(No part of this re/inter/view discussion may be published elsewhere without written permission from victor j. vitanza and the individual posters.) --Full Copyright notice is at the end of each file.
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The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View with Jane Gallop, beginning January, 1998. The subject of conversation is/was Jane's Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment (Duke UP, 1997). |
********PRETEXT List (Spoon Collective)******** will hold its next "Re/Inter/View" with
and her book ==Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment== Duke UP.
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============================ "Sexual harassment is an issue in which feminists are usually thought to be on the plaintiff's side. But in 1993--amid considerable attention from the national academic community--Jane Gallop, a prominent feminist professor of literature, was accused of sexual harassment by two of her women graduate students. In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Gallop tells the story of how and why she was charged with sexual harassment and what resulted from the accusations. Weaving together memoir and theoretical reflections, Gallop uses her dramatic personal experience to offer a vivid analysis of current trends in sexual harassment policy and to pose difficult questions regarding teaching and sex, feminism and knowledge. Comparing "still new" feminism--as she first encountered it in the early 1970s--with the more established academic discipline that women's studies has become, Gallop makes a case for the intertwining of learning and pleasure. Refusing to acquiesce to an imperative of silence that surrounds such issues, Gallop acknowledges--and describes--her experiences with the eroticism of learning and teaching. She argues that antiharassment activism has turned away from the feminism that created it and suggests that accusations of harassment are taking aim at the inherent sexuality of professional and pedagogic activity rather than indicting discrimination based on gender--that antiharassment has been transformed into a sensationalist campaign against sexuality itself. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment offers a direct and challenging perspective on the complex and charged issues surrounding the intersection of politics, sexuality, feminism, and power. Gallop's story and her characteristically bold way of telling it will be compelling reading for anyone interested in these issues and particularly to anyone interested in the ways they pertain to the university. Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She is the author of numerous books, including Thinking Through the Body, The Daughter's Seduction, and Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory." --description taken from Duke UP Website
ISBN 0-8223-1918-7
Jane, thanks for agreeing to do the re/inter/view with us. I've reread your book again and something keeps irrepressibly re-presenting itself to me as a question that begs for an answer, so I will begin with that question. Let me at first, however, establish the context: ---The 'writing protocol' that you use in Feminist Accussed... is by now fairly well know, for it is used by feminists and people who are not particularly associated with feminist writing protocols or interests. You combine expressive discourse with expositions of arguments. Mostly you use expressive discourse. (I have nothing against either of these being used separately or used together; I use them extensively myself and mix them with attempts at literary or experimental forms of writing.) I think that expressive discourse can be written and taken to be a form of argumetation, say, as an extended form of arguing by way of *ethos*, which gets me to my next point: ---When re/reading your book, I read or hear two words over and over again. I don't mean to suggest that you use the words yourself in a repeated manner, but I mean I find myself saying the words in between the lines of your writing. The words are 'nostalgia' and 'naive'. (I think that you use the latter word just three times in the book.) What do I mean when I hear the word 'nostalgia' when reading your book? Put simply, I mean "1971," the date or point in time that you keep going back to and keep using as a frame of reference for 'reading' the events in your life from that point on to ... "the kiss." (("I thought I was back in 1971" [page 92].)) But actually in your retelling of a particular narrative, you are in 1991. What do I mean when I hear the word "naive." I mean precisely what the word means! And hence when I read you, I say, 'You have got to be kidding!, right?,' when you say something like ... I just don't understand why people are upset with "the kiss." (I am not referring only to the kiss, but all that is associated with it.) Okay, so this is what I have in mind with the two words. Now, when I put these two words together with your 'writing protocol' (expressive discourse and expositions of arguments), I