(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). |
To all those who have been "confounded" by VV tenacious, even obnoxious insistence that it would be in Jane's best interests to RESPOND to what has become "the question": There--in dana's last post--is your answer. A question like that one, which, btw, is one that others would have posed if he hadn't (something he understood from the start), *will* have provoked responses--whether jane offers any or not. VV, being the good host, offered jane the podium first. Why? She's the guest of honor. She declined. Again and again, she declined. Dana, who not only had refrained from grabbing the mike to respond to that particular question, had, indeed, joined the host in posing the question to jane again (who again declined, this time without comment). But dana was more than ready to take the podium when johanna turned the question to her. And in her response, she makes a mighty compelling case against the major claims in jane's book. *What* she said--not only that feminists *can* sexually harass other feminists but that this one *did* and that, ethically, one *cannot* bracket off the question of student/teacher power relations in a discussion/exploration of sexual harassment--needs no commentary. But dana's response to 'the question,' offered from her unique position with respect to it (life in-the-brackets), unconceals a few things for me that dana herself does not mention but that deserve to be noted: 1) gee whiz, she's sharp!--and that calls into question, for me at least, the possible motive/s for those "negative evaluations" of her work (WHA?!); 2) holy cow, she's TOUGH!, tough as nails (now *this* is power feminism, *this* is an Uberfolk fem)--and that calls into question, for me at least, the suggestion that she'd feel threatened by a simple kiss....or by the standard demand for academic rigor (huh uh); and 3) woo weeeee, she's witty, she can *laugh*, not only at this incredible situation but at herself--and that calls into question, for me at least, the image of her that gets painted in the book: she doesn't sound like a sniveling, "bad, sad, blind, angry, revenge"-seeker to me. Not even close. So, ya know--and this would be my point--I find myself not nearly as anxious to hear jane's response to 'the question' now as I was before I heard dana's..... Can't help it. It's an ethos thang. And....so....to those of you who have been confounded by vv's seemingly inhospitable hosting, by his insistence that it would be in jane's BEST INTERESTS to respond (and quickly) to 'the question'.............there ya go. best, ddd
Alan, Thanks for your question. What a pleasure to feel my book is so well understood & that someone wants to think more about the issues I was trying to explore. My hypothesis as to the reasons harassment has veered from something whose meaning was embedded in sex discrimination to something whose meaning is embedded in a generalized sense of bad sex (the first usage of sex here means gender, the second sexuality) is: I think the idea that women are discriminated against (& that it should be stopped) is a relatively new idea in our culture (& most any I can think of). There is both resistance to this idea and misunderstanding of it. As sexual harassment became widely recognized as a bad thing, I think the new idea got transformed into a good ol' idea, that sex is a bad thing & should be curtailed, censored, punished. I think it's a tendency of new ideas to revert into old ideas as they get widely disseminated. And that's why I believe one's strategies & expressions must change w/the context. I don't think this is "conscious," but some very large movement of collective unconsciousness, an inherent conservative tendency in societies, which are continually coopting new ideas into old. HOpe this gets at what you were asking about, Jane
Byron, Anyone who read my book searching for an argument & engaging it critically would be a welcome interlocutor. But some of the comments are not critical engagements w/ the book. You disagree, I'm sure. Jane
Anne B., You ask whether I apply my ideas about experimental writing to my teaching. I'm not sure it's right to say I "apply" the writing ideas to teaching. Rather I would say that in both I'm working w/ the form (which is quite different in these 2 cases) to make it as malleable as possible to what I'm trying to teach (for me writing is a form of teaching). This is unbearably vague (I'm afraid it was a big question) but let me try to get more specific. In working w/ students, I will move between different sorts of questions, about their ideas, about their word-choice, about format issues. After an oral presentation, for example, that was supposed to be 15-20 minutes, but was only 12, the first question I ask (to begin class discussion) is why did you only speak for 12 minutes? did you realize this? what do you think it means? My response to students, esp on their papers or in office conferences is a variation on close reading. I listen for salient stuff & then try to engage them there, get them to talk more about what's going on. Sometimes that involves personal material (about parents, girlfriends etc) when the student brings that in. I try to follow the ethics of reading which for me means never broaching material that isn't in the text (in this case what the student has said or written). Among the material that gets presented, I feel free to range between the anecdotal, the theoretical, the personal, the emotional, the lexical etc, as the association seems most productive. Jane
