PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW
       with Jane Gallop 7

Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 23:20:13 -0600 (CST)
From: Alan Taylor
Subject: apt to jg: slippage

Dr. Gallop:

In your book you note that by including consensual relations in sexual harrasment policies universities reflect a society-wide trend to expand the meaning of "sexual harassment" in a way that suggests that "what is undesirable finally is not unwelcome attention but sexuality per se. Rather than some sexuality being harassing because of its unwanted nature, the inference is in and of itself harassment" (32). For me, the book centers itself in and around this trend, around the slippage in meaning that threatens a return to a puritanical sensibility that pits feminist against feminist and puts sexuality itself on trial.

While the book notes this change and, in my reading, warns against the dangers inherent in the expansion of the meaning of sexual harassment to include consensual relations, what the book doesn't do (and doesn't necessarily need to do) is to offer an explicit explanation of this trend, leading me to wonder what your thoughts were on this matter.

__What's driving the slippage in meaning from the classical definition of sexual harassment to the more expansive sense in which it would include consensual sexual relations?

I guess I'm interested in whether you think some people are consciously stretching the meaning of this term, and if so, for what reason(s). If it's largely unconscious (and this may be more interesting), I'd like to know what you think is driving this as well.

Thanks for sticking with us, and thanks in advance for any response you may wish to offer.

alan taylor

Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 22:50:34 -0600
From: johanna@RedRiverOK.com
Subject: Re: jg on Chronicle

I feel like this verb "advocate" makes me seem like a real loon, some kind of fringe weirdo pervert. Jane Gallop

Well, at any rate, such readings show that the reading public wants to cling to the possibility that you're still "getting it"--and plenty of it. JOhanna

Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 22:50:32 -0600
From: johanna@RedRiverOK.com
Subject: terrorizing intellects

At the likely risk of alienating Jane, I want to ask Dana a question which Jane didn't (couldn't?) answer to my satisfaction.

This was the original question to Jane:

"I want to bring up the part where you mention how your students' written complaints addressed your propensity to "make knowledge" from your life experiences. (I wasn't sure I understood the nature of their fears. There seemed to be a lot more at stake for these students than protecting their own privacy or enacting some sort of pre-emptive prior restraint on your speech/thinking in order to hit you where you live.) It seemed to me, reading between the lines and perhaps this is just a matter of what you deliberately decided to omit, that above all what your students feared from you was your intellect. Perhaps this is natural, given your negative assessment of their intellectual work. But-- _____ perhaps they were also trying to create/redescribe a new category to describe their "violation," something along the lines of "intellectual harassment" or "theory terrorism"? Is this possible? And if so, do you think such categories might be worth addressing here?"

In other words, Dana, all I could guess, from Jane's description of your request that she not be allowed to use these incidents in her academic work, was that in asking for this injunction you were making a claim of this kind: "You (Jane) should not be able to make theory out of my misery." Am I right? If so, I (still) think this would be an interesting question to pursue.

Johanna Schmertz (means "PAIN" in German, Jane!)

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 01:06:52 -0600 (CST)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: vv>jg: ethos in language (logos) in electrical pathos (online)

Jane, this is all very interesting, n'est pas?

We (the list) are a "lynch mob"! And Dear Lizzie agrees. VVell, of course.

As you probably know (for I sent a copy of the subscribers to Gary to fwd to you), there are over 300 people subscribed to the list. Probably 15-20 (a mixture of males and females) have posted to you. Let me suggest--not that I would inform you pedagogically--that there are a lot of other people on the list, many more--in fact, the silent majority of us--who might very well be inclined to agree with your theses in your book and agree with "your" estimation of how you have been treated. But if you constantly undercut your ethos with such statements that this is a lynch mob as well as making other statements (e.g., "Last nite while perusing a message from Victor, I ended up yelling at my son who came in to ask if I'd tuck him in"), you're going to lose them! These epithets and vignettes (there are many others, but I don't want to catalogue them, for your "sayings" will come across like a barrage) ... these epithets and vignettes are transparent. Cheap. And I am sure you can do better ... for at least yourself. Moreover, when you respond to people, directly or through other posts, you begin immediately to categorize them into "s/he loves me" ... "s/he hates me" ... and "Maybe s/he likes me." I mean, grrrl, you peel the petals of the flower right off the stem, right in front of us, on the screen!!! These kinds of dividing practices really get in the way and can only cause you problems here repeatedly, when in fact if you did not say things so blatantly like this, the silent majority might keep on loving you, if in fact that is really an issue for them!

