Jane Gallop Research Articles

Sondheim from the Side

This article is a short introduction to ‘Sondheim from the Side’, the Special Issue on the late influential American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, which focuses on the reception experience of minoritarian artists and critics to his body of work. Historicizing the impetus for the collection in the wake of Sondheim’s death in November 2021, and citing a number of queer and feminist scholars on the politics of reception – including Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Jane Gallop, Eve Sedgwick, David Román and Carolyn Steedman – this article theorizes the emphasis that the collection places on critically generous, first-person articles that centre rather than occlude the author’s social location and affective experience of various works, and it links this emphasis to methods in the field of performance studies. Borrowing from Special Issue contributor Gabrielle Hoyt and Jewish rituals of mourning, the introduction also frames the collection itself as a kind of prayer, or Kaddish, for the deceased artist.

Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus

Amia Srinivasan’s Feminist Analysis of Pornography

My research will focus on Amia Srinivasan's political and cultural characterization of sex. In her 2021 book The Right to Sex, she asks about how we should talk about sex and what is sexual justice and sexual politics. Specifically, I will be looking at her philosophizing on pornography, the idea of societally imposed sexual inclusion, and sexual relationships as depicted in pornography. The specific essay where she discusses this is Talking to my Students about Pornography. However, I will also examine some of the other essays in the book (The Right To Sex, On Not Sleeping with Your Students, and Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism) as I believe these essays contain overlapping ideas on feminism and connect to her analysis of pornography in significant ways. I will also look into any follow-up to the publication of her essays, such as interviews about the book or further comments to ensure that I am working with the most recent and accurate depiction of her opinions. There is a lot of formal academic response to her book, likely because of how new and popular the publication is. I will focus my research on papers that review her work, and how they critique her viewpoints or agree with them. Particularly I am looking at responses by Judith Butler, Maggie Doherty, Kathleen Stock, Elaine Blair, James H. Lewis, Khaleel Rajwani, and others whom I may come across in my research. I think doing so would show how others engage with her work and how her work fits within the existing feminist literature. Also, I will research deeper into the authors she has mentioned directly in her essays, such as Catherine A. Mikkinon, Jane Gallop, Freud, etc.., to better understand their views. All of this is to help create a contextual and comprehensive account of Srinivasan’s feminist characterization of sex and pornography in the twenty-first century. The significance of this study is to better understand recent progress in gender relations and power dynamics in the politics of the twentieth century. Srinivasan’s work is important because it is both relevant and grounded in the philosophical discipline; she writes about the ideas of past philosophers and the unique culture of our time simultaneously. The study will be in presentation format, with an extensive poster and script.

Theory, Place: Exile and Roots

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...

Through Thick and Thin

Through Thick and Thin

MEANS OF EXPRESSING LANGUAGE AND GENDER IDENTITY IN THE POETRY BY ANNE SEXTON, SYLVIA PLATH, ADRIENNE RICH

The article deals with the issues of construction of language and gender identity in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. It studies poets' attitude to the language and gender, it describes what motifs and images were employed by contemporary American female poets to express their vision of the language and silence. Special attention is paid to the concept of women’s writing, modern theories of corporeality, sexuality and the problems of the body and the language, which have been considered as major features of women’s poetry in the second half of the 20th century. 
 The theoretical background of the article is based on the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, Alicia Ostriker, in which they defined the concepts of women's writing and language, women's subject, bodiness and corporality. The article analyzes a number of related issues: firstly, it determines how well-known theories of women's writing are consistent with the peculiarities of the female experience and its realization in a poetic text, especially on the level of the themes and motifs; secondly, it studies how the motifs of language and silence are expressed in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, what are the similarities between their imagery and what are the differences. The article analyses modern feminist works as well as gender studies.