malgosia, I've been following this re/intvw from the beginning and have watched the ethics of Jane's notion of Feminism questioned and defended from several perspectives. Yours is the first question to directly address the underlying issues of what has been danced around by just about everyone. Dana's last post broached the subject, as you so quickly recognized. I spent many years in the corporate world watching people brandish and flogg other people with their big bamboos in their desire for a slice of the pie, as you put it. Although the number of those whose big bamboos were topped by mammaries were few, those who acheived their desires through the manipulation or intimidation of their power position can only be called pricks. We can say this is the way it is and continue to play the game as it has been formulated but I, for one, have always detested this ethic. It has always appeared to me to stem from a personal lack in which more is never enough and leads to an incredibly destructive narcissism. On the other hand, I've seen people acheive success, their slice, by acknowledging the desire of others and finding ways to accomodate that desire in their search for their own. When accomodation was not possible, they didn't whip out their bamboos and beat the person onto their path of desire. They maintained an ethic of power that is inclusive in a non-phallogentric way, which is what I always saw as the promise of feminism as I have come to know it. And that does seem to be the issue at question, here, what this spectacle is all about. Yes, Jane has gotten her piece of the pie. She appears to have gotten it by collecting a few big bamboos along the way and, at least by Dana's account and few of Jane's own, by forging one of her own and wielding it. But, is power, the attaining and keeping of it, always a matter of wielding a phallus? Can someone who classifies themselves as a member of a traditionally socially disempowered group ethically justify their use of oppressive phallogentric power practices to acheive and maintain a position of power within the dominant social power structures and still claim membership in the disadvantaged group? I think not. So, Jane, therein lies my question to you. You say that a feminist cannot sexually harass another feminist. OK. But, what, for you, constitutes gender? What constitutes empowerment for you? At the moment, your attitude towards empowerment is beginning to look demagogic. Say it ain't so, Jane. I apologize if this question seems personally agonistic toward you, but I, too, am a product of the American academic system and have wrestled with issues of empowerment. I've asked you this question in the spirit I have asked it of myself and look forward to your answer. Ron Hugar
"Man [sic] will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it." --Henry Miller, Sunday After the War. qtd. in Brown, Life Against Death, 305.
".... __What is this spectacle all about? Here is a person who's into getting a piece of the pie, and she's gotten it. __Is the spectacle about the fact that when one gets pie, it is almost never gotten 'differently'? __Do you, Victor, know a different way of getting pie? Is doing these public interviews, asking so-called 'hard' questions and making people squirm, not part of the way you maintain your own slice of pie? __And if so, is there really a moral punchline to this Jane Gallop story, as much of the tone of this interview, I believe, tries to insinuate? Jane likes and wants power. She uses people, disregards their feelings, plays them for her purposes, postures, as a big feminist, and so on. Is there a different way of liking, getting, and maintaining power in this society?" m, these are good questions; they are, as a fallen catholick would say, the good questions of our logos of the perpetual questions. How might a fallen protestant put them?! I am a fallen catholick who has become a pagan: Yes, I think that the spectacle is all about p o w e r. Mother Theresa is/was powerful, and will have always been powerful. A person writing a suicide note and then carrying out hir threat is powerful! Human (symbolic) action seems to be a practicing of a double bind. Woe is the person who has any power, and we all potentially have it, yet often do not know how to tap into and express it or have the opportunity or access to express it. But I do think that 'apparently' some of us would find that power is "gotten 'differently' "! After all, we have different ideological/idiotological stances. Some of us might say, 'My power is good; their power is evil,' silly as that is. Some of us might have said at one time, 'Power to the people'! ;-) Sure! And of course, there are other permutations and combinations of this kind of talk and sloganizing. As for me, concerning the questions of power and difference, I have to answer by saying, "No, there is no difference because of difference itself. The symbolic system that we use to communicate with each other--whether 'controlled' with rules of evidence and procedures or spectaklized--always already separates people out as good or bad, as acceptable or not acceptable. We are either sheep or stinking goats, as many puritanical sermons would have us! Your gentle questions work from the same topos of difference: Is there a different way to do or conduct this differencing? The questioning itself reenacts and returns us perpetually to the scene of the crime. Perhaps what we/you are doing is bad or problematic and therefore Is there a good way of doing it, so that we can like it and not squirm with it? KBurke says that difference causes victimage and tragedy. RGirard says that