Are Everywhere, 125.
14
Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 221.
15
David M. Halperin, “The Fulfilled and Unfulfilled Promises of GLQ,” GLQ 25, no. 1
(2019): 8.
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Volume Twelve

Queer Anger as a Resource for Campuses and Classrooms

In campus cultures modeled on the notion of being a family, bourgeois
homonormativity offers a kind of alluring bargain, such that some
embrace the very norms built to exclude queer and trans distinctiveness
in order to achieve belonging. It’s especially problematic given that, as
Heather Love and other queer theorists insist, the very notion of
queerness should demand space for the abject, for example, “shyness,
ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood,
heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame.”16 In
the campus-as-family imaginary, queer and trans rebellion troubles the
familial harmony, not unlike the angsty teenagers and yapping dogs
needing correction from the adults in charge. It is an inopportune time on
our campuses, however, to obey and come to heel.
Although infrequently uttered aloud on college campuses, enduring
stereotypes about queer and trans people persist in oblique ways,
impugning our humanity and capacity to be civilized. The homophobic
notion of queerness as an identity that is primarily sexual, evil, and
miserable, with an agenda aiming to recruit, dupe, or force others into our
“lifestyle,” all suggest an unassimilability that requires surveillance,
control, and perhaps symbolic if not actual relegation to a crumbling
campus building’s musty basement. Periodic acknowledgment in
strategic plans, and tokenizing inclusion in diversity dialogues and in
general educational curricula, may superficially credit queer people and
the study of queer lives. But these gestures should not lure us into
complacency about progress.
Many queer and trans folks have, understandably, felt compelled to
translate our fury, shame, sorrow, and trepidation into lavender-hued
antics, ones that might enable us to secure a piece of the diversity pie.
Waving an apparently innocuous rainbow flag, and working to put our
neighbors, colleagues, and students at ease, is surely a radical act of
defiance for many. Similarly, popular college student “coming out” panel

16
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 146.
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Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

presentations, chock-full of stories of overcoming bigotry and finding

love and community, can be powerful interventions against isolation and
internalized stigma. Yet they can also operate as happy entertainment and
anodyne educational fodder for the mainstream, whose members leave
with a self-satisfied sense that homophobia and heterosexism are in check.
They help tick the strategic-plan boxes for diversity, equity, and inclusion
at the expense of true transformation. We conclude our article, then, with
further reflections on the place of noncompliance and outrage in the
context of our campus lives, recognizing that the mismanagement crises
and crackdowns on campus speech and academic freedom in the COVID-
19 era are revealing the deeper roots of inequity and failed leadership.
Given the sharp values divide of our times, the impulse to
compromise and assimilate is worth resisting where feasible. Those on the
margins need and deserve the opportunity for an unapologetic
reclamation of the whole self, even in its apparent unacceptability, even
when it is raging or grief-stricken. Fortunately, the patriarchal version of
anger—the anger of terror and excuse-making—is not the only version
available to us. And whatever version of political rage we lean toward
must include an embrace of the supposedly negative emotions intrinsic to
a fully formed, authentically and existentially human subjectivity.
No matter its ethical justifications, artistic and academic work that
expresses anger and rage is likely to elicit persecution. Here, global
activists fighting to preserve gender studies in authoritarian states, and
historical troublemakers such as those discussed above, inspire us to
persist in our resistance. Adopting a queered anger with intention,
cognition, and thoughtfulness, rather than in utter opposition to these
qualities, we can tap into a nondualistic, mature, productive, and
attractive affect, avoiding the merely tantrum-like, destructive, and
repulsive anger of tyrants. As despotic forces gain traction across the
globe, the humanities are an essential part of challenging anti-intellectual
authoritarianism and cruelty. There is a need, an urgency even, to bring
our righteous anger to campus, to risk such conversations in our
classrooms and on campuses. Likewise, in “student-centered” university
discourses about “employability,” we cannot afford to drop our vigilance
in asserting the value and necessity of the liberal arts.
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 14
Volume Twelve