On the Status of Rights

On the Status of Rights

Review of 'Sexuality, Disability, and Aging' by Jane Gallop

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Jane Gallop. Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019

К настоящему моменту вопросы сексуальности и нормативности все чаще поднимаются в рамках disability studies и социальной и культурной геронтологии (King 2016; King, Almack, and Jones 2019; McRuer 2006; Pickard 2018; Shakespeare 2014; Westwood 2016; Westwood and Price 2016). Те немногие работы, которые были опубликованы на русском языке, предлагают подробный и качественный анализ таких тем, как стигматизация сексуальности людей с инвалидностью (Ярская-Смирнова 2002), проявление гендерной идентичности и сексуальности в условиях психоневрологического интерната (Клепикова и Утехин 2012), гегемонная и крип-маскулинность (Филлипс 2012; Хартблей 2014), женский опыт инвалидности (Доминелли 2004) и стратегии создания семьи (Носенко-Штейн 2018). Социальные исследователи старения в российском контексте обращались к изучению контроля над сексуальностью людей в старшем возрасте (Зеликова 2018) и телесного опыта старения (Рогозин 2018). Несмотря на гораздо большее количество зарубежных работ, книга Джейн Гэллоп «Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus» стала одним из первых изданий, полностью посвященных вопросам, возникающим на стыке негетеронормативной сексуальности, старения и инвалидности. Ее центральная задача – анализ проживания сексуальности как опыта и идентичности в контексте жизни с инвалидностью, приобретенной в старшем возрасте (с. 13). Text in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-228-234

What We Don't See in What We See: A Response to Cinema and Fascination

What We Don't See in What We See:A Response to Cinema and Fascination Ackbar Abbas (bio) The world is an enigma, Nietzsche said, but an enigma composed of its various solutions (qtd. in Calasso 3). In much the same way, we can say that fascination in cinema is an enigma made up of its various interpretations. The essays in this special issue of Postmodern Culture, each brilliant in its own very different way, draw on a wide range of disciplines—from psychoanalysis and philosophy to sound art and quantum physics—as if to say that what is fascinating about cinema exists everywhere and not just in cinema alone. However, each essay manages to construct its argument around a reading of one or two films. The arguments are staged in dialogue with Freud or Lacan, Blanchot, Barad, or Bersani, but these canonical figures are not given the last word on the enigma of fascination. (More often than not, they appear like apotropaic gargoyles attaching themselves to an argument.) Rather, the significant emphasis is always on how fascination informs and deforms all the elements in cinema, including words and images—informs by de-forming them, like the sly way Deleuze's "dark precursor" works, or the way Lucretius's clinamen conditions atoms to swerve from the straight and narrow. What emerges from this special issue, then, is not a unified theory of fascination, but something perhaps more valuable: descriptions from the field of how fascination is present in a film and how a viewer or reader experiences it. Taken together, the essays suggest that behind the question "What is fascination?" lies the question "What is cinema?" Let me begin with Kwasu D. Tembo's essay, which raises some key questions about fascination and cinema, including, if only by implication, the question of film form. Tembo notes that fascination is often used today as a term of approbation, especially when we do not know what to say, but he also reminds us that there is a sinister side to it, highlighted by the psychoanalytic study of sexuality. When sex is linked to power, as it always is, we find "aberrations" like sadism and masochism. In the first half of the essay, Tembo brings out the heavy artillery (Freud, Lacan, Gallop, and others) to argue that Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002) is about psycho-sexual fascination as a form of bondage. The film deals with the affair between Lee Halloway and her boss Edward Grey; Lee has masochistic tendencies, and Grey sadistic. Not unlike the master/bondsman dialectic, psycho-sexual bondage is "bidirectional." Furthermore, it turns around a Lacanian "thing," an objet petit a, a thing that is a no-thing—like the dead earthworm Lee mails to Grey—which Tembo calls in his title "the power of absolute nothing." The work of Jane Gallop, herself a reader of Freud and Lacan, opens the further possibility of a feminist reading. However, it should be obvious that what accounts for the film's fascination is not any scholarly apparatus but its overall tone, the fact that it is not a case study but a romantic comedy given several generic twists. In the film, bondage as "bidirectional exchange" is less a psychological insight than a comic formula whose automatism makes it appropriate for farce: so less a psychoanalytic tour de force than a Schnitzleresque tour de farce. The marriage of true minds takes the farcical form of a sadist and a masochist falling in love. Of course, it will have to be a kinky kind of love, romantic comedy taken to unexpected places. Nevertheless, like more conventional affairs, kinkiness has its own trials and tribulations, as well as its own precise if perverse algorithm of desire, seen most clearly in the minute detail of the fetish. One example is Grey's red pencil. He uses it like an instrument of torture, a red-hot branding iron, to circle Lee's typing errors. Tembo points to an even better example, the dead earthworm that Lee mails to Grey when all else fails to rekindle his passion. She tries enticing him to no avail by placing a sexy photo of herself on his desk or dressing...