similarity causes victimage and tragedy. And therein lies our sense of community: 'to double business bound'. And so then, our question is, What to do, we fallen creatures into the spectakle of making people 'squirm' with tough questions? m, in many ways your questions attempt to counterinsinuate, "Victor likes power. He uses people, disregards their feelings, plays them for his purposes, postures, as a big re/inter/viewer, and so on." I would have to agree, on ethical grounds, that what I do certainly can be read in that way, especially if you or others have something subjectively invested in wanting to read my proposing re/inter/views as a hybrid genre for discussions, which has as its end, and only its end, getting my own piece of the pie. And of course, I 'ought/must' agree with you! Yes, Jane squirms. The subscribers read the questions and answers and they squirm. Spoon squirms. Jane and some of the subscribers respond and I squirm. 'Accomplished irony' is always at work and play. Perhaps such irony is our only salvation.... I squirm. Thou squirms. He squirms, she squirms, it squirms. We squirm. You squirm. They squirm. so I attempt to make you squirm. Thou (perhaps) squirms. etc. It's in our grammatical paradigm. Yes, All of God's children squirm. Or all the gods' children squirm. God's/gods'? The difference? There's a big difference. 'Accomplished irony' is always at work and play when we don't try to shut it down.... There is no doubt about it that I would not be doing any of this--PRE/TEXT-L and the print and electronic journals, etc.--if I were not interested in power and using it against power. I mince no words: I want 'to change' the profession that I am in, just as anyone else wants to who posts to this list, or who reads or publishes a paper, or who in some manner jumps into the public sphere to convince or persuade others, or who establishes lists to give people the opportunity to express their views in an electronic public sphere. But your perpetual question still stands: __Is there a way of liking, getting, and maintaining power in this society? *Perhaps not. Nor is there in any society that human beings will construct or awake some day to discover themselves in. (Perhaps the exceptional 'where' and 'how' was Biblical Babel, but we think not, and would make the world into, as KB says, HelHaven. We who are rotten with perfection!) *Perhaps Yes. The gods. What I have tried personally and professionally to do is to figure out ways of implementing Nietzsche's ideas in his brief essay "Homer's Contest." I like his writing about dispersing and radiating power. It's a good article. VVhich I would direct people to, without my summarizing (i.e., further investing in) the content t/here. Actually and Virtually, everytime I think or write, I attempt to follow what is said in that, for me, good 'book' document. Thanks for your question that still remains perpetual, v
Collin, Thanks for your interesting question. I was indeed wondering what your earlier title was thinking about. Yeah, perhaps Gen X does have a different naivete/cynicism/nostalgia ratio than do us Baby-Boomers. Certainly I understood part of my surprise at what happened to me as a gap between the 70s & the 90s. And certainly those decades could name two different feminist generations. But my sense is that 90s feminists (the ones most associated w/ the generation) seem to be trying to get back to the late 60s/early 70s & away from what set in in the mid to late 70s. By describing '71 I was trying to portray an early liberatory moment in feminism, before cultural feminism, before the anti-porn movement, before so much that now gets attacked in the name of 70s feminism. I happen to think that moment is closer to the present than the moment that succeeded it (around 1975). Much gen x feminism decries the puritanism of older generation feminism. By portraying '71, I wanted to show that pro-sex feminism was nothing new. B/c the power victim feminism tends to get mapped across generations. I have a marvelous student who is in fact writing a dissertation on the relation between 90s & 70s feminism. And I'm learning tons about it from her, even as she & I enact that relation in our relation. Compared to her careful work, anything I have to say here is crude & reductive. So if you're really interested in this question, let me direct you to her. Her name is Astrid Henry. Jane
ddd, b/c you have been so earnest in questioning me & listening to my answers, considering them, I feel I owe you an attempt at responding to your question about my accusers. First of all, there is no way to generalize about them, even tho they are only 2. They are completely different, in themselves & in relation to me. Second, I had already spent a lot of time trying to understand them during the months I worked with them. So the problem is that in fact I know them rather well, & have of course many theories as to why they accused me as they did. In fact, I believe my original mistake stemmed from my stubborn insistence on "empathizing" w/ them while they were my students, rather than withdrawing into safe distance. They both manifested all the danger signals of students who resent their situation, of angry people who could not work with me. The main thing I learned from the case is that it was ridiculously naive of me to think I could teach any student, that I could reach any student. I used to think I should stick w/ them all, negotiating their resistances, accepting their anger. I devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to teaching these students, more time & effort b/c