Kyla Schuller is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, where she investigates the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and the life sciences in U.S. culture. She was an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, and she’s held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the UC Humanities Research Institute. Her essays appear in in academic journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, and GLQ as well as popular outlets including Slate, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Avidly.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Kimi Ceridon. She a freelance writer in Medford, Massachusetts. Her writing has been published in Bon Appetit, Dreamers, HerStry, For Women Who Roar, and Snapdragon. Her new endeavor for 2022 is launching a Grazing Board Business called Life Love Cheese.

KC: You first told me about your book The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism when we took an online pitching class through Catapult. I think it’s safe to say that your first book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century was very academic. How did your approach to The Trouble with White Women feel different?

KS: Biopolitics was dense and academic, and I hadn’t anticipated the life it has had outside of academia. That was fun. The book’s argument was based on years of archival research and historical work on the sex binary. The idea that “male” and “female” exist at discrete, totally opposite positions emerged from nineteenth-century race sciences, which insisted that only white people were specialized enough to have evolved to a state of absolute difference—anatomically, physiologically, mentally, and emotionally.

KC: Did this thinking come about because people doing the research at the time were white or did they explicitly say “only white people were binary because they were more refined than other races”?

KS: It’s the latter. It’s extremely explicit. The logic of the sex binary emerged partly because race science dominated American science during the nineteenth century. The research in Biopolitics was really important, but not widely known and people got excited about it. It got way more attention than I expected, which made me want to write a book to a wider—W-I-D-E-R—audience.

KC: That’s wider with a “D.” [laughs]

KS: [laughs] Yeah. I love to write. The process of writing Biopolitics evolved out of my dissertation. It was a 12-year project. I loved it, but I wondered if since I was putting in all this effort, could my work reach more people? I didn’t want these ideas to only be circulating within a sphere of people who read it as part of their job, whether their job is as a graduate student or as a working academic. I wanted to use this research to make a political intervention. And that’s when I thought, “Okay it’s time to write to a bigger audience and let my love of story and narrative as a reader shape the way that I want to develop as a writer.”

I wanted to tell The Trouble with White Women through story and scene. I read some books on how to do creative nonfiction. I knew I probably wasn’t doing a full creative nonfiction project because I have a lot of figures in this book—two in each chapter. It goes from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It wasn’t going to be a creative nonfiction where people think of it like reading a novel. Still, I wanted to borrow from creative nonfiction techniques. I didn’t want to tell it in a dry, academic way.

I wanted to write something that was more dynamic, with action and energy. I worked with my research assistant Leo Lovemore to make scene charts. I looked through these figures’ lives to find salient moments where they did something that enacted their politics. I chose a lot of writers—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray and many others—and I wanted to find moments where the decisions they made showed their political theory. More than just discourse analysis, I wanted to have scenes where they lived their ideology. We organized scene charts chronologically and looked for where their lives overlapped. We literally mapped these out in Excel charts. It showed me that white feminists and intersectional feminists were in tension hashing out the best way to approach abolition or birth control or civil rights. It was more interlocked than I’d thought. Going in, I suspected white feminism had silenced intersectional feminism, but I didn’t realize how much it came down to a key white feminist stealing the work of an intersectional feminist at her own moment. I kept seeing that through these scene charts.

KC: We could talk about writing craft all day. What books on creative nonfiction did you read?

KS: I started with just putting “creative nonfiction” into a search. I learned Lee Gutkind coined the term, so, I read You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. It taught me—well it’s a little embarrassing to admit this in this forum—but it taught me the basic mechanics, things like alternating scene and exposition. As an academic writer, I was trained to turn 500 sources into an argument, but not how to turn that argument into something somebody wants to read. [chuckles] Academic writing is a bureaucratic genre; it’s a kind of writing where it’s people’s job to read it.

