Oh, my dears, where even to begin? In what is becoming at least an annual tradition, the conversation in the academic blogosphere has turned once again to that “controversial” topic of the pseudonym. Things started out pleasantly enough, with the JWH roundtable (I linked to H’Ann’s post about it because you can’t access it without Project Muse) featuring Historiann, Tenured Radical, and the indefatigable typist Moose from Roxie’s World, and then with Historiann’s piece over at Common-Place. Undine posted her own response to the Common-Place piece. And then TR had a guest blogger, Katrina Gulliver, who got in on the act, arguing in favor of writing eponymously. And then Comrade PhysioProf, in the colorful way that we have come to expect from him, challenged Gulliver’s claims.
And then there are all the comments. It’s enough to make this pseudonymous blogger feel like she needs a good stiff drink.
As I wrote in a comment over at Undine’s, here’s my current take on my pseudonym (and if you want to know how I’ve thought about the pseudonym in the past, I produced a handy compendium a year and a half ago of a bunch of my posts on the matter):
1) I never wanted my blog to be about my field of specialization. I always conceived it as a “life of an academic” blog, and I always wanted it not to be something that I thought of as “work.”
2) At a certain point, I realized that I’ve been Dr. Crazy for so long that I’m pretty much stuck with it. People have a relationship with the pseudonymous me, and to take that away from them after nearly 7 years seems like it would do more harm than good.
3) I really resist the idea that every part of our intellectual life must translate into a line on a cv. I think that is unhealthy and unproductive.
A lot of people know who I am now, and it’s not terribly hard to figure out. I’m not terribly worried about anybody finding out who I am anymore, but I have tenure now and I’m at a very different place in my career than I was when I started blogging. For me, the pseudonym feels like a comfy sweater that I put on when I sit down at the computer. And it allows me to write about my life in ways that I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing under my professional name.
I don’t think that my pseudonym is, to quote Gulliver’s general thoughts about pseudonymity, “an egotistical pose,” nor do I think that it “serves to perpetuate the (irrational) fears in academia about the dangers of the newfangled interwebs.” I don’t write under a pseudonym in order to say whatever I want and then to have a “retreat path of deleting a pseudonymous blog, with plausible deniability.” That was never the point, and, quite frankly, too many people know who I am and I’ve been doing this for too long to make that any sort of a realistic option. I don’t think that I’m hurting the feminist cause by choosing to write under a pseudonym, nor do I think I’m somehow failing as an academic by doing so. At the end of the day, I think it’s possible to be a feminist and a public intellectual even as “Dr. Crazy.” In some ways, “Dr. Crazy” gives me much more authority and a much wider audience as I inhabit both of those identities. And maybe there are a slew of men posing as female academics on their pseudonymous blogs, but I’ve yet to encounter anybody who’s had the energy to play that particular game. It seems to me we have bigger fish to fry than that, if we want to talk about blogging discourses amongst academics.
It’s great that some people write under their professional names, and that others write under pseudonyms with their professional names attached. I’ve thought about doing both, but ultimately decided against it. Not for any deep, dark reason, but because after nearly 7 years, both I and my readers are attached to Dr. Crazy, and Dr. Crazy would change if I all of a sudden made an explicit link between that name and my professional name. But whatever works for you, I say. And sure, writing under one’s own professional name does allow for certain networking opportunities and a certain kind of visibility. If a person wants to use blogging in that way, more power to the person, I say.
Why don’t I want to use blogging that way? If it’s the wave of the future and all? Well, basically, it’s that I somehow managed to create professional networks for myself without doing it. I don’t need to. And, further, I have absolutely no interest in giving conference papers about blogging or in presenting myself as a blogger as a primary part of my professional identity. Not because there’s anything wrong with doing so, but because it would take pretty much all of the fun out of blogging for me.
Because here’s my dirty little secret: I blog for fun. Sure, it’s nerdy fun, but I like it. It’s relaxing. Enjoyable. Social. (Ok, the line from The Breakfast Club just popped into my head: “So it’s sorta social. Demented and sad, but social.”) I spend the majority of my time doing things that I report on my annual activity report and that end up as lines on my cv. I have no interest in turning something that I like doing into one more of those things.