Cautiousness about expressing anger, of course, remains legitimate,

given academic conventions and a desire to obtain and maintain
employment in a shrinking job market. Being perceived as anything other
than a “reasonable, objective scholar,” a “likeable” instructor, a
“congenial” colleague, or even a properly socialized woman remains
risky. The social conditioning runs so deep that one wonders, Will strong
expression of “negative” affect wreck my reputation, if not my career?
Unfortunately, self-reflective honesty about what one’s own anger might
mean is made much more difficult by a university culture that
simplistically conflates faculty civility with politeness and docility. It has
perhaps never been more understandable for faculty members to feel that
we cannot afford to be honest, even with ourselves, about our own
difficult feelings and unruly emotions. We have good reason to fear being
punished by administrators or evaluated by students as “unfriendly” or
“too intense.”
During these volatile, dangerous times, we increasingly view anger as
a messenger providing clarity about what and who needs attention and
care. Feeling anger on our own behalf can cultivate healthy self-regard
and self-esteem, and anger toward systems for which we are not the
target—in our case, say, our undocumented students or Asian American
colleagues—enables empathy and compassion that bind us to other
sentient beings. Further, we can see that anger about the treatment of
animals, the natural world, and disregard for basic values such as truth-
telling is vitally necessary. Placing this ethos in our scholarship and
pedagogy—reconceptualizing anger rather than relying solely on the
patriarchal, abusive version—we can listen to it and learn from it rather
than feel controlled or shamed by it.
Embracing a queered version of anger prompts us to foreground in
our pedagogy and scholarship examples of courageous activism, the full
ferocity of which is too often obscured. Rather than depict queer radicals
as historical aberrations, or shy away from their insistent eruptions of
emotions, we might situate them among direct action and civil
disobedience luminaries past and present. We should also question the
march-of-progress views of social justice that are way too convenient to
match reality. We might be more vocal when the radical views of Dr.
15 Queered Outrage
Cathryn Bailey and Susan K. Freeman

Martin Luther King Jr., say, are bypassed in favor of his more conciliatory
rhetoric, words that find favor in signature quotes and graduation
speeches. Similarly, we can contest the dismissal of the anger-fueled
manifestos of US lesbian feminists of the 1970s, pausing a bit longer to
contemplate what was and is deemed ugly, offensive, and unworthy of
embrace.
Grounded in a more expansive notion of anger, we professors might
be more inclined to spend time exploring the complicated subjectivity of
some of the most outrageous activists, assigning manifestos, personal
narratives, and imaginative exercises.17 We might recruit our students’
unsanitized, subjective responses to them as well as sharing our own. We
can, perhaps, better face the full fierceness of our social justice histories as
we attend to our own roiling internal furies in the present. The
possibilities here are many, since these are not necessarily add-ons to our
current teaching practices but perhaps rather a reframing of current
content. For teachers who do not now include much in the way of memoir,
fiction, and film but rely, instead, on more research-based material, the
wilder, anger-fueled sources depicting queer rage may elicit deeper
reflections about mobilizing outrage in the service of justice.
Obviously, we must still be responsible teachers and colleagues,
availing ourselves of practical precautions, treating one another with
respect, and providing our students with mental health resources. But if
marginalized people have learned anything in recent years, it is that there
is no escape from this difficult reality, one that includes not just the anger
of newly empowered white supremacists but also a fury that lives within
us. The silencing of dissent with platitudes about politeness or civility
remains deeply worrisome, especially since it is those in power
themselves who usually get to define and enforce these terms. When “civil
discourse” shuts down unruly voices, it jeopardizes our access to
legitimate dissent and capacity to exercise academic freedom.

17
For ideas and resources, see Leila J. Rupp and Susan K. Freeman, eds., Understanding
and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, 2nd ed. (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017).
AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 16
Volume Twelve

Upon even minimal reflection, many see that civility ought not be
reduced to self-serving, finger-wagging calls to “be nice,” and that, in fact,
our convictions must often be expressed with fierceness, especially in the
face of trenchant stupidity or deadly injustice. Ideally, after all, norms
about civil discourse are meant to increase robust, substantive speech, not
to curtail it. And because the recent catastrophes and betrayals have
become political and social debacles of the highest order—devastating our
universities along with our nation—outspoken campus voices are more
necessary than ever. This is a matter of saving not just our jobs and our
departments but also the future of academic institutions altogether. As
has always been the case, those in positions of power may try to
selectively define and enforce “civility” when troublemakers appear,
when we speak in terms that evoke queerness and rage rather than
conformity and submission. The deployment of civility talk is a heavy-
handed and dangerous tactic, rooted in a facile, self-serving conception of
anger, and academics have a special responsibility not to fall for such
authoritarian tricks. After all, academic freedom means nothing at all if
vulnerable faculty can be cut from the herd or chased from the table the
moment the person controlling the mic or the Zoom mute button decides
they sound too angry.

Cathryn Bailey is a philosopher, professor of gender and women’s studies, and

president of the WMU-AAUP at Western Michigan University. Susan K.
Freeman is a queer historian and associate professor of gender and women’s
studies at Western Michigan University.