As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change. In my preferred version of the The Chair, McKay (a black woman going up for tenure) would have an affair with Kim (the Asian American chairwoman); this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc.
I did enjoy binge-watching all six half-hour episodes of The Chair on Saturday morning though. Throughout the intrigues familiar to faculty members (wrestling over invited guest lecturers, tenure review, asymmetrical faculty power, pressure to grow class enrollment etc.), it is two narrative threads which provide the necessary dramatic tension to tie the entire story together: 1) the romance between the chair, Kim, and Dobson, and relatedly, 2) Dobson’s mock Hitler salute during a lecture, which devolves into a social media fiasco, student protests, Kim’s attempts to navigate the controversy both as chair and as Dobson’s partner, and Dobson’s eventual firing. The multiple plot elements are satisfactorily complex and sympathetic—Kim’s struggles as a single parent of an adopted child Ju-Hee who experiences anxiety over cultural identity; Dobson’s depression and struggle over the recent death of his wife; and most of all, Kim’s seemingly futile attempts to make any headway as chair, constrained by the Dean, senior faculty members, and the force of social media. I heard once that chairing a department means that everyone wants something, nobody gets anything, and everyone hates you. Sounds about right.
I was happy to see women of color centered in The Chair. Kim’s and McKay’s struggles ring true to me as a scholar of color who works within the ambit of US academic discourse, though I am geographically located elsewhere. On the one hand, there is an emerging awareness that the work of people of color is critical to the next chapter in the development of many disciplines. On the other hand, people of color are assessed within the confines of institutions that have historically been dominated by white, male, cisheteronormative voices, necessitating a complex dance of pushing the envelope in a way that is ultimately addressed to those who wield institutional power. Thus a tenure track faculty member is likely, like McKay, to be forced at some point to propagate the discourse of a senior faculty member—McKay does this literally when she distributes Rentz’s lecture notes, though she confronts both Rentz and Kim on other occasions. The usually unseen labor of women, especially women of color, is brought to the forefront. McKay’s high enrollment section is combined with Rentz’s poorly attended one to “save” the latter; a large part of Kim’s struggle lies in the responsibility of caring for her daughter as a single mother.
There is some distance between women of color in The Chair and in reality, which should be noted: most single mothers are not tenured faculty, and black women faculty are disproportionately represented among adjunct instructors (as opposed to ladder faculty). Against this backdrop, McKay’s positionality as tenure track faculty requires some consideration. McKay’s success on the tenure track not only represents many black women's forefront research. Her success in the show also quietly suggests that The Chair is shaped by the romance and fantasy of tenure at an elite institution. There are of course some prominent women of color at elite institutions such as Yale, which prizes McKay in the show, but this is unrepresentative of the disproportionate number of adjunct women of color in academia. If McKay does join Yale, she is likely to join the ranks of multiple brilliant women of color in Ivy League universities who have been unfairly denied tenure. The show presents a positive image of McKay as the "cream of the crop," but this could be read in terms of the neoliberal narrative of competition and scarcity; this narrative is particularly insidious given that the show hides the reality of accumulation under racial/racist capitalism in US universities, built on the backs of adjunct women of color. On that note, where are any of the adjunct instructors in the show? 100% tenured professors is a Harvard fantasy (from where one of the show's writers Annie Wyman graduated with a PhD) that doesn't pan out even at Harvard. With a 100% tenured faculty, the neoliberal decimation of tenure is itself completely blotted out.
In centering women of color, The Chair makes an encouraging step towards inclusion. However, in the wake of hit shows such as Orange Is The New Black, Glee, and Tales of the City, I believe audience’s expectations have been raised. These hit shows, which also feature women of color, are notable for the significant presence of queer-LGBTQ themes, and other recent shows have also included important queer narrative threads (The Politician, Hollywood, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). I find it highly improbable that the English department faculty in The Chair is presented as 100% straight. In my preferred version of the show, Rentz would be a closeted gay man who finds liberation through McKay’s course “Sex and the Novel.” And McKay would have an affair with Kim; this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc. Dobson would be a single gay parent with a crush on David Duchovny.
As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change.
The Chair’s central plotline of faculty and student response to Dobson’s mock Hitler salute requires some concluding notes. It's clear that the show's portrayal of so-called "cancel culture" is written from the perspective of the professoriate rather than students. Firstly, for a show centered on the Holocaust, where are the Jewish characters? The Jewish students? Especially without their presence, without individual stories, the students may come across as a mob. Yet the show does strike a point about the discursive truncation of social media, including the selective editing of video (to show just Dobson’s mock Hitler salute, extracting it from the context of a lecture on facism/absurdism), which is precisely the same method used in fake news. Clearly, the student protests and fake news are not the Same, but they are both structured by the materialities of social media platforms. 1) Truncation: extended thoughts that require more than 140 characters to express are atomized and fall into the collective unconscious. 2) Research shows that posts that go viral tend to evoke strong affect, which means that social media-driven ethics is shaped by affect rather than actual ethical analysis; this is shown in the university's truncated disciplinary process, regardless of whether you agree with the outcome (Dobson was fired not because the ethics committee found his actions to be wrong, but because they wanted the student protests to end; as an outcome-directed, teleological rationale in an ethics-framework, this circular logic is itself fundamentally wrong). Ultimately, what I personally like most about the show is two things: 1) it’s centering of people of color (albeit in a somewhat unrepresentative, romanticized way), and 2) the mirror it positions in front of the structure of social media, asking pointed questions about the critical processes by which we come to decide issues of ethics and morality.