get a little confused. (Hence, the earlier reference to kidding.) Moreover, when I put these two words together with all that you have written that I have read of yours--and I have read most of it all--I really get confused! In this light or darkness, my provisional conclusion has to be: Jane is kidding us! (To be sure, she knows that her pedgogical performances are unstable and are given to being volatile.) Jane, you are a powder keg, right? And you have got to know this more than any of us does. Or are you the last one to know? But my confusion centers around the idea that """"Jane is concerned with an experiment in writing that brings into collision a point of view of the 'nostalgic good olde days' of 'when I was a student at the birth of the second wave' and of an uncertain certain 'naivete' of not understanding why people don't understand my performances."""" But your performance has to be more complicated than merely the apparent collision between nostalgia and being (apparently) naive, right? I mean at the very end of the book you ... in a move from ethos to pathos and perhaps to bathos(?) ... you ask yourself again, 'am i being naive about people?' Jane, it is not very satisfying (at all) for me to ask you, in turn, _____Are you, Jane, being Naive? There has got to be more to all this then your being Naive. This cat does not meow! Nor does this dog hunt! I am confused. You have put me to the point/less of confusion. Which would be okay under most circumstances, but this book supposedly is a defense (apologia) for "the kiss." (Is Chekov near by? I don't see any disillusionment? Or am I supposed to be not only confused but disillusioned?) So Jane ... my question: _____What's going on in terms of point of view in your book? You like to experiment. Is your writing of this book an 'experiment' in some special sense of the word? (Of course, all writing along with everything else should be--I am given to saying--an experiment of putting at stake writing itself or putting at stake y/our relationship with the audience, right?) You start with reference to the tabloid-like title, but _____do you end with a tabloid-like close? _____Have you responded in un/kind to the audience the way that they have responded to you? These ruminations and questions are important to be BECAUSE I don't know what to make of anything else in your book until I have a sense of """"your attitude(s) toward"""" what you have written in _Feminist Accused..._. And of course towards the audience(s). The book seems to only get you into more trouble. And I fully understand the value of getting oneself into trouble and I have attempted myself, though differently, to build my career on such acts of writing. _____So what gives, if you are willing to give here? Then, later after some discussion, I would like to ask detailed questions about your arguments, not that I find them "wrong," but that I would like to know more about, say, your argumentive stance against MacKinnon and consensus. VV
Victor, First of all, I don't think the book was meant as a defense (apologia) of the kiss. I didn't want to defend it; I wanted to explore its meaning. I see the book not as an argument, but as an exploration. Within the exploration, there are a few different arguments (i.e. sexual harassment is about discrimination not sex, feminism has an inherent tendency to divide into those who stress oppression & those who stress liberation). It does have the genre mix you refer to, except I don't think the non-expressive part is an argument (but maybe I don't quite get the boundaries of these categories as you use them). Anyway, I wrote this book not to defend my behavior but to make knowledge from it. To figure out what the complex event might signify. And thus I wrote about myself not as myself but as someone reading myself (my behavior, my history, my thoughts). My history & my actions were my text & I was doing a reading of it. The mix of genres is actually a genre from literary criticism. The expressive parts are my presentation of the "text," the expository parts are my analysis (interpretation) of the text. In lit crit, you have to sum up or quote the text before presenting your analysis. At least if you're writing for an audience who doesn't already have the text well committed to memory. So I hope that clarifies what I was trying to do (in general). As for your two N-words. First of all I like to think about their pairing. Second, let me say that I feel positively (not negatively) about both nostalgia and naivete. I think both are components of how we process living in history & I think only theoretical posing makes intellectuals write as if they can free themselves from either. But the most fruitful thing about pairing the terms is that it brings out the fact that both have a relation to age & thus also to history, to what I just called "living in history." We associate nostalgia with age(ing) & naivete with youth. So I'm pleased to be guilty of both failings. In fact I think it crucial to be guilty of both rather than just one. (of course I'm always trying to be both