Feminist Accused of Difference from the Self
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Feminist Accused of Difference from the Self Introduction Mary J. Harrison earned a Ph.D. from the Facul- A woman’s intellectual and academic work bears ty of Education at York University in 2014. Her dis- a complex emotional history. The infantile separation sertation, Thinking Through the (M)Other: Reading of one’s body and mind from that of the mother is at Women’s Memoirs of Learning, was supported by a the origin of one’s capacity to think, learn, and cre- doctoral fellowship awarded by the Social Scienc- ate something in and of the world (Kristeva 2001; Pitt es and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2006). The development of subjectivity—of an individ- ual self—thus depends on an unbearable and destruc- Abstract tive loss: the loss of the infantile belief that one’s self and In this article, I read Cynthia G. Franklin’s (2009) dis- one’s mother are the same (Harrison 2013). Alice Pitt cussion of Jane Gallop’s (1997) Feminist Accused of and Chloë Brushwood Rose (2007) argue that attending Sexual Harassment, arguing that Franklin’s criticism to the psychical processes that structure one’s capacity is rooted in disavowed identification. Next, I explore to think and learn will help to free up those capacities Gallop’s memoir as generating such strong reactions as and, concurrently, that analysing the blocks, strange Franklin’s because it describes the intense and originat- eruptions, and difficulties of one’s intellectual life can ing conflict of separating from one’s mother to develop help elucidate the vicissitudes of the inner world. They a mind of one’s own. I conclude by analysing my own call this the work of making emotional significance and identifications with Gallop and her text. argue that such work is crucial for those who wish to make for themselves a life of the mind. In this article I Résumé explore the emotional significance of the mother’s dif- Dans cet article, j’examine la discussion par Cynthia G. ference for feminist women academics. Franklin (2009) de l’ouvrage Feminist Accused of Sexual A life of the mind can feel at once welcoming Harassment (1997) de Jane Gallop, en affirmant que la and alienating for women scholars who may experience critique de Franklin est enracinée dans une identifica- the academy as a site of simultaneous belonging and tion désavouée. Ensuite, j’explore l’idée que le mémoire estrangement. Nancy K. Miller (1997) evokes this am- de Gallop génère des réactions aussi vives que celles de bivalence with her questions: “Can a woman, more pre- Franklin parce qu’elle décrit le conflit intense et initial cisely, how can a woman be at home in the university? de la séparation d’avec la mère pour développer sa pro- Or can’t she?” (983). Susanne Luhmann (2004) argues pre individualité. Je conclus en analysant mes propres that generational conflict is a factor in what constitutes identifications avec Gallop et son texte. at-home-ness for feminist scholars. Because the future directions of Women’s and Gender Studies, for instance, will not necessarily align with the history of the field— its past directions—what feels homely for a given schol- ar will likely shift with her generational identifications. Generational conflict implicates the dilemma of the mother’s difference. Luhmann contends that the moth- ers of institutionalized Women’s and Gender Studies of- ten experience its future as a loss if it doesn’t align with the past priorities and paradigms that those mothers set in place. Through the inevitability of generational 195 Atlantis 37.2 (2), 2016 www.msvu.ca/atlantis conflict—inevitable because it is a condition of our very terpretations of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. subjectivity and capacity to think—the mothers of the I read it as a tale describing academic women’s defenses field may no longer feel at home in the very home that against the condition of loss that enables thinking. Gal- their labour built. lop’s memoir chronicles the thinking woman’s need to Clare Hemmings (2011) highlights how genera- navigate the problematic reality that she is not of one tional conflict informs the structure of scholarly femi- body, mind, and self with her intellectual mothers. In nist narratives, conversations, and debates. She notices section three, I turn my focus to my own ambivalent that Western feminist theory tends to proceed along identifications vis-à-vis this memoir, noting the ways in particular discursive lines: progress and loss narratives which my reading repeats both daughterly violence on dominate the field. Generational conflict haunts these Gallop and motherly violence on the graduate students narrative structures: progress narratives tend to be em- who populate the text. I risk exposing the tangle of my ployed by junior feminist scholars who imagine that defenses and identifications in order to think in new Women’s and Gender Studies is steadily ridding itself of ways about how ambivalence structures academic life the exclusions