We take ourselves so fucking seriously in this profession. And I suppose it’s fine if people want to take their blogging just as seriously as they take their other professional activities. But I’ll say this: I have no interest in writing that sort of blog, nor do I read very many blogs like that. So I’ll keep my pseudonym, thanks. It’s a hell of a lot more enjoyable for me than the alternative.
And yes, the dead horse I’m beating has its own pseudonym. You can call him Harry.
Thanks for the link. My apologies if I helped revive a dead horse!
In some ways, this debate becomes almost infinitely reductive because of the fact that we all play with different voices and different persona in our writing, depending on the genre and our goals. I would say that Historiann and Ann Little are about as closely linked as Dr. Crazy and [Your Name Here.] That is to say, they’re both personae we inhabit online, who are mostly our genuine selves but only selective parts of our RL identities. (I don’t know if you would agree or not, but that’s my sense.) So the fact that Historiann admits that she is the creation of Ann Little seems to be just a minor detail.
Readers of Dr. Crazy: forgive the solipsism here. I’m just using myself as an example.
My pseudonym feels like this:
Wow CPP, That was just a little drink in preparation for a fun sunday!. Beato you !
H’Ann – no need to apologize at all, though I did almost write “I blame Historiann” as the first sentence
I figured you’d get that I was kidding, but I wasn’t sure about everybody else! I think you’re right that our positions are really similar in relation to pseudonym and name – the only difference I see is that I started without linking my pseudonym to my name, and now I feel like it would change things if I did so explicitly. It’s sort of like how Mary Ann Evans keeps writing as George Eliot even after people found out who George Eliot was (though, obviously, I’m no George Eliot!).
CPP – And THAT my friend is the difference between the pseudonymous you and the pseudonymous me. However, you have exactly captured the way that I feel before a department meeting
thank you for reminding me of that Breakfast Club quote, which so well describes all of my social activities. . .
I blogged under a pseudonym a while back. I still miss that. Being the public me isn’t much fun for blogging: I’m not in it to just promote my academic self. And if I was, my department Twitter account fills that need just fine. So my blog (which is dormant due to technical difficulties) isn’t anything I’m eager to revive.
So don’t give up your pseudonym if you don’t want to do so. I like Dr. Crazy and I hope she stays around the blogosphere a good long time.
It’s interesting reading this kerfuffle because I feel like due to the career change, I’ve dropped right out of the academic blogosphere and a lot of this debate is irrelevant to me… although yeah, I think I used to have a lot more academic capital as New Kid than as Dr. [Real Name], and certainly, more people have read what New Kid has written than what [Real Name] has written!
I think one of the things that’s at play here is how difficult it is to distinguish “work” from “non-work” in academia. That is, like you, Dr. Crazy, I never wrote in any sustained way about my academic field (teaching, yes, teaching medieval history, sometimes, struggling with research in general, yes, but not actually about the subject of my research). But I wrote a lot about being an academic because I *was* an academic, and being an academic takes up a whole lot of one’s life. It’s not one of those jobs you leave at work when you get home. (Plus, being on the tenure-track is unlike almost any other kind of job.) So I think that there’s one kind of academic-life-blogging that is really life blogging, but because academia TAKES OVER your life, that kind of life blogging entails talking about academia quite a lot. And because it’s about academia, some readers assume it’s also professional blogging, and bring professional expectations to the experience. But such blogging is *not* a professional document.
Anyway. I completely agree that blogging, for me, is fun, and is *not* a representation of the professional me, and has to not be “work” or I won’t do it. I read very few “medieval” blogs when I was a medievalist, where medieval = ABOUT medieval history (rather than by a medievalist). Now, I don’t read very many “law” blogs, that are about law (I read a bunch of law student blogs. They have a totally different culture than the academic blogosphere involved here. I do read some law prof blogs, but mostly when they talk about law school).