One edited collection of essays called The Book of Literary Non-Fiction was helpful. The essay on history was useful. It talked about two kinds of things people love to read in histories. One is more details about something they know. I can fully relate to the pleasure of being proven right or having new data for your hobby horses. The other thing the book said people love is a surprising detail that makes them instantly want to tell somebody else about it. One of the surprising details for me in The Trouble with White Women was that Black, trans legal scholar Pauli Murray was typing anonymously for Betty Freidan even after she had multiple law degrees. That is how she was making a living.

KC: And what creative nonfiction writing classes did you take?

KS: I took one through Sackett Street Writers with Xeni Fragakis that was fantastic. She emphasized the importance of structuring a narrative with tension and how to link together events with tension framing instead of just additive framing. She showed a video with Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about their process for South Park. They always think about introducing the next scene needing with a “but” or a “therefore.” Using just “and” linking is pretty boring; it doesn’t go anywhere. It is a beautiful schematic way that helped me plot narrative and not just list events. It was really revelatory.

KC: I feel like I need to watch some South Park now.

KS: I took a class called “Essay Machine” with Catapult taught by Brian Gresko. That was great. We read so many excellent essays. I drafted the first version of chapter one about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Harper in that class. Then, I took a class at The Center for Fiction with T. Kira Madden.

KC: I took a conference workshop T Kira Madden. It was so good.

KS: Oh nice! The class had a lot of experimental fiction writers. It was challenging for me because I’m working on things like sequencing scene and exposition—that’s where I’m at—and they were all accomplished experimental writers.

KC: I love how you stretched yourself with classes in different genres. Mapping scenes feels like a fiction- and novel-writing technique. Is that where you picked it up?

KS: I think I picked it up just realizing I needed to have scenes. As I was trying to unlearn an academic way of writing, I realized I had to create different kinds of planning documents from the beginning. If I had an outline, I’d work in the frame of linear logic—what is my thesis, then what subpoints do I need to arrive there. I wanted to circumvent that process and give myself a blueprint that would go toward narrativizing argument. I have to say that I loved it! It unlocked something in my heart and brain that I had sequestered away. To write on the grounds of human feelings and interests and let a complex political analysis emerge out of the foibles of human life was deeply satisfying.

KC: I love that.

KS: I am hooked and I’m not going back.

KC: So, how does this experience affect your future writing?

KS: I don’t know that I will always write this way. I do want to do another narrative-style book next. I’d like to write a book called Sex Is Not Real: The Racist History of the Male-Female Binary. It’d be a general audience version of some of The Biopolitics of Feeling argument. The research would be looking at a larger colonial context than I did with Biopolitics. That said, I plan to take a year-long nap before I start that. I loved pairing two figures in each chapter for The Trouble with White Women. I felt a deep writerly pleasure in the way the structure of the book ended up enacting the argument that there have been two kinds of feminism in tension, and one has tried to further marginalize the other. I could see that happen chapter by chapter.

In my initial proposal for The Trouble with White Women, my focus was going to be on white feminist politics. I thought I’d spend only twenty percent of a chapter on an intersectional feminist alternative that existed at the same time. I was shopping the book proposal around, I had meetings with seven editors and every single one said “Make this 50-50. That is what’s new about your book.” I started doing the research and I was stunned at how much these forms of feminism emerged interlocked. I was very grateful for that advice from editors.

KC: So, how did you choose your women in tension?

KS: That comes from doing this research as a scholar for almost 20 years. My specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century race and gender politics has been understanding the dominant canonical writers and thinkers and also the multi-ethnic, more marginalized literature and culture. I was aware of figures like Zitkála-Šá. Frances Harper is huge in nineteenth-century American literature, but Dr. Dorothy Ferebee is one of the least known people in this book. She had a much more holistic view of reproductive freedom than Margaret Sanger. I came across Dr. Ferebee because I spent two weeks in the Planned Parenthood archives looking at Sanger’s project to bring birth control to southern Black women. I saw how often Dorothy Ferebee was an advisor, pushing back on white maternalism.