BODY IMAGES IN THE POETRY BY ANNE SEXTON, SYLVIA PLATH, ADRIENNE RICH

The research is an attempt to analyze female body images in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. Special attention is paid to the concept of women’s writing, modern theories of corporeality, sexuality and the problems of the body and the language, which have been considered as major features of women’s poetry in the second half of the 20th century. The theoretical background of the article is based on the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, Alicia Ostriker, Christina Britzolakis, Jacqueline Rose, in which they defined the concepts of women's writing and language, women's subject, bodiness and corporality. The article analyzes a number of related issues: firstly, it determines how well-known theories of women's writing are consistent with the peculiarities of the female experience and its realization in a poetic text, especially on the level of the themes and motifs; secondly, it studies how the female body images are expressed in the poetry by Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, what are the similarities between their corporeal imagery and what are the differences. The article analyses modern feminist works as well as gender studies.

You, Me, We: Encountering Art, Autobiography and ‘Potential Space’ in the Present

In order to critically interrogate the conditions in which we live, and the world around us, feminists have turned to the complexity of their own experience. As we have learned, the time of autobiography is key to its political function: the occasional is the time of prefatory critical reflection (Nancy K. Miller); the belated is the time of the anecdotal (Jane Gallop); the after-effect is the time of belated surprise (Shoshana Felman). But what of the present moment? In this article, Morra proposes that the representation of the temporal, spatial, and historical present is a powerful form of critique. Bringing to bear Maria Lassnig’s art practice onto feminist theories of autobiography, Morra suggests that the potential space of the present (D.W. Winnicott) is fundamental to autobiography’s ability to provide us with a form of individual and collective feminist resistance.

Laura Kipnis. Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. 256 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewLaura Kipnis. Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. 256 pp.Jane GallopJane Gallop Search for more articles by this author Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of a number of books, including Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997) and Anecdotal Theory (2002). Gallop has just completed Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (forthcoming).PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 2Winter 2019Davidson and His Interlocutors Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701001 Views: 301Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Critic as Parasite

The Critic as Parasite H. Aram Veeser (bio) Critics are sometimes felt to be parasitic upon the really creative and original writers. The word "parasite" is, at its etymological root, a spatial metaphor—a being that dwells "next to" (para-) a source of "food" (sitos)—the relationship between a parasite and its host gains coherence from a shared space. In everyday speech a parasite is "a sponger, a lazy profiteer, a drain on society." But in a biologist's terms, the parasite is "an ancient and respectable view of life" (Playfair 2007, 19). Michel Serres in his study, The Parasite, says that the parasite is not entirely bad. A parable illustrates that parasites disrupt the usual economies of capitalism: The parasite is invited to the table d'hote; in return, he must regale the other diners with his stories and his mirth. To be exact, he exchanges good talk for good food; he buys his dinner, paying for it in words. It is the oldest profession in the world. A vagrant, dying of hunger, found himself one evening at the kitchen window of a well-known restaurant. The aromas were delicious. He filled himself on them and that calmed his hunger pangs a bit. One of the scullions discovered the trick and, quickly coming outside, demanded money for what could be called the service rendered. The vagrant and the scullion were about to fight over their disagreement when a third person came by who offered to settle the matter. Give me a coin, he said. The wretch did so, frowning. He put the coin down on the sidewalk and with the heel of his shoe made it ring a bit. This noise, he said, giving his decision, is pay enough for the aroma of the tasty dishes. The roast is the thing eaten, and an aroma comes from it. The coin is the thing exchanged, and a sound comes from it. If the coin is worth the roast, then the sound of the coin is worth the aroma of the food. And he returned the coin to the vagrant. Justice is done. (Serres 2007) Serres concludes this story in a way that makes me think that parasites are a little bit like literary critics. The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic. He crosses the exchange, makes it into a diagonal. He does not barter; he exchanges money. He [End Page 409] wants to give his voice for matter, (hot) air for solid, superstructure for infrastructure. People laugh, the parasite is expelled, he is made fun of, he is beaten, he cheats us; but he invents anew. This novelty must be analyzed. This sound, this aroma, passing for money or roast. (2007) The parasite's positive trait is this capacity to introduce something new and to throw existing arrangements out of whack. Jane Gallop told me theory had completely overturned the literary canon, as early as 1985. Beginning with the so-called culture wars around that time, critics have been beaten and made fun of and had their lines withdrawn. By the early 1990s, the same moment when Bill Clinton outlawed welfare mothers, literary critics were on their way to being expelled from the workforce. But some potentially good qualities of parasitism still make their appearance in the interviews that I have completed with some of the few remaining North American literary critics. I hasten to add that parasite was not always an insult—it was respectable in ancient Rome to live off the hospitality of others. In the Renaissance, the sponger and the hanger-on were a feature of court society. It was only with the rise of middle-class respectability that parasitism became abominable. Capitalism has no tolerance for parasites. Paid flatterer cannot be your job description on your W-2 form. If you have as I had a self-made-millionaire Uncle Henry, that uncle will refuse to be a sucker and hire a sycophant to stroke his ego. Or so he will pretend—in fact Uncle Henry will nurture hangers-on, "helpers," and servants with vague duties. Serres links together three categories of parasites: biological, social...