If today we were to take a Gallop Poll, You might very well have a high percentage agreeing with you, but if you continue talking to us in this manner and encouraging others to do the same, then you are going to lose big time. And this was never about winning. It has been about asking tough questions, which every person who has ever been reinvwed has been faced with. Which every person who has ever taught (male or female) has been confronted with. So again, it's in your best interest to wrestle with these questions, not all of them, but the ones you find acceptable. And of value to you. I would think that the ones that you never thought of and the ones that you want to call out of bounds are the most valuable for you. And yet, of course, only you can decide that ... as we watch you decide.

I really resent the cheap attempt by a poster who is signing off to say that this is a male-female issue. Many of the posters asking tough questions are female. The issue of sexual harassment here is one of female against females, whether or not that has any standing in relation to Title VII (Civil Rights Act, 1964); whether or not one agrees with MacKinnon, or whether or not we will agree with the decisions that the Supreme Court will make about the 4 harassment cases that they have decided to hand down rulings on.

Here, we are attempting to debate these issues ourselves. And part of the debate is whether or not your ethos (or ethoi) are believe-able. I opened with a question on your apparent nostalgia and your apparent naive p/v. You answered it and I appreciate that, but I did not believe you. It is as simple as that: You were not believe-able to me. And then I thought that the real issue here is Who Wrote This Book? and is she believe-able? If you do not have any ability to empathize with the two students, then there is a serious problem. And it's not a personal problem but a social problem! If you have that capability but refuse not to discuss it but to deflect it under the banner that it has nothing to do with your book, then you are not believe-able. etc........ Much that you say about some of us, many of the charges, etc., seem really to be about yourself. In other words, they seem like a simple projection of sorts. But about that, What do I know? Nothing! But I do know that you do not sound believe-able to me. Here, you have been your worst own enemy. I really believe--let me be naive for a second--that our reception of what you are saying to some of us would be easily acceptable if you would simply be honest with yourself and then us. If not, then this is all going to go down as one of the best and worst of pretext reinvws.

v

ps: Johanna of the Red River, It's true that I am not Slavic, but it is also true that I am not Italian. I am, on all sides of the family, Sicilian.

Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 23:14:08 -0800 (PST)
From: "Paul B. Turpin"
Subject: Re: FYI, current articles on s.h.

FYI: re the general issue of sexual harrassment policies:

The current issue of _The New Yorker_ (2/9/98) has an article by Jeffrey Toobin, "The Trouble with Sex: Why the Law of Sexual Harassment Has Never Worked" (p. 48), that recounts some of the legal history/development of the laws that underpin university policies. Included in the article is a narrative about a professor whose outcome was quite different from Professor Gallop's.

Also, see the front page of _The Wall Street Journal_ (left column) on 2/4/98 under the "Corporate Affairs" heading: "The One Clear Line in Interoffice Romance Has Become Blurred." The article details some changes happening in corporate policies about intimate relationships: where they were formerly forbidden outright, the changes are in the direction of altering the power relationships--i.e., a manager can have a relationship with someone at a lower level if the manager transfers out of a supervisory relationship to that person.

Paul Turpin

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 00:17:50 -0800
From: lbj
Subject: Re: vv>jg: ethos in language (logos) in electrical pathos (online)

At 01:06 AM 2/7/98 -0600, VV said to Jane:

}As you probably know [the whole world is watching, yadda yadda yadda]
}[...]
}v

Oh, for chrissakes. I haven't read flame bait like this since at least 1994, you know, back "in the day". Where'd you hone your rhetorical skills, VV, alt.politics? alt feminism? alt.conspiracy?

Keep it up, and you may lose your list to more than just Jane's "epithets and vignettes". I subscribed because I want to read Jane's responses to us readers; in fact, those e's and v's add to our understanding of the book and the dynamics of pedagogy in general (which, silly me, I thought was the purpose of the bleedin' list.) So if you could kindly dispense with the Troll-in-Residence schtick...