KC: I feel like The Trouble with White Women went from Duke blog post to published book quickly.

KS: It was even faster than that. Biopolitics came out in January of 2018 and The Nation asked me for an interview. A couple of hours after the interview was posted that November, I got an email from an agent. He said, “I’d love to meet. Do you have a project you’re working on?” But I was in a period of extreme illness, which is a big part of my writing story. I have severe and chronic Lyme. Even in a good period, I have limited neurological capacity, so I often must decide if I am going for a short walk or writing a page. Lyme is another reason I want to write for a general audience. Because of a serious disability, writing is one of the ways I can engage with the world.

So, this agent emailed me, but I was on medical leave and housebound. I couldn’t write or read for five months. I told him, “Yes, I would love to meet with you, but I just can’t yet.” When I started getting better in April of 2019, I thought, “I really do want to write a trade book.” I had no idea what to write. I was afraid. I didn’t know if I could do it. So, I gave myself a mantra. I said to myself five times a day, “I give myself permission to want a bigger writing career.” I woke up one morning and my first thought was, “I am going to write a history of white feminism.” I knew it was the right thing to do and I didn’t question it. Within four months the book proposal was sold. In two years, the book was done and on its way to coming out.

KC: Amid a debilitating disease, you used this mantra, took classes, researched creative nonfiction, and wrote the book. I’m blown away. We’ll get back to the topic of Lyme disease, but I want to talk a bit more about the book first. As someone who wouldn’t pick up an academic analysis of these topics, I appreciate that the book pulled me into the history of feminism in an engaging way. The end of the chapter on Zitkála-Šá crystalized how intersectional feminists have been erased. Can you talk about how the erasure of feminism’s counter-history intersects with the goals of writing this book?

KS: When I woke up thinking I wanted to write a history of white feminism, I knew the first thing of the project was going to be figuring out “What exactly is white feminism?” In the media, the definition I most often encounter is a version of “white feminism is a feminism that ignores women of color, poor women, trans-women, et cetera.” As a researcher, I knew that the projects of whiteness are not just committing sins of omission; white supremacist structures further exploit more marginalized folks. I wanted to see what that meant in the history of feminism. I was drawn to Alice Fletcher and Zitkála-Ša. Fletcher was a famous scientist and academic in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. In addition to being an anthropologist who studied Indigenous groups in the U.S., she was also the person most responsible for the Dawes Act which dispossessed Indigenous people of 90% of their land. On top of that, she played a key role in the off-reservation boarding school movement. She was the kind of figure I was looking for—a white woman who wanted to assimilate Indigenous people into U.S. culture. She wasn’t forgetting Indigenous women. She understood her role as saving the so-called dependent races, saying, “I am their mother. They are my children. They look to me for protection and care.” That is the power dynamic I saw in white feminism over and over. Meanwhile, there is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous writer who was published in Harper’s and The Atlantic. She wrote gorgeous stories about what it meant to be forcibly assimilated into boarding schools and have her culture stripped away. She also became an accomplished violinist. Yet she had an ambivalent relationship with the skills she learned in boarding school. That is a story of tension and nuance; it’s not an easy story of heroes, villains, and victims.

KC: It was interesting how you showed the flaws of these women while still showing the tension between the history and the counter-history of feminism.

KS: That’s good to hear. That was not easy. Being faithful to the material meant that I had to complicate the story. My editor taught me something helpful about unfurling evidence and analysis. When I’d get into dense material, I sometimes wrote in a more academic way—the opening line of a section would be something like, “This is what we should understand.” Then, I would provide evidence. My editor told me I should flip that structure. Present the evidence first—the dialog, the setting, the environment. Let the reader feel the tension themselves before interpreting it.

KC: Getting back to the topic of Lyme disease. I know you had a debilitating episode that disrupted the launch of The Trouble with White Women. It felt like your book was out there but you couldn’t be out there with it, celebrating and promoting. How has Lyme affected you as a writer and an academic?

