Helis Sikk

What’s So Bad About Being Disappointed?

In 2026, it is impossible to consider my position at Brown University without the prism of December 13, 2025, when a gunman opened fire in a large lecture hall, killing two students, injuring nine others, and leaving the campus changed. Words such as “resilience,” “community,” “care,” and “hope” have been adopted by the corporate university to ensure a smooth transition back to “business as usual.” The emergence of this overused and commodified language in this tragic context has unsettled me. Do not get me wrong. I know there is no way to do this right, no ideal way to return to the classroom after such extreme violence. The ready availability of this language has, however, highlighted for me a broader predicament concerning how we describe what happens in these spaces in which we teach, research, and, to varying extents, live. As Lucia Hulsether insightfully stated in the 2015 special issue of Feminist Formations, “There is no inherent paradox between feminist critique and the persistence of women’s studies within the neoliberal corporate university.”¹ And so, I wonder especially at this time when there will be no neat resolutions, how to find words for critique and resistance in gender studies when our very words have been commodified and drained empty of meaning by the institution. I do not think that a solution can be found in new metaphors to describe the conditions of gender studies in academia. Metaphors such as “factory” are abstractions at best, and they lean towards a polemic at worst, distracting from the uniquely specific conditions of present-day academia. The university is not a factory. Metaphors are charismatic, relying on the affective to catch attention, but they run against a wall sooner or later when we move to the granular.

The Pembroke Center, where I currently teach, is largely protected by the endowment that sustains it from the cuts to programs we see to gender studies programs across the country. Importantly, as a private institution, Brown is not governed by a board appointed by a governor, and we do not rely on state funds the way public institutions do. The Center was founded as a hub for critique and, unlike most gender studies programs, is not focused on community engagement and/or activism. At the same time, we have no tenure lines. I’m an assistant teaching professor with several administrative responsibilities, which makes me a contract worker, up for renewal every three years. Our one endowed full professorship position, the Nancy Duke Lewis Chair, is not, strictly speaking, a line in gender and sexuality studies, as it has no teaching responsibilities at the Center.

The Pembroke Center is home to Brown’s undergraduate concentration in gender and sexuality studies, and we have a graduate certificate program. Our academic sovereignty is weak, but we have stronger structural integrity than most gender studies programs. All these factors protect the Center from being the target of right-wing attention and allow us to continue to do the kind of work in gender and sexuality studies that does not have to pander to the Laura Loomers of the current media landscape. While having a certain level of security in a private university at a Center with its own endowment can create an odd cognitive dissonance with what is happening in the rest of the country, we are still affected by the overall climate of uncertainty. I firmly believe that we need all kinds of feminist work, as Sara Ahmed wrote in Living a Feminist Life: “Feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. Feminism needs to be everywhere.”² Ahmed is arguing for feminism in our everyday life, which is important, but we should not forget the salience of feminism in critical thinking. I want to reflect here on my current position and on my previous experiences at very different institutions to offer my own perspectives on how we live in a time of continuous precarity and disappointment;³ I ultimately aim, however, to also think through the possibility of hope.⁴ Following Marcus and Muñoz’s thinking, I believe that things never line up. I suggest we purposely identify places where things do not line up in gender studies and attempt to navigate this misalignment with clear strategy and care. Conversely, we should be suspicious of places in academia where things do line up. In other words, to follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s thinking, there is a time for repair and a time to be paranoid.⁵ In 2026, it is time for both.

Discussions around the precarity of academia tend to focus solely on the conditions of faculty. We love to tell the story of the virtuous faculty against the evil administrators, but in doing so, we may not adequately engage with the fact that not all faculty and administrative positions are created equal. It is wrong to assume that only faculty do feminist work. Staff do feminist work as well. And while it is certainly true that not all who get categorized as staff are feminists, I’d also say that not all gender studies faculty are feminists either. I know for certain that I would not be able to do gender studies without the people in staff positions with whom I work on a daily basis. It is also important to note that the line between faculty and staff gets blurry at times: some who are designated as staff also teach and some faculty take on administrative roles. Yes, the corporate university divides and conquers the best it can — for instance, there are separate meetings for faculty and staff — but we need to be aware of how faculty can contribute to these divisions by misrecognizing the kinds of complexities I am noting here.