old & young, or maybe it's just a feature of my actual middle age) I think both nostalgia and naivete are symptoms of the difficulty of living in history. And I believe in the necessity of recognizing (& living in & with) that difficulty rather than rising above it to some theoretical overview which gets it all right because it is not enmeshed in time. So yes Jane is both nostalgic & naive. But I think your quandary about whether I'm "kidding" stems from (as your juxtaposition suggests) the stance of the book. There are in fact two Janes in the book (or a split Jane perhaps). Jane is both a character in the story and the narrator who is telling the story AND analyzing its meanings. So when I say I was naive, or imply I was nostalgic, the analyzing first person voice is commenting on the suppositions of the character (hence the past tense). And perhaps your puzzle stems from the fact that the analyzing first person is trying to be as lucid and knowledgeable as possible whereas the Jane the agent in the history was not always lucid and knowledgeable but grappling with real historical life. I think I've said enough for now. Hope this helps some. Jane
Jane, As a follow up to Victor, I would like to ask what might be an obvious question. Ever since I first read your work, I have been interested in your use of language as "performative." By performative, I don't mean the Searle /Austin "promise" but something else--a something else that deliberately exploits the non-representational aspect of language. Of course, I realize that critical theory has long called into question the sense that language is both non-intentional and non-representational, but I don't of many who exploit this, with the exception of you, Victor, Derrida, and a handful of others. What I find, instead, are people who discuss the non-intentional and non-representational in very traditional intentional and representational essays. Here are the questions: Do you see your writing as performance? Do you see your writing as spectacle? I will stop here. I promised myself that I would sit on my hands so that I could finish my dissertation. However, I have always wanted to ask you these questions. Thanks, M. Todd Harper
Professor Gallop: While the title of your book calls to mind the sensationalism of tabloid journalism, I want to extend the word "sensationalism" to have a more positive meaning and use it to describe the sort of epistemology/pedagogy that I've come to associate with you and that I think many of us strive for in our classrooms. This sensationalism (the positive one) is based on the intuition that acts of reading, writing, learning, and teaching, at their BEST, hum with feelings of physical exhilaration, of pleasure, a gut-level thrill that seems more or less analogous to the erotic. I think of this sensation as the lived experience of empowerment. The more I'm able to provide this experience for students, the more I feel like I"m succeeding with them--that is, I' feel like I'm winning them to a life-long love for thinking about language, and this, I assume, is empowering for them. But how do I answer all those who would maintain that the real work of empowerment has little to do with "turning students on" intellectually but rather with acquainting them with the codes, conventions, and formulae of a particular academic discpline? This "disciplining" of the students presumably proceeds as the casting off of the smaller, individual body where "inspiration" registers so that they can move to the larger, communal body of conventional discourse. In other words, how might I answer those who would insist that "sensationalism" is always mere tabloidism? Does this transgressive approach (dissolving, as it does, all the traditional binaries of mind/body, desire/thought, conscious/unconscious) necessarily float to the margins? Is it characteristic of marginality? If it is closely intertwined with marginality, as I think it might be, I'm unsure now about how I managed a moment ago to frame it as the lived experience of empowerment. Any thoughts on this would be most helpful. T. R. Johnson
Todd, I appreciate your appreciation of what I'm trying to do in my writing. Yeah, I've always been bugged by people who write ABOUT the wild effects of writing but write IN the most traditional way. Seems contradictory. I've always sought to write (& to teach & to live) in ways that took seriously the theory I care about. Glad you noticed. The answer to both of your questions is YES, but that seems somehow flat. Like I feel I should make a twist of the questions or something. They are in fact obvious, as is my answer. Does that make them rhetorical questions? My sense of writing as performance/spectacle is rooted in my understanding of Derrida. That writing is not a vehicle for ideas. That things happen in writing. Writing is also a time art and I always understand what I'm trying to do not as get something down once and for all but intervene in a particular context. Well, you should go back to writing your dissertation (is that what you're doing?) so I better stop now.