KS: Well, Lyme is multiple things. One tick carries a lot of infections, so if you’re pretty sick with Lyme, you likely have Lyme plus all these other infections at the same time. I got four or five infections with the tick bite. Once my immune system crashes, it opens the door to all kinds of retroviruses and other infections like Candida and parasites. So, when I say Lyme, I am referring to the fact I’ve had 13 chronic infections since 2012 that have waxed and waned. When Lyme is active, I am completely nonfunctional. When I first got sick, I couldn’t even finish sentences. The tick-borne illness causes significant brain inflammation, and my capacities are just gone. When I get a little better, I start being more functional, but my word recall is not great and my anxiety response is out of scale of the actual stimulus. I’ve had crying meltdowns when my tea kettle went off at the same time my toaster oven dings. I’m like “What do I do? These things are happening at once!” It’s an extreme anxiety response. When the Lyme tapers down, and my brain is no longer so inflamed, I can have sequential thoughts. I may have really limited physical mobility, but my brain still wants to do stuff. I can write.

KC: Most events around your book launch have been virtual. Has that enabled you to participate more in some way?

KS: The first five weeks, I had to cancel everything. I was so ill that I couldn’t walk from one room to another. Now, I am in the recovery stage, but I could not be doing bookstore events or in-person interviews. So I am benefiting. Many people with disabilities have had the experience during the pandemic where things are suddenly accessible to us that weren’t before.

KC: You wrote about your experience with Lyme disease in an essay called “Losing Paradise” in The Rumpus. Are there also parallels with Lyme, COVID, and climate change?

KS: I’m glad you read the “Losing Paradise” essay! It’s really important to me. It’s about that period when I was housebound while the town next to my hometown in northern California burned down. Lyme disease is called the first epidemic of climate change because warmer winters and chopped-up forests have led to the proliferation of tick-borne illnesses. Pulling my body out of this dysfunctional pattern is my number one priority right now and some of what makes it possible is the stuff that happens in the energy plane. Speaking into being “I am healthy,” “I am strong.” It’s helped me see ways I can support myself beyond health. Such as realizing I wanted to write a general audience book and I was afraid. I did that work on the energy plane and gave myself permission to do something I was afraid of. It precipitated an immediate and dramatic resolve. Overall, I’m genuinely grateful for the lessons that Lyme has taught me and what it’s helping me accomplish in other parts of my life.

It felt like a real insight to me. That question of “what is it that we want” can be a hard question. I was often expecting things I want to arrive wrapped in a package on a silver platter. And I would be like “Why is it so hard to get what I want?” I realized it’s because our desires don’t often materialize to us in appealing forms. They materialize in ugly, scary forms like jealousy, fear, anger. When I realized I needed to take those feelings seriously, that’s when I had the courage to say, “Oh, I want to be a writer.”

KC: I love the motivation I am getting out of this. Before we wrap up, anything else you want to bring up?

KS: In doing the research for The Trouble with White Women, I hugely benefited from the work Black feminist historians have been doing for decades. And in many ways, I was able to write this book so quickly because it wasn’t a research project in the way some academic research projects can be because people like… I used to have a really great memory and when I’m tired my name recall goes… but Frances Smith Foster is who I am thinking of. She spent a decade uncovering Frances Harper’s four novels that had been completely forgotten. Or the work the scholars had done in finding Zitkála-Šá’s publication. Or the work of my friend and colleague Brittney Cooper in uncovering and interpreting Pauli Murray’s history. It’s not that I was discovering the counter-history. I was assembling it and synthesizing it and using it to dislodge a canonical feminist history and offering new interpretations of the tensions within feminism. So, my process was very indebted to the work of Black feminist historians like Paula Giddings, Nell Irvin Painter, and Angela Davis who have been telling us the history of feminism for decades even when that wasn’t always landing.

KC: And finally, what is your favorite quote from your favorite non-man author?

KS: It’s by Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass:

We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter, and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.