If I want to read real flame bait, I'll go back to Usenet, thank you.

lbj

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 11:01:24 -0500
From: Lizzy lizzy@conch.net
Subject: a red pencil

lbj - let's buy him a new red pencil. I subscribed for exactly the same reason, not to read an author who's trying to be loved. Lizzy

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 11:37:16 -0500
From: Lizzy
Subject: Lizzy: stuff

VV - received a separate email from a reader of the list who so far has not responded publicly - thanked me for being "a gift of sanity to the list".
I was amused to learn that you operated under an assumption when you red-pencilled my "best fishes" to "best wishes".
For a while, I've been toying with something...the list is called "pretext" which can mean "an effort or strategy to conceal something". Is that why Jane's candor bothers you? Or in this wonderful world of promotion/consumerism, have the major parties creating the list conspired to stir up the readers with this fencing back and forth like wrestlers before a match? In any case, it's bringing out some admirable responses from Jane.
Best switches, Lizzy

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 10:44:11 -0600 (CST)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: v>lbj: thanks for the reverse reminder

LBJ, thanks for the reverse reminder and memories. ;-) I'd vote for you even today. v

Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 11:55:28 -0500 ()
From: Terry Goldie tgoldie@YORKU.CA
Subject: Re: jg>lizzy: Dissecting the frog

Dear Professor Gallop and others
Excuse the formality of the salutation but you can take the Canadian out of the email address but you can't take the Canadian out of the boy. And I am a "boy," although my name is androgynous. I just wanted to make that clear before saying the following. I can see the irritation you feel from some of the rather intemperate language, especially for someone not used to lists. When I first subscribed to a list about four years ago I was amazed at some of the flame wars. But the substance of the questions needs asking. So many of the observations have been falling into simplistic gender traps. Language is of course gendered, as is society, yours as well as mine, but there are so many other issues at play. I would think that in 1998 male-bashing in a feminist discussion is just about as useful as white bashing in an African-American one. I would think the suggestion that a female professor could mistreat a female student should be no more surprising than that an African-American professor would mistreat an African-American student. What I would like to see in this discussion is more consideration of these basic issues of power. It could be argued that sexual harassment is merely a somewhat moralistic focal point to deal with the contradiction between social relations, which most of us would like to move in the direction of affection, and administrative relations, which most often have a top-down energy: "Of course I like you Professor Smith, especially given that I hope to get into law school."
Terry

Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 09:53:00 -0800 (PST) From: Lorie Goodman lgoodman@PEPPERDINE.EDU Subject: lg>liz: candor

Lizzy,

Seems to me that vv is not bothered by Jane's "candor." Rather her lack thereof.

Many of us on the list are rhetoricians. Thus, we begin with a concern for audience. Jane seems not to share this concern, and we find this troubling.

e

Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 13:09:11 -0500 (EST)
From: "Anne G. Berggren" agbergrn@umich.edu
Subject: Re: jg>lizzy: Dissecting the frog

Dear Jane and all,
As a first-time subscriber to a list such as this--because I wanted to hear Jane speak about her book and her ideas--I have been appalled at the sort of samurai scholarship offered by vv and others. I'm reminded of Jane Tompkins essay "Fighting Words" from 1988, where she describes the spectacle of one women critic ripping up another woman critic's book at an academic conference and then says, "By the time the paper was over, I felt as if I had been present at a ritual execution of some sort, something halfway between a bullfight, where the crowd admires the skill of the matador and enjoys his triumph over the bull, and a public burning, where the crowd witnesses the just punishment of a criminal. For the academic experience combined the elements of admiration, bloodlust, and moral self-congratulation." What is happening here seems to me to be reversion to a view of teaching and academic inquiry that can justly be called patriarchal, even though I rarely find any men in academia who still subscribe to this worldview. It's a view in which verbal combat and intellectual vertuosity become the means for weeding out students the Professor-in-charge takes a dislike to.

Without this strutting around of these PC's who certainly could be either men or women, the rest of us could have gotten further in rethinking the ways we imagine teaching and writing.

Thanks, Jane, for your remarks about experimental writing. I'd like to know if you apply some of these ideas to your teaching also, and if so, how.

Anne B.

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 13:43:27 -0800
From: Socha 347hqx7@cmuvm.csv.cmich.edu
Subject: Audience/candor

Surely Jane's candor is more interesting than the 'lack thereof.' It has more to do with the subject of her book. Does candor reflect a more immediate concern for audience? Wouldn't you say that a lack of candor reflects a greater concern for the potential audience of one's audience?