Sexual/Theoretical Politics: An Interview with Jane Gallop

Sexual/Theoretical Politics: An Interview with Jane Gallop

The Feminist Seduction: Cyborg Writing and Womanspeak

The Feminist Seduction:Cyborg Writing and Womanspeak Erin Holliday-Karre (bio) The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2006 brought about a resurgence of scholarship on his work. While writing this essay a wealth of specifically feminist scholarship appeared including a 2011 panel at the American Comparative Literature Association conference entitled "Rethinking Baudrillard and Feminist Theory." In her call for papers Ingrid M. Hoofd writes: "From Jane Gallop's 'French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism,'…to Douglas Kellner's 'Baudrillard's Affront to Feminism,' the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has been widely condemned in the 80s and 90s as an anti-feminist philosopher." Hoofd suggests that it is not just Baudrillard's death but his increasing relevance that makes him important to feminism: "It has become urgent to revisit Baudrillard's relevance for feminist theory in light of the latter's decreasing grip on global politics." According to Hoofd, Baudrillard has become progressively relevant by defining many theories of global politics. Thus, Hoofd argues that feminists need to reconsider their earlier critiques of Baudrillard in order to increase and maintain their own political relevance. But in most of the recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for sociologist Victoria Grace's Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists have focused on Baudrillard's later theories of simulation, the trans-sexual, and cybernetics in order to maintain global relevance, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979).1 In the most recent full length feminist work on Baudrillard, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body (2007), Kim Toffoletti only tangentially addresses Seduction: "My purpose here isn't to defend Baudrillard on the topic of seduction…rather I look elsewhere in his body of work using his theory of simulation to make sense of posthuman images in a climate characterized by the abundance of signs and the implosion of meaning" (2007, 49). [End Page 295] Toffoletti's assumption here is that a theory of seduction is not as important as simulation for understanding today's "climate." A critical engagement with Seduction is, I argue, key to understanding just how we, as feminists, are now in the position of not only trying to "make sense" of the "implosion of meaning" but also defending our "grip on global politics." I agree that a feminist revaluation of Baudrillard's work is "urgent," but I also argue that as long as feminists refuse to engage with Seduction, they will continue to miss an unacknowledged historical strand of feminist theory that speaks to our continued grip on global politics. Contrary to popular feminist belief, Baudrillard's work on seduction is not rooted in a fundamental disregard for or antagonistic stance toward women. But the fact that this remains a prevailing point of view proves that feminists ban together more than most people give them credit for. Jane Gallop blacklisted Seduction in the 1980s and, since then, most feminist scholars skip over this seminal work, usually with a nod to Gallop,2 before moving on to engage later works, such as Simulations or Transparency of Evil.3 In "French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism" Jane Gallop states that the "primary" reason for her dismissal of Baudrillard is what she sees as a "rather rabid attack on feminism" (1987, 113). He is the French theorist who outright establishes "an adversarial relation to feminism" (1987, 113). Gallop is admittedly not upset with what Baudrillard says about the feminine but rather by his assertion that women should allow him to counsel them: "Baudrillard cannot seduce feminism with his truth, because he protects his truth from being seduced by feminism" (1987, 114). Gallop's issue with Baudrillard, then, is that he refuses to see feminism as itself seductive. Thus, Gallop has laid down a challenge that many feminists have been loath to take up, preferring to reduce Gallop's critique to the idea that Baudrillard is sexist. In one such example, Rebecca Schneider argues that the timing of Baudrillard's theory of seduction is significant because it occurred just as women and people of color were beginning to gain access to the spheres of production: "Baudrillard might be read as representative of an anxiety born of...

