Critiquing Co-Education, Celebrating the Killjoy

By Anya Tang ’22

Happy fiftieth year of co-education, Exeter. Black-and-white photos of femme-presenting people sitting at the table seem to be our way of celebrating the undoing of an archaic transgression: patriarchy is now a problem of the past! The future is female! 

The platitudes go on and on, but they point to one message—that co-education’s fiftieth anniversary celebrates how gender minorities have been empowered by the Academy. Yet, one thing I’ve consistently noticed in my discussions at the Academy, and in my own thinking, is how easy and comfortable it is to embrace this narrative of unconditional celebration. For me, it feels easy and good to say: co-education is a good thing that needs to be celebrated, and I can end the sentence there. 

I like it when the Academy posts about co-education. Clicking through the interactive timeline on their webpage to see each milestone in gender equality at this institution feels instinctively good for me. It makes me feel like things are getting better, and it suggests to me that things will continue to get better. Celebrating co-education and uplifting the hard work of past (and current) students and faculty intuitively makes sense to me. And that is my problem.

In my one-dimensional support of co-education, it becomes far too easy for me to forget the importance of critically analyzing these milestones, all of which frame Academy progress as glowing, positive and progressive. There is no discussion of how hard each individual had to fight for these milestones, no mention of the conditions female faculty experienced before the blippy mention of “Female Faculty Get Boost” in 1980 and no self-accountability for the backlash against crucial changes.

Harvard history professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich coined one of feminism’s most popular slogans, now emblazoned on posters and t-shirts across the nation: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” It takes struggle. But we miss that when we think about co-education—we de-emphasize the real hard work needed to make change happen. And when we ignore that struggle, it’s easy to unconditionally support and celebrate the Academy for “being inclusive,” rather than developing the capability to hold Exeter accountable for its shortcomings in gender-based inclusion. 

When we only celebrate our achievements and never question or identify how we managed to do it, our narratives about gender become reductionist and one-sided. It becomes far too easy to lean into the idea that when marginalized folks nicely ask people in positions of power to cede their space, the latter do so willingly. We reinforce the idea of respectability politics: that if we perform or fit ourselves into a predefined box and if we are meek enough and polite enough, that perhaps the patriarchy will bend ever so slightly to give some of us a centimeter of breathing space. 

By centering and conflating Exonians’ gendered struggles with the Academy’s actions and milestones, we de-center the ways in which inequities in gender persist and deepen across multiple axes of identity. Co-educational history becomes one-dimensional when the only history we see are narratives of well-behaved women.

This is not to say we are not allowed to be happy about progress. We can and should celebrate and uplift the labor and energy that we have put into feminism at Exeter. For us to continue that labor, however, we must be critical in our support of the Academy’s celebrations of co-education. 

I propose leaning into the “feminist killjoy,” a term developed by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. Ahmed calls for us to examine how our (valid) feelings of melancholy and anger disrupt the easy comfort of consuming things that make us happy, like co-education. We need to dig deep into our institutional complacency and continue to challenge it as those in the past have done for us. In killing joy, which is much less scary than it sounds, we create space for continued political possibility and exploration of the ways in which we can critique ourselves and others while still showing support and solidarity for feminism.

There is no three-step process or weeklong free trial in becoming a feminist killjoy. Nor is there any self-help book for instantly becoming a killjoy, though Ahmed has written extensively on the subject. And a bit of humility, here. It is highly unlikely that after reading this 929-word op-ed, we will be able to put down the newspaper and enter the rest of our lives ready and eager to kill joy: what does it even mean to be a killjoy, or to kill joy?

For me, a gender minority, it means to be critical in my support. Killing joy means that I interrogate the reasons for my celebration of co-education and the conditions that let us achieve co-education in the first place. It means leaning into the discomfort I feel when we challenge and call out narratives of “Harkness warriors” as rooted in racialized, cisheteronormative power structures that sway our perceptions of others. It means exposing the tension between the narrative that the Academy was some benign actor in gender equality and the lived truth of the feminists who came before us. 

We are allowed to be happy about progress: that is a feeling that we give ourselves. We are allowed to celebrate having a space to exist and learn in: we grant ourselves that right, and we continue to grant ourselves that ability to celebrate with each day we wake up and take up space. But the most crucial thing we must remember is that we are allowed to criticize and question the conditions that let us be here to begin with. We are allowed to be killjoys.