Samantha Pinto
The Feminist Institutional
Trolley Problem
In my Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, I teach the infamous philosophical trolley problem. The problem presents a scenario in which a trolley operator must choose between two fatal outcomes: staying on the present track and killing five laborers in her path or switching tracks and killing one unwitting bystander. Fledgling philosophers assess the operator’s impossible choice, considering a series of variations on the number and/or identity of those on the tracks.
One of the originators of this applied ethics scenario, Phillipa Foot, used the trolley problem early on to think through abortion ethics. Apropos of critiques of feminist reliance on choice rather than justice-based models for reproductive rights, she rejected a bloodless concept of individual choice and instead sought to demonstrate how every “choice” has possibilities/affordances as well as consequences.
The trolley problem’s inescapably consequential stakes may be read as a figure for the institutional history and present conjuncture of women’s/gender/sexuality studies (WGSS), a field that originated in ethical critique and has continuously navigated new challenges and trade-offs. Its survival to this point has required and reflected its ability to make difficult, even existential choices — challenging its core tenets as it gained intellectual and institutional purchase. The trolley problem — the subject of many a political cartoon, meme, and a hilariously gory television sequence on The Good Place — presents a feminist ethics of “choice” that always has skin in the game. The trolley scenario also reminds us that feminism is always in motion. As I tell students on the first day of class, my thesis for the course is “feminism is about change.” The trolley problem crystallizes how feminism is a discipline based in the ethical value of examining gender formation across cultures but also one that places deep emphasis on the ethics of self-critique. Ethics is less a proper object of study than a method, an orientation. And maybe that can help us as feminist scholars see WGSS survive as its objects — programs, departments, centers, majors — come under attack and even disappear in their institutional forms.
From the start, the consolidation of women’s studies (now under various names) as an autonomous, interdisciplinary, academic formation presented ethical considerations. How do we navigate between the supposed divide between theory and practice? If we want a department, do we hire our own faculty or “borrow” and cross-list existing faculty and courses across disciplines? If we want a major or graduate program, do we require a central feminist theory course or institute a sequence that represents the proliferating proper objects of feminist studies: women of color, transnational, queer, and transgender feminisms, all with their own mandatory courses? Will we seek fancy matriculations and other markers of success at R1 universities, or will we admit and fund students from under-resourced backgrounds? Will we ask faculty and staff to sacrifice in the name of feminism, or do only what we are compensated for in an often underresourced unit? Do we choose to prioritize social efficacy or scholarly prestige? Do we seek to extend or deconstruct disciplinary expertise? How will we meet the letter of the university’s rules and also match feminism’s ethical imperatives to access?
We’ve watched centers turn to programs, which have fought to be departments in institutional spaces hostile to their aims, survival, and scholarship; we watched and participated in making our field credentialed, creating and upending our own norms, perhaps like no other discipline before us. We’ve never fully cast off the self-critique and meta-critique that grounded the field from the anthological corrections, to the queer studies proper object battles, to the name debates and TERF-wars of this era. But we have made choices: sacrifices, trade-offs, and (some argued in the heat of the moment) betrayals for institutional space and solvency. The institutional dance of affixing the discipline with moral and ethical, as well as intellectual, certainty has had to be in constant conversation with a field whose bread and butter is change in the form of self-critique.
Re-emphasizing self-critique as the core “value” and “values” of WGSS as a field of inquiry within the institution might feel like another kind of bargaining or betrayal at this moment. But it might also help us “let go,” in Jennifer Nash’s terms — not without fight and rage — of some of the fear of change as the field comes under attack. Change is what WGSS and feminism is uniquely suited for as a field. The trolley problem teases with its fixed positions, its zero-sum game of choice. But it’s an exercise about the ethics of process, not just “progress.” It’s about the impossibility of getting it fully right, of having no consequences, when you are living, making, being. It’s about laying bare, making transparent that all directions are fraught as we are making ethical paths. It’s that process that feminism should cling to and be proud of, rather than erase, for ideals of certainty. It’s that process of choosing hard paths — and of working out not just the utopic ideal but acknowledging the costs — that feminist theory as a discipline has devoted its intellectual life to.
It’s also why I devoted my professional life to feminism. I knew I wanted to be a professor when I walked into an Introduction to Women’s Studies course in my first year at a large public state institution. As I progressed in the major at a different large public state institution, I knew it was my path, not because I felt feminism was right but because I connected to the process of questioning not just the external world but the history of feminism questioning itself, constantly. I could never, would never get it right. But not — as critics of the field in the 1990s were wont to say — because feminism threw up its hands and declared radical moral relativism. Instead, it demanded attention to the ethical process and products of change, changing who to focus on as subjects, choosing and changing what classes grounded the major as it developed, shifting what it could and would include under its intellectual umbrella in thousands of anthologies, journals, faculty searches, masters theses, and certificate and PhD projects. WGSS constantly engaged with process and revision of itself as much as of society. If I wish that process-based ethical thinking was more transparently our writ, rather than the latest object of what we deemed always already right, that’s not a moral relativism but a pivot in identity: from saving the object that is institutional WGSS to remembering that feminism has untold forms and processes of ethical reckoning with a constant recognition of the costs.
As WGSS and our scholarship, faculty, students, and staff are gleefully routed under the current institutional trolley tracks, I am trying to think about the versions of academic feminism that can survive this devastation. I say this from the acute location of an institution where academic freedom, especially concerning open discussions of gender, sexuality, and race, is already severely and officially curtailed. How can I go on, how can the field go on — will it go on under attack and under many scholars’ exhaustion and sense of defeat from losing all that we’ve institutionally built?
The trolley problem and its adaptations across different branches of philosophy is a mechanism to shine light on how untangling ethical process is part of the intellectual and pedagogical underpinnings of every field and discipline. Feminism has rerouted the trolley problem, sometimes refused its very tenets, but it’s also a way to think about how the field has been able to, in the face of dire material realities and our own field’s missteps, think about the next step, and the consequences of that action, inside of our own discipline. This, I believe, is WGSS’s most enduring writ: not to promote the latest outcome of what we’ve deemed always already right, but to enact a kind of process-based, ethical thinking that outlives the forms and containers we’ve built and others have destroyed for our work in the institution.
We know that the institutional choices that are being made to place feminism on the sacrificed track are wrong, ethically. On campuses across the country, including my own, feminist curricula are being censored, suppressed, and actively destroyed; I will not be able to teach the Introduction to WGSS I developed again. Feminist scholars are not the agents of these choices, nor are they being made on our terms. Running over feminism’s institutional forms can’t erase the body of scholarship and the field formations that make its own forms of ethical pedagogical and intellectual experimentation crucial to what the university has been, is, and might become. From our imperiled position, we are nevertheless equipped to place the call from inside the house of the university and to use it as a form of ethical inquiry that questions, first and foremost, itself.
For me, and I imagine for many, this moment represents a crisis of faith in the project of higher education and feminism’s continued ethical relation to it. For me, it’s a moment of ethical pause as both a trolley operator who has helped to build the university system and as one whose professional body is on the tracks. I’m questioning my own continued place in and commitment to the university, as well as WGSS’s. This institutional version of WGSS as we now know it is changing — violently, devastatingly, unjustly — during this era. It has changed before as it came into more firm institutional life. I am trying to think through to the field’s next institutional act in the wake of these histories of formation and destruction, using WGSS’s key analytical mode of self-critique as my ethical guide.