On a Personal Note
When I left my first job out of college, my boss’s boss told me something like, “One day you’ll understand what professionalism is.” I don’t think he meant it meanly, and in retrospect, I truly did not understand what professionalism was or why it might be important (although, to be fair, I was 22, and I had been working in an environment where someone once made fun of me for not wearing sweatpants to work). I eventually did get some sense of what it was — and to be clear, that word can mean a lot of different things, but the way that supervisor meant it, and the way I’ll be using it here, is to signify something like “proper workplace conduct.” I also learned more or less how to enact it. But with the exception of dressing up for the office, which is one of the major things about the Before Times that I miss, it’s often not my preferred mode. In fact, I think one of the reasons that I got along so well with one of my Ph.D advisors is that we wound up having a quite informal relationship. Our style was casual — we were on a first-name basis from before day one, and we primarily sent each other short emails with no greeting or signoff — and we lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same synagogue. He even played basketball on Tuesday nights with my then-boyfriend. It wasn’t just the lack of formality or entangled social worlds, though; he was also an emotionally supportive mentor. When I was going through a painful end of a serious relationship (a different guy, not the basketball ex-boyfriend1), he offered to drive down from the North Side of Chicago to Hyde Park, where I was living at the time, and have lunch with me. After that, part of our working relationship was that I could tell him if I was going through a difficult time.
Emotional vulnerability with your supervisor is pretty much the opposite of what people generally mean by “professionalism.” Crying in your office, for example, is not widely considered professional — and forget about crying in your boss’s office. The ideals of professionalism therefore often correspond pretty closely with how we as a culture tend to think men are supposed to express their emotions (i.e., as little as possible).2 In fact, as people have begun to point out in the last few years, professionalism is in part the unspoken rule that people in the office should act like they are not only men, but white, straight, and uncomplicatedly gendered men. (Though of course, if people present as female, their clothes should be feminine and attractive without ever reading as sexy.)3
The standards of what is too personal to be professional have also traditionally distinguished between what is “personal” and what is “professional” writing in the academy. For example, in the past, and maybe even by you right now, me publicly writing about how I relate to period jokes would be considered unprofessional. There’s been a move for a while, though, to collapse that distinction to some extent, and to incorporate embodied knowledge alongside intellectual analysis in serious writing. Unsurprisingly, this move has gone hand-in-hand with feminist, queer, and anti-racist lenses. A handful of favorite examples: The writing of Patricia J. Williams, which is an invigorating mix of legal theory, critical race theory, cultural analysis, and personal reflections on, among other things, being a law professor who is the great-great-granddaughter of a lawyer and a slave. More recently and closer to my field, there’s Mara Benjamin’s justly hyped 2018 book The Obligated Self, which looks at the Jewish concept of obligation through the lens of parenting, especially motherhood, incorporating Benjamin’s own experience of lesbian motherhood. And Sarah Zager, a friend of mine who is a philosopher, recently published this amazing essay about her experiences with early infertility and how it has impacted her own thinking about care ethics. This mode is also something I am beginning to explore with my graduate students. I assigned Williams, Benjamin, and one of my favorite genre (and gender) bending books, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, as part of an independent study over the summer with an MA advisee. Her master’s thesis will be a zine about self-identified women’s embodied experiences of egalitarian covenantal Judaism.
It’s clear that I see the problematization (ugh I’m sorry for using the worst academese, what do normal people say intead of that word?) of strict standards of “professionalism” in writing and in personal work relationships as an intersectional feminist move. But I also think it can only happen successfully when done from a feminist mindset — specifically, with a clear awareness of power structures and senstivity to those in a vulnerable position. In the worst-case scenario, an informal, emotionally intimate relationship with your male supervisor looks like confiding in him about your past trauma and then getting asked invasive and creepy questions about your sexual proclivities. I am incredibly fortunate that my advisor was thoughtful and careful about what being a good supervisor meant.4 He also has a strong feminist perspective, which is closely connected to his having left the Orthodox world. The first thing I remember him ever saying to me in person, on my first trip to Chicago to look for housing, was “I want to give you what [insert name of male Orthodox teacher] gave me, but without the emotional trauma.” After we met a few times at his house early on — I thought nothing of it; it was the middle of the day, neither of us lived near campus, I’d been there before, and I knew his kids — he told me he felt this was inappropriate and we should start meeting at a local cafe instead. It was a slightly awkward moment, but it was his responsibility to think about and maintain those boundaries, and knowing that he was doing that ultimately made our working relationship better.
I’ve tried to keep that relationship in mind as I think about how I want to interact with my own students. I don’t ever want my students to feel that they owe me anything outside of what is on the syllabus, so I try to be careful not to confide in them, to listen sympathetically but not join in when they complain about things at JTS, and not to be the one to initiate conversations about their personal lives. I probably don’t always get the balance quite right. Navigating the line between emotional openness and appropriate boundaries takes work, and like other forms of emotional labor, it’s work that women are much more likely to take on than men. It’s also not foolproof; maybe one of these posts is going to be TMI for somebody, which is more complicated than if I avoided writing this at all or somehow didn’t make it publicly available to my students and colleagues (hi, students and colleagues!). I like to think it’s worth it, though.
Speaking of personal writing from professionals, several of my friends have either started thinking about or actually started Substacks in the last few weeks, which makes me very happy. If you’re thinking about starting one, do it!!!! And if you are looking for more good content, you might like:
My friend Avigayil’s feminist Torah commentary. “The building of the Mishkan takes slowness. We build God’s sanctuary with repetitive, mundane action. The Sanctuary comes into being through careful daily labor.”
My friend Mordu’s thoughts about shaking up the study and practice of education. “We can more than afford to be just a little outrageous when it comes to ideas! There is a fear of fun, a fear or play, a fear of disorder.”
Oh, and if you liked this content but aren’t actually susbcribed to my Substack yet, you should do that!
My spouse, Phil, doesn’t appear in this story because we weren’t together when I was in grad school, but because the Jewish world is utterly ridiculous, my in-laws are good friends with this advisor’s parents.
OK this isn’t a TV post, but I just re-watched this episode for the billionth time so I can’t resist adding this gif of Andy Brennan from Twin Peaks:
The tweet in the first link is about presenter guidelines that were sent out before an upcoming conference on patristics (early Christianity stuff). People I follow got understandably mad about it, and that pretty much sums up my experience of Twitter.
I was also fortunate to have had a female advisor, whom this little essay is not about, but who was also a role model and an extremely supportive mentor, albeit in different ways.