My question is, can one be candid and 'begin' with a concern for audience? Jane's narrator shows concern for audience in the kiss on page 91. Her "sense of an audience totally transformed [her] conventional gesture." It became, she says, "a loaded performance." Does that demonstrate a lack of candor?

d

Date: Sun, 08 Feb 1998 00:42:58 -0600
From: Byron Hawk oth@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: Re: posing

Why are any of use so surprised that BOTH Jane and Victor are posturing, as is everybody else who sends out a post. This is no big news. It's a part of being rhetorical and using language.

I was much more interested in a point Jane made earlier in refernce to reading protocal. This list is made up predominently (I assume) of people who consider themselves rhetors or at least aspiring rhetors. We've been trained with reading/writing/speaking protocols that are more often than not argumentative. One could make the argument that this is inherently patriarchal, but this is another argument.

What is important is the other point Jane made referring to reading/love. We are trained this way and we love to discourse this way. When we read your book searching for its arguments it was the joy of it, not out of any spite. I wouldn't have wasted the time on it out of spite.

I can only read Jane's "lynch mob" reference as a joke. And honestly I thought it was pretty funny. Joke's too, are an important part of rhetoric.

Voguin'

Byron

From: EAWARD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU
Date: 7 Feb 1998 13:57:24 EST
Subject: Re: jg>lizzy: Dissecting the frog

I'd like to thank Anne for saying what I've quietly been thinking. I would like to see hard questions answered, too, but the way some of them have been asked have reminded me of the way professors ask questions (in the name of honest dialogue) to students they really dislike and/or are threatened by. Questions phrased like "What is it with you..." don't seem to even pretend to want an honest two way dialogue. They seem argumentative and arrogant. Listservs, in my experience, just seem to carry this line of questioning on--the thinking seems to be that since no one can "see" me, I can be as rude, arrogant, and argumentative as I want to be. Rhetorician or not, I still think there's something to be said for common courtesy. Especially toward a guest!

Elizabeth

Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 13:34:44 -0600 (CST)
From: sophist@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: Re: Audience/candor

d, i can agree with you about candor but only if you stipulate what your interests are. When it comes to candor (or condor) and when it comes to jane's book or projections through various narrators--and many of us use multiple narrators, whether pathological or not, on posts to lists, ... when it comes to jane's book, I am concerned, given my interests, with her lack of candor about the two students. And the issue of PAIN. It is easy for me to mirror back to Jane her various performances in her book in relation to her students, making her a student and sending her a perverse kiss across the wires, crossed though the vvires are. And I am not surprised that she is Pained. And I am not surprised that all this exchange is interpreted by some on the lists as talking down to or being rude to a guest. But the host-guest relationship is historically a very complex one, though some here would make it simple.

So d, my questions about Jane being honest and direct about the students and how she 'framed' them or 'cut them out' of the book, made them speechless, put them in a place where perhaps they cannot reconstitute themselves, still stands. And if it is not answered here, that's fine; for it will continue to stand until it gets answered. That which is repressed always returns. As a case in point, recall Dana's post, a blast from the past and from far away, yet still so close, Japan. Dana's post can be read in many different ways, given our various interests.

Jane can take care of herself. And I am sure that Dana can damn well take care of herself. But I still want to know how Jane *cares* for these two students.

v

From: "Collin Brooke" CBROOKE@odu.edu
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 15:07:14 EST
Subject: Re: ribbit ribbit

Lizzy,

At the risk of being accused of piling the shinola on, I wanted to reply to a couple of your comments, and particularly to what has troubled me about them.

You write that

And so it should be with this list - I want to know where your book took people, what stuck to them. I don't want to read how cleverly erudite is their dissection of the author.

Preceding this is your example of a teacher leading students through the "dissection" to which you're referring here. What stuck with me in Jane's book is the phrase "the buzz of live knowledge" (20), and its implications, because I find that concept pretty radical. For me, it links together intellectual and bodily pleasure in a way that most people don't really think about. (BTW, it also is a nice link to Elaine Scarry's work, which *is* very appropriate to Jane's work, erudition aside.)

