Boundaries Are for Sissies: Violation in Jane Gallop and Henry James

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the tension between protecting sexual freedom and developing a paradigm of sexual vulnerability. In keeping with its abiding commitment to “antinormativity,” defiance and “opposition to straight culture,” queer studies consistently measures the rigor of its radical critiques by advertising their repudiation of the putative “lines” distinguishing the normal from not-normal in social-psychic life. Perhaps nowhere is the operation of this logic more vividly and vigorously defended than in the field’s approach to childhood sexuality and, in particular, to questions pertaining to sexual innocence and violation. Jane Gallop’s Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), a manifesto against the ideological underpinnings of sexual harassment laws and its deleterious assault on feminism and sexual freedom—through an account of her own real-life defense against accusations of sexual harassment by two graduate students—offers an early and sensational engagement with these questions. This chapter reads Gallop’s text alongside Henry James’ short story, “The Pupil,” in which a precocious young boy develops an intimate connection to his older male teacher. This chapter looks at how Jean Laplanche’s “general theory of seduction” provides a new rubric for distinguishing the fantasy of childhood innocence from the reality of asymmetrical sexual development.