that have marked its history. Hemmings for women. argues that theorists who deploy progress narratives cannot notice the debt that they owe to the founding Memoir and the Crisis in Authority mothers of feminist theory and Women’s Studies. In In her book Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural wishing to represent Women’s and Gender Studies as Theory, and the University Today, Cynthia G. Frank- increasingly inclusive, progress narratives can exclude lin (2009) argues that academic memoirs, proliferat- the important contributions of the intellectual mothers ing rapidly since the 1990s, offer us a vantage through of the field. Loss narratives, on the other hand, oper- which to consider the problems, issues, and intellectu- ate through a reversal of this kind of discursive aggres- al trends that higher education faces in the context of sion. More senior theorists who tend to draw on these the increasingly neo-liberal university. In particular, narratives imagine a loss of intellectual rigour in the Franklin is interested in debates surrounding and shap- field as well as of political action. These theorists ap- ing the status of the humanities, contending that “ac- pear resistant to change in the academic terrain of fem- ademic memoirs serve as a barometer for the state of inist theory and resentful that junior scholars take their the humanities during a period of crisis” (2). She also work in new and unanticipated directions. These nar- notes the way in which the genre of memoir offers es- rative structures, which organize the field, both effect tablished academics (to whom she refers as participat- and reflect conflict; conflicts within feminist theorizing ing in the “academic star system” [see, for example, 1]) can feel so intolerable because they recall an intolerable a complex opportunity to comment on their academ- condition of subjectivity and language: the original con- ic and institutional environments: academic memoirs, frontation with the mother’s otherness. frequently published by prestigious university presses, To grapple with how generational conflict often offer critiques of the university, but they do so emerges in feminist narrative and what kinds of emo- from the author’s secure and privileged location as ten- tional significance one might make of it, I undertake a ured “stars” within the academy. Franklin highlights the close reading of a memoir by an academic feminist, one way in which the memoir genre softens the blow of ac- who positions herself as both a daughter and a mother ademic memoirists’ critiques not only because of their of Women’s Studies in the United States. A story about ironic position vis-à-vis the academy—they critique the generational conflict and its effect on women’s at-home- very institutions which support their capacity to offer ness in the university, Jane Gallop’s (1997) Feminist critique—but also because the genre itself is structured Accused of Sexual Harassment brings into sharp relief around a logic of individualism and, as such, allows the emotional significance of the dilemma the moth- writers to present their views as personal while also, er’s otherness poses for the feminist academic woman. paradoxically, overlooking the “ways reigning theories I begin with Cynthia G. Franklin’s (2009) reading of can be fueled by personal investments” (26). Franklin Gallop’s memoir, asking what is at stake for Franklin in is interested in “the complex story that accounts of in- Feminist Accused. In the next section, I offer my own in- dividual professors’ lives have to tell about the current 196 Atlantis 37.2 (2), 2016 www.msvu.ca/atlantis cultural and political climate in the academy” and re- generation informs the “academic star system,” but also gards memoirs as “offering spaces that are more mus- how that system—which both influences and is influ- ing and pliable than those afforded by theory [allowing enced by who gets canonized as the fathers and mothers authors to] display contradictions between the personal of a given field of thought—is structured by race, class, and political without having to reconcile them” (1-2, 2). power, and privilege. Yet Franklin is also wary of the individualism of “the Writing of academic memoirs written since monological genre of ‘me-moir’” because it can obscure the 1990s, Franklin (2009) asks: “Must a focus on the the power and privilege inherent to the academic mem- individual happen at the expense of larger, potentially oirist’s professional position (158). revolutionary, social and political identities and con- Even for scholars committed “in their other cerns that challenged the academy in the 1980s?” (6). work…[to] a progressive politics and structural analyses This echoes a question that fuels feminist scholars’ de- of power,” memoir can offer tenured academics a space bates about the dilution of a politically feminist agenda in which to posit themselves an exceptional individual that may or may not accompany feminist theory’s in- and thus, Franklin (2009) argues, to overlook their own stitutionalization in the academy.