they were so angry, stubborn, difficult. And it was only when they lodged their complaints that I began to see what I should have seen all along. They did not want to learn from me; they were fighting me, from the beginning. The reasons for that lie in their own particular (& differing) stories. I could only hypothesize. Going through the case, I learned something which is difficult for me to accept. That sometimes there are people we must stop empathizing with in order to survive. They were out to get me. And I had to treat them as the enemy in order to save my career & my psyche. I had never understood before what it was like to have enemies. It is different than fighting with friends, loved ones, people one has an attachement to. It is not a relation gone wrong, but an inherently adversarial relation. They had in fact taken advantage of my willingness to empathize. So I find it ridiculous for strangers to criticize me for not empathizing w/ my accusers. "An accuser" is an enemy. I do empathize in general w/ my students. But by accusing me, they had decided they were not my students, & I no longer had responsibility to understand, to help them. They did what they could to take me down. I did what I could to survive. In fact I had done an enormous amount, while they were still my students, to help them. They chose to bite the hand that had fed them. This is probably not what you were looking for. certainly is angrier than I prefer to be. Jane
As I announced a bit ago, I'm leaving town on Wed morning for a while. Tomorrow will be the last time I log on to this list. I wanted to remind people of that so they don't needlessly post messages to me that I never read. Some comment has been made about my leaving the list "so soon." Other comments have been made about issues involving my power. And certainly I feel some people have been treating me like someone with inordinate & ill-gotten power who ought to be unseated. In light of those two sorts of remarks, I want to make a point. Completely apart from the question of exposing myself to aggression, this list has been A LOT OF WORK. Everyday for 3 weeks, I log on and attempt to answer, as thoughtfully and earnestly as I can, questions people pose to me. Whereas you all can post if you feel so moved, can read it when you have time, I have contracted an obligation to read and respond. And I have tried to fulfill my obligation. Late in the game I made a decision to stop responding to messages that infuriated me. But I made that choice when I realized the only other alternative was to quit the list immediately altogether. And I chose to stay on, b/c I had agreed to , b/c I felt a sense of obligation to subscribers who were reading to find out what I had to say. I'm trying to make a point about my labor and my sense of duty, not only b/c I've felt them misrecognized here, but b/c the situation is for me so completely reminiscent of teaching. In my daily duty to the list, I felt like the teacher -- not b/c I knew more or anything ridiculous like that, but because I was the one who had to show up everyday, who had to do the reading, no matter how busy I was or how tired, or how sick my kids were, who couldn't decide to cut class when I wasn't in the mood or had something better to do. That is probably the biggest difference btw the teacher & the student. And I make this point b/c all the emphasis on the teacher's power in contemporary pseudo-political discourse on pedagogy neglects perhaps the most essential thing. And something we might not want to neglect in our politics. LABOR. Teachers labor for students. Students do not labor for teachers. Students benefit from our labor; we do not benefit from students' labor. Any application of the Marxist class model to our classes tends to neglect this very basic thing. Anyway, this allows me to make what for me is an important, because both obvious and neglected, point about teaching. Jane
Students benefit from our labor; we do not benefit from students' labor. Any application of the Marxist class model to our classes tends to neglect this very basic thing.
Terry
Elizabeth, Thanks for recalling that my role here was supposed to be guest. I have been happy the last few days to discover people on the list who have a sense of courtesy or hospitality. People such as yourself have made me feel more welcome than I did last week. Jane
Jane, I appreciate very much that you responded, particularly given the circumstances. Your response raises about a kazillion new questions in my mind, but I read your next post already and know that you won't have time before you leave town (and the list) to respond again. So.... I'll just let it go...with a 'thanks' and a 'peace.' best, ddd
Jane, thanks for the appearance on p/t-L and the virgorous responses to the questions you dealt with. if you have time to deal with some of the remaining ones, that's great; if not, then that's understandable. gary, thanks for keeping the information flowing in both directions. best, vv
Actually I wouldn't disagree. Some comments are about what's been happening on the list. Since I came to the book and this discussion simultaneously, it's hard for me to separate the two. I might disagree that the comments about the discussion here are therefore "uncritical"-- which you didn't say, but one could infer it. There are many levels and styles of critical engagement and I'd like to think that most of the comments made so far on this list fall into that space. But this might be STRETCHING the word critical a little to far for some. Byron
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