Theory, PlaceExile and Roots Jane Gallop When I was invited to give this talk, I definitely wanted to come speak to you here. But I was put off—I hesitated—because of this year's topic, "Spaces." I felt I had nothing to say about the topic. Over five decades of writing about theory, I had never really focused on space. Whereas, in contrast, I have frequently written about time. My 1992 book on feminist literary theory was called "Around 1981," because it centered on that particular moment. My 2011 book The Deaths of the Author is subtitled "Reading and Writing in Time," because time is absolutely central to its retheorization of the death of the author. And my most recent book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, is subtitled "Queer Temporalities of the Phallus," since it recasts the phallus as a temporal concept, moving toward a conceptualization of sexuality and identity as lived over time. My work, it seemed to me, has been a continuing insistence on thinking about time, and I just didn't feel a focus on time would be appropriate to keynote a conference on Spaces. For the last 15 years or so, my work has been very influenced by "queer temporality," an important theoretical movement in the first decade of this century. In my latest book, in order to explain queer temporality, I cite a 2005 book by Jack Halberstam; I teach this same Halberstam book in my graduate seminar on Queer Theory. But speaking to you here today, I must confess that the title of this Halberstam book that I have written about, quoted, and taught is: In a Queer Time and Place. And while I have explored the resources of this book for talking about "queer time," I have never so much as commented upon the last word of the title, never followed its interest in "Place." So when, a little over a year ago, I accepted the invitation to come speak here to you, I determined to pay attention to place in the books I was teaching. What follows is what I found. I will be talking here about how place operates in three different books, all major books of theory from the last third of the 20th century. Two of the books are from the undergraduate course in feminist literary theory that I regularly teach; the third is from the graduate seminar in crip theory that I taught for the first time in spring 2020. All three are texts I have read multiple times. I was certainly aware of the prominence of place in them, but had never really focused on what place was doing there. With the present occasion in mind, over the last year, I began to notice some interesting things about their use of place, and some remarkable connections between [End Page 245] these three books, which I had never seen grouped together. In what follows, I will lay out what I noticed. Let me begin by introducing our three texts. They are probably all books you have heard of, and may have read, even taught or written about. All by Americans, they were published in the 1980s or 1990s. The oldest of the three is Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Published in 1983, it is a collection of her essays from 1967 to 1983. Its title essay is one of the standards of feminist literary theory, and the book's introduction of the term "womanist" has had wide impact on feminist theory generally. The second book, likewise from my undergraduate course on feminist literary theory, is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, published in 1987. It has likewise been widely taught and cited, and has introduced the "borderlands" and the "mestiza" as major theoretical concepts. Our third book is from another course and another decade: Eli Clare's 1999 Exile and Pride. While Clare is a poet well-versed in feminist theory, I do not teach this book as feminist literary theory. It is a classic of crip theory, arguably the earliest book of crip theory, the theoretical field I now work in, which brings together disability and queer theory. Clare's 1999...
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Aug 20, 2024
Natalie Puttkammer 
Open Access