Academia and the politics of (il)legibility

I write this as my first post under my own name as part of Beauty in Decoherence. In de-anonymizing myself and migrating my blog over from my prior platform, I find myself navigating like never before the politics of legibility in academia. Sure, having transitioned from atomic physics to physics education research, this move is somewhat politically safer, but it comes with significant risk nonetheless. More importantly, coming out as the author of this blog places me in a unique position with respect to navigating the academic institutional norms around legibility.

Simply put: academia rewards legibility – and specifically the neoliberal form of legibility that favors metrics, publications, and connections in high places over relationships, self-growth, and authenticity. In physics in particular, this looks like following academia’s answer to the white middle-class sequence of heteronormative milestones. The supposedly linear progression from physics undergraduate degree to Ph.D. to postdoc to junior faculty to tenure cannot help but draw comparison to the white heteronormative life sequence of getting a job, getting married, buying a house, having kids, and retiring to Florida. As a Ph.D. student, legibility for me looks like marketing myself to bolster my profile in pursuit of the ultimate goal of a tenure-track faculty position and the postdocs that will get me there. Anything oppositional or even orthogonal to this goal is seen as a waste of my time.

Constructing a website as an academic means performing academic legibility. It means talking about my research with minimal overt jargon but with just enough insider flair to bolster my positionality as a member of the physics community. It means prominently placing my CV, contact info, and publication list (not that it’s long!) so that a certain audience can “read” me and decipher my value to the physics community.

Physicists engage in legibility and prestige politics on a daily basis, even when doing so is detrimental to the field or their overall research. For instance, I have seen countless research hours wasted writing long-shot Nature papers only to necessitate major revisions to comply with Physical Review length guidelines after the paper is rejected by Nature. Both Nature and Physical Review are plenty-trustworthy journals within the physics community, so is it really worthwhile to expend the additional energy simply to gamble on placing a publication oriented toward a small faction of the scientific community within a journal with a somewhat higher impact factor? Wouldn’t the scientific community benefit more if that time was instead spent on improving the quality or quantity of the work in the first place? The examples are countless: We take on volunteer work just to build CV items (as if CV length alone is a good proxy for character or even productivity), insist on requiring debunked GRE scores for graduate admission in the name of “more data,” and occasionally even get busted for misrepresenting data or for plagiarism. Too many of us blindly spend our undergraduate careers inflating grades, our graduate careers finagling over first-author status, and our postdocs agonizing over citation counts, only to gain a coveted faculty position where 80% of what matters is securing ever-more-competitive grants.

Physics culture will never be transformed simply by improving the quality of metrics if we don’t look beyond the culture of legibility itself. Why should the merit of a physicist be restricted to grades, scientific publications, or any other capitalist metric? Does the core value of a physicist not lie in her innate curiosity, her desire to look up, see the night sky, and wonder how the laws of nature could produce such beauty? Is my former classmate in undergraduate any less valuable as a physicist because she chose to head to art school after completing her B.S. in physics?

Moreover, appealing to legibility politics will never uproot the capitalist power structures that lead to the diversity and equity problems we observe in physics today. Simply choosing different metrics to value the individual will simply reify white hegemony under the guise of “meritocracy,” even if representation otherwise modestly improves. Racialized capitalism functions by placing the value of an individual in their past and supposed future actions, then creating the conditions to make this prophecy self-fulfilling. True liberation can only come from eliminating the need to bolster one’s value at all, recognizing the value of the individual as an inherent property of her humanity rather than the tangible outcomes of her work. 

Toward a politics of illegibility?

Legibility politics is ultimately a zero-sum game when it comes to liberation within (and outside) physics. Altering the playing field to achieve some seemingly more equitable outcome will do little when the fundamental problem is that we’re playing the game at all. Affirmative action as traditionally practiced is an essential prophylactic in the short term, but is insufficient for converting diversity gains to freedom — at some level it still reifies the notion that merit can be quantified, and that inclusivity only demands tipping the scales a bit as if that is anywhere near a suitable remedy for past injustice.

I too spent much of my undergraduate engaged in legibility politics. As a newly-out trans woman in the physics department, my immediate need to get people to recognize my name and pronouns demanded that I focus on proving my worth as an individual within physics. The problem is that in doing so – coupled with the narrative of success against the odds engendered by my strong grades and research performance in the face of visible and rampant discrimination – I allowed myself to get rehabilitated as a sort of diversity token in physics. The success of a girl with a bunch of marginalized identities (who was, notably, white) could allow the department to take credit for my emerging from the department as a successful physicist in a way that reified concepts of merit, even when one of the first comments I got upon transitioning was the very anti-meritocratic “someday if you study hard enough you’ll be as smart as your [non-existent] twin brother!”

So if a politics of legibility only reifies hegemony, and a politics of invisibility certainly also only benefits the oppressor, what do I have left to assert my individuality? As I have begun working on this blog again after a hiatus, and rebranding myself in the process, I have started to envision the idea of an oppositional politics of illegibility rooted in queer theory – wherein I can make myself visible, not because of but in spite of the elements of my CV. How can I write about my research in a way that is informative but doesn’t toot my own horn? How can I make this website a space for my counter-CV, the aspects of my life (like being a proud lesbian cat mom) that most embody who I am but are seen as irrelevant when brought through the laboratory door? How can I define myself not so much by the knowledge created via my accomplishments but instead by the modicum of wisdom that comes from honestly facing my failures?

Perhaps these questions are the start of a much deeper conversation on destabilizing physics culture. For me in the moment, practicing a politics of illegibility begins with the unapologetic juxtaposition of my research and personal life on this site – placing my unpublished blog writing aside my published research rather than prioritizing one over the other. And against the advice of others, selecting my primary domain to be decoherence.me rather than josiemeyer.com (I own both) makes me illegible in its own way – to define myself not by the name on my publications but by an abstract term that embodies the thermodynamic destabilization of the very quantum technologies associated with my research. To force the reader in a little way to grapple with my politics lest my work otherwise be seen in an apolitical context. I have also opted to avoid paying attention to “hit counts” on this site and other metrics of spread, lest I allow the desire for search engine legibility to undermine my authenticity.

Incidentally, you may wonder why (despite being a strong voice for considering one’s positionality in physics spaces) I refuse to list my social identities in a conveniently-browsable location. The reason is that I see a different but related politics of legibility at work in some toxic activist spaces that I refuse to make myself legible to. Under the guise of a distorted interpretation of intersectionality theory, I used to espouse the practice of being as open as possible about my whole host of privileged and marginalized identities. There is still great benefit to be had by disclosing my own positionality, and if you read enough of my blog you’ll definitely see it. But in activist circles I have too often seen number of marginalized identities used as a dangerously-oversimplified heuristic for marginalization and even for wisdom. As a multiply-marginalized white woman, I can evoke a lot of sympathy in physics diversity spaces that want to avoid doing the much harder work of interrogating white empiricism. When reading my work, I don’t want that misguided sympathy to give me credibility. A politics of legibility would have me lean into my marginalized identities for the “activist cred” they give in certain counterspaces, while a politics of illegibility simply focused on the disturbing fact that I am a white colonizer on stolen land. I will never be your model physicist diversity token. I am not valuable because of what I can do for you, whether that’s publishing papers or bolstering your diversity statistics. I’m valuable because I’m human and because humanity is beautiful, nothing more, nothing less.