Editor’s Introduction: “Feminism’s Abject Selves”

There have not been a great number of feminist conferences held at the Maison Francaise of Columbia. previous one, which may also have been the first one, took place over thirty years ago, in November 1984. Organized by Nancy K. Miller and Michael Riffaterre, it was one of the then ongoing series of annual colloquia and gave rise to the influential volume of edited by Miller and published by Columbia University Press in 1986. list of conference participants reads like a Who's Who of academic feminism at the time, with a roster including (in order of appearance) Carolyn Heilbrun, Catharine Stimpson, Nancy Vickers, Mary Ann Caws, Alice Jardine, Jane Gallop, Domna Stanton, Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, and Naomi Schor, as well as organizer Nancy Miller; the concluding remarks were delivered by Gita May. Monique Wittig was also a participant, presenting her paper The Mark of Gender, which was published the following year in Feminist Issues 5 and eventually became a chapter in her 1992 book Straight Mind and Other Essays. (1) In April 1985, the following year, the Maison Francaise hosted a conference on Simone de Beauvoir (who had herself spoken there in the late forties). I unfortunately missed both these events, but I heard about them. In what turned out to be a small twist of historical irony on a personal scale, the announcements for them played a part in my decision to become a graduate student in the Department of and Romance Philology at Columbia, starting in September 1985. (If I'd been more diligent in my research I might have noticed that feminism was not, in fact, a central driving force in the department during those years.) When the book of Gender was published, I'd just started graduate studies, and I still have the volume, with its pink cover featuring a drawing of an army boot and a stiletto-heeled pump. In the interim, there have been many conferences on any number of topics hosted by the department at Columbia, but feminism per se doesn't seem to have figured among them. It thus seemed like it might be time to revisit feminist topics, which along with everything else have changed a great deal over the past thirty years. result of this rumination was Leduc, Wittig: Feminism's Abject Selves, which took place, also at the Maison Francaise at Columbia, on April 17 and 18, 2015. idea for this conference was conceived on Saturday, October 5, 2013, over drinks at the end of the Proust Reread conference that had just taken place at the Maison Francaise. Its origin was a conversation between Jeanine Plottel and Anne Garreta, who discovered a keen common interest in the works and of Monique Wittig. They observed that since 2014 marked the fiftieth anniversary of publication of Wittig's novel L'Opoponax--I won't say seminal novel, because that work is anything but seminal, so let's say germinal instead--of Wittig's germinal novel L'Opoponax, which propelled her to much-deserved fame with the Prix Medicis in 1964, this important anniversary should be marked by a conference. Many further conversations ensued about how best to pay homage to Wittig's legacy. Eventually the possibility was evoked of questioning what had happened to the once-much-discussed topic of French Feminism. Whatever Happened to Feminism? was one title we came up with, but we wanted to maintain a literary emphasis, not to attempt any sort of of the event (as the Poetics of Feminism had apparently been intended to be, but the discipline and its state had become somewhat more murkily chaotic in the interim). We decided--or, to be entirely accurate, I decided--to focus on three key figures: Beauvoir, Leduc, and Wittig. This came about because from Whatever Happened to Feminism? the topic evolved into Wittig, and the Legacies of Feminism, and yet still I felt something was missing. I was also told that the word legacy in a title was a sure turnoff, indicating a tedious adherence to the past rather than a vigorous forward-looking dynamic, but to be honest that was not really why I decided to abandon the concept of legacies. …

Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave

Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited:The Case of the Second Wave Cecily Devereux (bio) “Où sont-elles passées les hystériques de jadis,” asked Jacques Lacan in 1977, “ces femmes merveilleuses, les Anna O., les Emmy von N.?... Qu’est-ce qui remplace aujourd’hui les symptômes hystériques d’autrefois?” [“Where have they gone, the hysterics of yesteryear … those amazing women, the Anna O.s, the Emmy von N.s? What is there now to take the place of the hysterical symptoms of long ago?”] We might answer that the despised hysterics of yesteryear have been replaced by the feminist radicals of today. Elaine Showalter “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender” When the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (apa) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm III) appeared in February 1980, hysteria,1 while it appeared in the index, had apparently lost the status it had held through the first and second editions as an identifiable and specific clinical disorder.2 Like some other historically familiar and, crucially, saliently “female” conditions, hysteria had shifted to another category of reference. Thus, in 1980, for nymphomania [End Page 19] readers were asked to “See Psychosexual disorder not elsewhere classified 282–283” (489), for frigidity to “See Inhibited sexual excitement 279” (487), and for hysteria to “See Conversion disorder 244 (247), Dissociative disorders 253–260, [and] Factitious disorders 285–90” (488).3 As a term used not only in relatively recent medical and psychiatric discourse but for centuries “as a dramatic medical metaphor for everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable” in women (Micale, “Hysteria and its Historiography” 320) and as “evidence” of both the instability of the female mind and the social function of women defined in relation to their reproductive capacity (their “wandering” wombs), hysteria’s implicit demotion to a broader, less specific category of disorder might have been met with a generally good-riddance kind of relief at this point in the twentieth century, well into the Second Wave of feminism that had taken shape in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s. Indeed, given what Charles Bernheimer suggests is the persistence for centuries of recommending a “cure [through marriage and pregnancy and thus] by submission to the yoke of patriarchy” (3),4 the disappearance from the North American diagnostic manual of the etymologically gendered term hysteria might have been anticipated to generate some small celebration, at least among those interested in the status and the rights of women. In fact, however, at more or less the same moment hysteria was removed from the dsm, it was emerging at the centre of a new discourse of academic literary feminism that had taken shape as a critical and political practice, as Jane Gallop suggests, “around 1981.”5 In the 1970s and 1980s, in what Elaine Showalter described in 1993 as “a new twist in the history of the disorder,” hysteria was being “reclaim[ed]” “in the name of feminism” (286), figuring prominently in the foundational texts of what Showalter had earlier characterized in 1985 as the “new feminist criticism” and what in many contexts would be called feminist theory (The New Feminist Criticism). Historically linked with femininity for hundreds of years, hysteria’s involuntary, uncontrollable, somatic symptoms were coming to be understood in the emerging critical feminist discourse not as a medical condition but a cultural one, an embodied index of forms of oppression [End Page 20] that Showalter described as “a specifically feminine protolanguage, communicating through the body messages that cannot be verbalized” (“Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender” 286). This “feminine protolanguage” could be functionalized as a space for marking feminist reaction and resistance to the patriarchal oppression it indexed: as such, it could be seen to operate not only as what Juliet Mitchell represented at the time as a “pre-political manifestation of feminism” (cited in Showalter, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender” 333)6 but as a new manifestation of feminism at that moment. At one level, the “reclaiming” of hysteria in feminist theory and criticism is the logical obverse of its removal at the same moment from the medical discourse of the dsm. Both gestures suggest that what is called hysteria is not...