The thing is, it’s totally totally totally fine to do those things (write about your academic field professionally). It’s just weird to me that people STILL seem to want to apply expectations/understandings about that kind of blogging to other kinds of blogging. Like, if you mention academia, that means there’s one set of rules you need to adhere to or something?
As for men writing pseudonymously as women: well, sure, it might happen. Yes, there’s a lot of brouhaha that arises when that happens and the author is unmasked (I seem to remember this happening sometime in the last 3-4 years.) But honestly? I don’t see the benefit in our culture for most men in writing as a woman. Unless, well, they like dismissal, mansplaining, and sexual harassment??
(I’d like to introduce Harry to my own dead pseudonymous horse. WHO’S THAT AT THE DOOR?? It’s SECRETARIAT!!!!)
(Sorry, had to throw that in there.)
As someone who blogs under my academic name and under a pseudonym, I see them as both different presentations of self- and neither fully give space to ‘me’ (I feel I should be quoting Judith Butler at this point). But, this is partly about the spaces I blog in.
So, I blog under my academic name on topics in my field, and so my blogging tends to be ‘serious’ and conversational formal. Now, I have developed that style, I find it difficult to subvert that and be funny or sarcastic or angry or whatever. It is always professional me- so in some ways is quite dull, if informative.
Then there is FA who likes to be sarcastic, has a bit of a shorter temper, and is more hardcore in her positioning than I am in my everyday life. Yet, she is also stuck in that I find it hard to make her vulnerable or to talk about her personal life- she maintains the hardcore politico front most of the time.
And, the reason that I think it is hard to subvert these personalities, is that the spaces that I write in have came to take a certain form, and to write differently in those forums would change the genre- and for whatever reason, I find that difficult to do.
My reason for blogging pseudonymously is quite simple: Students. It’s not that I’m writing anything that would make me cringe too horribly if my students were to read it–but I *know* students look us up online (dude, the other day, one of my advisees started describing pictures I posted on Facebook in August–and she’s not even one of my Facebook friends!), and it’s nice to have a space that they can’t access. Especially at a small college like mine, which is, moreover, in a small town, it’s easy to feel like you’re constantly under scrutiny, and I don’t want that to extend to my blogging (which is, as you say, Dr. C, really for fun and not a part of my job).
I genuinely do not understand why anyone else cares, at all, whether or not someone chooses to blog under his/her own name or not. Seriously. Have we not better things to think well of ourselves about?
heu mihi makes a really good point about how situational these decisions are: if I taught at a small college and/or in a very small town, I might have made a different decision about my nom de blog. A few students (mostly grad students) have told me they’ve found my blog, but that’s cool with me. (I never write about my students anyway, except for maybe a few very complimentary posts about them.) After all, it’s a blog, not a diary stuffed under my mattress.
heu mihi also writes, “Seriously. Have we not better things to think well of ourselves about?”
Obviously not: we’re BLOGGERS! (Kidding–mostly!)
Thank you again and again… and to all of you in the comments! Jliedl, I miss your pseudonymous self, even though we are RL friends — she was a different you. And New Kid, I love that your pseudonymity has let you keep the blog and keep it interesting in ways that eponymity might not — I think you are so right that there is a different sort of authority there, and you’ve managed to keep that throughout the transition.
And now I have to go and blog.
Trackback apparently not working… http://blogenspiel.blogspot.com/2011/02/look-its-time-to-beat-that-horse-again.html
[...] It’s the only way to resist that collapsing, which I see as a perversion of normality. New Kid on the Hallway, at Dr. Crazy’s place: I think one of the things that’s at play here is how difficult it is to distinguish “work” [...]
[...] discussion there, or check out Not of General Interest, Another Damned Medievalist, and Dr. Crazy for more excellent [...]
I thought Harry was a large white rabbit. Oh, right, that’s Harvey.
(In case you’re wondering why a new comment at this late date, I got here by following the links in Roxie’s recent post on pseudonymity, and just couldn’t resist; my father is great fan of Harvey’s, and it’s almost Father’s Day. I enjoyed the rest of the post, too, but especially the final line)