What troubles me is that argument that I hear you making, about how what the teacher does in the classroom and what you do "one-on-one" with the author are two entirely separate activities. I may get myself into trouble here, but I think that Jane makes the case for blurring those boundaries, far more than you allow for. What you describe earlier as poo-bahism (not that there's not plenty of that as well) may also be excitement, pleasure, love (as I think Byron was saying). The body is political, as the 60s may have taught some of us, but to say that the body is also intellectual is something that I think we have a great deal of trouble with in this country. Although I'm not convinced that it's necessarily a consistent position throughout FASH, I like Jane's book for beginning to make that argument.

My second problem relates back to the first question I asked (thanks for the reply, Jane!). This is probably going to feel like an attack, and I'm sorry for that, but it seems to me like your posts fall pretty clearly under the sign of victimage as Jane outlines it. You make the leap from one or two people to "lynch mob," you set up the discussion as girls v. boys, etc. If I read you rightly, you're asking everyone else on this list to empathise with FASH, and to share their particular journeys with this book. I don't think that's an unreasonable request, but I see many people refusing the same consideration to others' posts. What to some appears a barrage, to me seemed precisely what you asked for--Victor asked about Rorty (whose politics of redescription bears directly on the issue of naming the "crime") and Scarry (whose definition of pain--the voice separated from the body--bears directly on the students' conditions). We (and I am nothing if not an academic ;)) may cite others' work as a way of naming our own personal journeys, but perhaps that is because we take our joy in joining things together, synthesizing what we read, and participating in that buzz of live knowledge. At least, it seems so to me when I do it. One of the things that I think Jane challenges is the knee-jerk assumption that there is nothing sexy about knowledge, learning, education.

What I regret is that there are so many professionals whose love for their work is described as passion and/or excellence, while in those of us who teach, it is dismissed out of hand as elitism, jargonism, self-importance, poobahism. And while my comments here may be construed as a type of revenge, or dissection, or whatever other vilifications we might imagine, I was simply struck by the fact that you ask for something of us that you yourself haven't spent a great deal of time providing, either.

I can understand how the discussion thus far would make you uncomfortable to do so. But it is interesting to me, in a discussion where Jane has talked about restoring power and potential to the dialectic of feminism, that so many of the comments have painted the discussion into the corner of victimage. And I know that I'm just fueling the fire of talking about the discussion rather than having it, so I'll end this, and post another question in a little while...

collin

From: "Collin Brooke" CBROOKE@odu.edu
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 15:42:18 EST
Subject: generation gaps, part ii

Jane,

Thanks again for your reply to my first post. What follows here is the second half of my thoughts, and rather than asking a particular question, it's probably more along the lines of an invitation to elaborate.

Earlier, I alluded to the argument that is being made that suggests that feminists need to escape the dialectic of power/victim. I was thinking of folk like Susannah Breslin, who has been tapped as something of a pop-spokesperson for this particular perspective. Regularly, I see examples (and hear them) of women who disdain the label of feminist while basically sharing the ideals.

For me, this links up with your book in spots like 19-20, where you talk about how women's studies is different now than it was when you were a student. You explain that it is no longer a matter of discovering books together (19), and while this is one explanation for what might be described as a generation gap within feminism, I wonder if you've thought about other possibilities. I don't mean this as a passive criticism, but rather genuine curiosity.

I'm square in the middle of what's been called Generation X, and I've had the opportunity to teach/study/write about it a little, and I'm curious how you perceive the impact of what I might call generational demographics on feminism. I would never claim that the current generation is inherently one way or another, but I think that the ratios between naivete/cynicism/nostalgia are different for those of us who grew up in the late 70s/early 80s. I think that the media has a lot to do with it, and your inclusion of that discussion of Disclosure leads me to think that it plays some role in your thoughts as well.

You write that your students "still want a feminist education that feels like women's studies did to me in 1971," but that's tough for me to believe. I know that there is still a great demand for feminist education, but I'm not sure that today's students want it for the same reason, or even could. Regardless of whether or not they're right in thinking so, I don't think students perceive male oppression in the same terms that students and teachers did in 1971.

I think that this is a fairly obvious statement, but as I said above, I'd like to posit it more as an invitation than a critique. I think that you establish what some of the differences are between the ways you teach and the ways that your teachers did, and so I'd like to hear your thoughts about the ways that you perceive your students as different from how you were back then. Not in any essential way, but in terms of goals, feminism, etc.

Thanks...

collin