People in staff positions are often the first people in line between the ones who govern and the governed: they are the first to contact and welcome visitors, the ones who reimburse our travel expenses, prepare paperwork for guest speakers, book rooms for lectures and hotels for guests, and order food for events. Indeed, the list of important tasks they take responsibility for is endless. What I would like to emphasize in particular is that staff take on the emotional labor of hearing people out even as some faculty treat individual members like their personal servants. Staff who do that kind of labor do not have the flexibility of a faculty schedule; they work from 9 to 5 and are appallingly underpaid. At private institutions, such as Brown University, what people get paid is not public, unlike at state institutions such as the University of South Florida, where I previously worked. Brown is moving toward eliminating pay grades, which will remove the little transparency that currently exists when it comes to compensation. To get any sense of how well someone is compensated, you can look at the size of their office or the color of the desk in their office. White desks are the lowest, then light brown, and finally dark wood for the highest paid. I wish this was a joke, but it is not. Staff consolidation in the last few years across smaller departments means there is even less job security in an already exploitative workplace environment where some barely make a living wage at an elite institution. To navigate disparity, strategic solidarity between faculty, who are allowed some power of governance, and staff, who are allowed none, is important to consider. This is one significant place for repair where things do not line up, and it is not by accident.

An example of where things at first blush might seem to line up is the relationship between the university and the “community.” After all, academic institutions place rhetorical emphasis on nurturing this connection, and they fund programs intended to foster it — programs that provide funding to those faculty who eagerly support them. Gender studies faculty are often encouraged to be activist-scholars and engage with “the community” in their research. Having had one-year visiting positions in small towns in Indiana and Ohio, I find this troubling. To expect someone who is a newcomer to the town, and perhaps relatively new to the country, to seamlessly get involved in “the community” for barely nine months seems to me irresponsible. In other words, this is where things are forcibly lined up by the institution, but it is something we should be paranoid about. Doing feminist work in and between academia and “the community” requires time — and a lot of it. Time is something that the neoliberal university does not want to give us. Even tenure-track faculty should be rightfully paranoid here because academia is inherently extractive. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argued in “R-Words: Refusing Research,” not all knowledge should be accessible to academia.⁶ Refusal means that terms are set by the “researched” and not the institution, which rarely happens. It is important to ask: who is truly benefiting when things seemingly line up and deadlines are set by the institution? The relationship between activist-scholars and “community” is often too fraught to be a place to seek solidarity at this time.

Given what I have described, it may seem naive to say that I am not willing to let go of hope. I am aware that holding onto hope means we will be disappointed: disappointed when “hope” gets used and misused by the corporate university; disappointed when we try our best to find coalition in places where things do not line up and fail, or they line up too readily and are mere window dressing for empty projects; disappointed when things line up only to have the institution cut the funding if we do not meet its arbitrary requirements. This does not mean that we end up with nothing. While we may not gain community and connection, and sometimes we lose friends and collaborators, we do gain solidarity in a shared feeling of disappointment.⁷ And that is not nothing.

In his essay, “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,” José Esteban Muñoz notes that hope “must be disappointed.”⁸ He writes,

It’s difficult to count on hope in the face of the heartbreak that often shadows the incommensurable. After all, we want things to line up, to be true to each other…. If there is a tentative way out of this conundrum, we must see equivalence for what it is and challenge its mandate; this is not to say that everything equivalent goes, but to say that the hopeful, incommensurable project of being-with is a complex and flawed one that is nonetheless utterly necessary.⁹

Maybe it is being born into occupation and living next to Russia for the first twenty-one years of my life that explains why Muñoz’s words resonate with me, but I’m used to being always disappointed while maintaining hope. I never saw my family lose hope that we would be free, even after almost fifty years of Soviet occupation. My mother was born in 1954, one year after Stalin died. She did not know any other kind of governance but occupation until 1991 when Estonia regained its independence. There was no knowing when the occupation would end. There was always personal and political disappointment in the face of hope. How my mother went on with her life under the communist regime as a single parent and after the fall of the Soviet Union echoes how Sara Marcus wrote about the temporality of disappointment:

To keep longing for a lost future is evidence of survival. The loss may have undone a dream of a more just and peaceful existence, but the dreamer nonetheless goes on existing and aspiring. There is more at stake than mere survival, though, because disappointment shapes practices and forms that extend desire’s reach beyond the inner arena or immediate scene of loss.¹⁰

Loss and disappointment did not mean that my mother gave up being a mother or stopped being an Estonian. She kept her culture and her values, sustained by stories from older relatives about the traditions and ways of being one with nature (from growing your own vegetables to talking to crows); by music, poetry, and theater. In other words, it may be from her that I first learned of soft ways of resistance that count for more than “mere survival.” I learned that it is not so bad being disappointed, especially when disappointment abounds to an extent that it becomes absurd, something that is almost impossible to make sense of, like death or extreme violence. It is not so bad being disappointed, because sharing disappointment is what connects us to people who share our concerns and values.