Best wishes,
Jane wrote: Jane, please forgive my not understanding, but what do you mean by "writing is not a vehicle for ideas"?
Best wishes,
Lizzy wrote:
>Jane, please forgive my not understanding, but I can't speak for Jane, but my understanding of this phrase is that writing is not simply a "transmitter" of ideas from one brain to another. It is a perspective from which writing is a generative process in itself, and sometimes it is the writing which we must *follow,* not "deliver." Do ideas get disseminated through writing? Sure. But not mechanically. I would like to connect this idea with the questions that T.R. raised. He said, _______"But how do I answer all those who would maintain that the real work of empowerment has little to do with "turning students on" intellectually but rather with acquainting them with the codes, conventions, and formulae of a particular academic discpline?" I love the way he uses the term "sensationalism," that writing starts with the body, a response to something felt. And so I am also always struggling with ways to open up this idea to work in my classrooms. I have a few tactics, but I'm looking forward to Jane's response to T.J.'s question, and I'd be interested to know what others do, too. In pre/text format, here's my question: ______ How do you (Jane or any of you) play with these concepts in terms of your students? And I mean lower level undergraduates as much as upper level and graduates. Joan Richmond
Jane, In the light of the questions generally on pedagogy and students, I was wondering ...: I remember year's back picking up RRorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989) and reading and rereading it several times and having students read it and discussing it with them .... I remember the discussion in it about PAIN. Somewhere in the book RR talks about the Ironist and Liberalist attitude toward PAIN. (RR is borrowing heavily from EScarry's The Body in Pain.) Somewhere RR says that a liberal believes that the worst thing that someone can do is cause someone pain. He spends time talking about the ironist and hir attempt *to redescribe* the world. (*to redescribe* is a very special word for RR and one that stands in contrast to the word *to argue/argumentation*. For RR, and I agree, the world is changed not through argumentation but through massive redescriptions that eventually bring about gestalt switches. That is a theory of the growth of knowledge that I can feel comfortable with, one that Feyerabend would also feel comfortable, but perhaps Lakatos would not.) And I remember observing students reading this book and listening to me talk about it and then without transition talk about various ethical-political issues, various takes, say, on the field that I am in ... and watching them ... some of them ... getting very uneasy, watching them struggling with what was being said, not in the form of an argument, but in the form of a massive redescription of values that they hold to be sacred, worthy of veneration, etc. I am not just talking about their belief that God is in heaven and everything will eventually be okay. I am not interested in reversing Theism and making them into Atheists. I was talking about their basic assumptions about such concepts as ethos, logos, and pathos. About their takes on them. I dealt with those issues because RR's book (look at the TOC) deals with these three major proofs: contingencies of language (logos), selfhood (ethos), and liberal community (pathos). A reading of RR and someone speaking for it in class, seductively, can be devastating to classical-traditional or Enlightenment notions of how to live ones life! How to seek a better life with others! I remember tears in their eyes, but their feet not dancing (but until later, much later, and how they danced!! and still danced ... rhetorical satyrs that they are!). Without getting into the bloody details of the kind of *mind PAIN* that Scarry and Rorty are talking about (un/namely, the worst thing that someone can do to another is not cause them to scream in pain but to use that pain/agony in such a way that when the pain is over, the person cannot still reconstitute hirself), let me ask you .... _____What for you is "teaching"? _____When you teach do you cause pain? If so, What are your thoughts about causing students to be in pain? _____Do you think it is possible to teach without causing pain? Would you still call it "teaching"? _____Do you think that the students who brought the sexual harassment charge against you were in pain? Do you think the charge was brought about by your causing them pain? or caused by the "relationship"? _____Do you think that these two students are still in pain? Can they reconstitute themselves? _____What have you learned about teaching and pain, if anything, in relation to the ... let's say "event(s)" leading up to and following the sexual harassment charge? If there are any variations on these questions that you would like to give, or if you would like "to redescribe" them, please do so. VV
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