Mark Twain, Memory, and the Failures of Historicism

I want to begin with the rather simple statement that Mark Twain’s autobiographies—and here I am referring mostly to Life on the Mississippi and the text we now call the Autobiography—hold open the past as a resource for slowing down time. In itself this isn’t a highly provocative claim; I imagine that many would agree that we find in Twain’s work a desire to hold off futurity. I think, too, that it is fair to say that his continual return to the materials of the past is in part motivated by modernity’s culture of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence becomes an issue when the speed of “progress” requires a diminishing of the present in addition to the past. Temporality, under modernity, is organized into the past, present, and a horizon of expectation known as the future. The future increasingly encroaches on the present by directing our thinking and desires forward; Twain well understood the risks and anxiety of this minimized present through the market logic of investment. Planned obsolesce exploits such anxieties through the introduction of looming future dates of expiration. While ancient, dead forms of culture were of no interest to Twain, those still-working elements of the past had some attraction. The ability to use these elements, to repeat certain experiences, to laugh twice at the same joke: these are what he understands to be threatened by obsolescence.1 While we recognize the extent to which narrative has broken down in his Autobiography—it is precisely this feature that has made this text’s reputation— we might not immediately link this formal feature to Twain’s anxious response to modernity. If we carefully consider how individual moments of breakdown are framed and what they might contribute to any possible larger narrative structure and authorial strategy, we expose what I would like to suggest we recognize as narrative leftovers or remainders. These originate in, and are signifiers of, a failure to fall into line with the requirements of a certain temporal

The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Gallop, Jane (review)

Reviewed by: The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time by Gallop, Jane Tristan Deveney Gallop, Jane. 2011. The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $74.95 hc. $21.95 sc. 184 pp. Emily Eakin’s obituary for Jacques Derrida in the New York Times observes that his death marked the moment at which “the era of big theory came quietly to a close” (2004, D12). This equivalence between the death of Derrida and the death of his ideas prompts Jane Gallop’s reconsideration of authorship in her new book, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (23). For Gallop, the ideas laid out by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and by Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” (1969) continue to offer new insights despite the obituary’s proclamation of the death of theory. Gallop insists, however, on a new reading of authorship in the twenty-first century: the strangeness of the relation between literal and theoretical death lies at the heart of her study, as a function of authors’ attempts to mourn their own deaths. Much of the recent critical work on the death of the author addresses the evolution of the role of theory in literary studies over the last fifteen years, and it is into this camp that Gallop falls. However, while critics like Loren Glass and Seán Burke in different ways elided the literal nature of rupture, Gallop is interested in such endings, particularly as the death, return, or persistence of the author affects the temporal modes of a text. She addresses how anxieties about literal death and the death of influence become tools for generating meaning. For Gallop, the question of the death of the author becomes one of connecting physical death with obsolescence and the perception of anachronism. She does this in a series of close readings of short passages from works by major theoretical figures (Barthes, Derrida, Sedgwick, and Spivak). As she writes, “the title of this book, The Deaths of the Author, is meant to refer to both the literary theoretical concept and the real life drama, to make it impossible to think either separately, to insist we think them together” (5). Doing so involves a reconsideration of the temporality of writing: the act of writing is inscribed, she suggests, with the author’s awareness of his or her own death as an approaching event that will affect not only bodily existence but theoretical influence. Writing becomes caught up with the change in status from living to dead (7). The erotics of the body in this moment of passage have a great deal to do with the ethics of memorialization, in which the anticipation of rereading is a kind of anticipation of physical return, of touch that is desired. The futurity of desire (which in this case is a desire for the persistence of the present moment) as something deferred or unsatisfied is connected, Gallop argues, with the dailiness of reading, with the return of the author in a particular moment of the reader’s life. [End Page 179] Motivating the desire for the present moment is an anxiety about failures of anticipation and about past assumptions that are recorded in print even after they have been proven wrong. The recording of these failures both sustains the moment of the past assumption and threatens to elide the author’s influence, so that writing risks the death of influence in the recording of such failures. Gallop suggests that “the printed word, necessarily anachronistic, is where the writer confronts her status as a dead author” (114). The argument here is less about reading the death of the author than it is about what it means to commit to writing at a time when authorial death has become a critical commonplace, something that remains in the back of the writer’s mind at all times. For Gallop, the death of the author is a moment not just of anticipation but of surprise, and what she finds most fascinating is the attempt on the part of the writer to make his or her text surprising as well...