Summer Wood’s review of Linley Erin Hall’s Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie?: The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology in the spring issue of Bitch Magazine has me thinking: because of Larry Summers there is a public debate about the gender wall in the academic sciences, but is there no such wall in the humanities?
When I look at my theory shelf I see blokes: Adorno, Bakhtin, Carroll, Derrida—any one of us could write an abecedary of male theorists. My shelf has three women—Butler, Grosz, Kristeva. Yes, I could have done more work in gender and women’s studies, but the point here is that I didn’t: the shelf of theory texts you pick up in grad school is even more an empire of men than are the shelves of criticism and literature.
I can’t build an empirical case that male lit professors imported theory in the first half of the 20th century to build a bulwark against feminist encroachment, but such a history isn’t unfathomable. When I rolodex the theoryheads among the 200 grad students in my department I come up with few (two?) women, and there is the inadmissable but compelling evidence of Sisyphus’s comment yesterday: “I have finally decided I am not a theorist.”
Sisyphus did not write “male professors stonewalled me,” but her assertion, and the fact that such assertions seem to come more frequently from women than from men, makes me curious about the relationship between lit theory and gender.
can I take a moment to list some characteristics of the stereotypical “theoryhead” grad student?
1. Determined to steer the conversation to whomever his pet theorist is at the time; dominates conversation/pontificates (conversational aggression, stereotypically male)
2. Disciple of one or more theory-oriented professors in the department (often male, often a boys club)
3. Singleminded investment in theory/continental philosophy; comfortable using terms in the “abstract” sense you were talking about in your last post (immodesty, male)
I have to leave this comment unfinished (and probably won’t be able to get back to it for 24 hours or so) but at least at my institution what you’re talking about is very real. Of course philosophy departments are also heavily male (possibly relevant, possibly not).
Kermit – I loved that! I call them theory vampires – they suck the life and soul out of every text they encounter.
Having said that, one of my reading areas was critical and rhetorical theory. You’d better believe that I added the women! I had Butler, Cixous, Harding, Haraway, Irigaray, Barbara Johnson, Kristeva, the Marks/Courtivran collection, Susan Miller, Minh-ha, hooks, Pratt, Louise Phelps, Lynn Worsham, Cheryl Glenn, and a whole bunch of others, including the whole anthology of Feminist Post-Colonial Theory edited by Lewis and Mills.
And yes, I have found many male theory hounds to be hostile to feminist theory and female theorists and their female colleagues. Until I arrived here, I had never been in a situation where women were treated less seriously in the classroom. Welcome to academia.
Huh. I discovered theory—that is, discovered it as something I could be passionately interested in–as an undergrad through the Marks & de Courtivron anthology, _New French Feminisms_ which until I read this post I thought was owned by every single theory-orientated person who got a PhD since 1990 in English, French, or comp lit.
The NFF anthology led me to Kristeva, and especially Irigaray, whom I studied intensively for many years.
Jane Gallop, Jacqueline Rose, Toril Moi, Juliet Mitchell, Cathy Caruth, Joan Copjec, and Kaja Silverman, just within psychoanalytic theory, and just rattling names off the top of my head, seem pretty indispensable, in addition to the ones you mentioned.
Obviously everyone recognizes the theory-vampire type, but I think that some of these practices are more institution-specific than we sometimes can see. Certainly the 2 schools where I did PhD coursework had lots-n-lots of brilliant women in the theory mix–no doubt in part because both of those programs had prominent female theorists.
I’m thrilled to hear so rosy a report, JBJ! Although Kermit’s description of the Feral Theoryhead suggests that the species has spread beyond UW–Madison, it’s good to hear that my experience with a small cohort and narrow cluster of seminars is unrepresentative of the larger discipline. The gender balance on my bookshelf was not helped by my theory orientation professor’s disinterest in psychoanalytic theory.
One consequence of starting this blog is that I now have a much longer reading list, but I’m excited to give NFF a look. The feminist anthology taught in my intro theory class—Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies—didn’t have so powerful an effect for me.
Hey, look, it’s all about me! I’m probably a really bad case to base any arguments on, because I really dislike Kristeva and Irigaray (we may have come to a detente more recently) and I had such a horrible encounter with French Feminism and ecriture feminine in a grad survey course that I was steadfastly anti-psychoanalytic for a very long time.
That said, I took the General Theory list for my field exam along with 4 other women and a guy in my cohort. We were told that no one had taken it in about 5 or 6 years, and that for a long time women only did the Gender and Sexuality list rather than the general one. Since then we’ve had an almost 50-50 split of new grad students and plenty of women take the theory lists.
And, where I was coming from with not being a theorist is from some pressure from my diss advisor (a woman) that I’m not theoretical _enough,_ and that I should model myself more after some of her previous students and current cohort mates, who are all women. My frustration with theory at the moment is how it often does _not_ map well onto the empirical stuff we find in archives … I’m becoming more and more archival and historical in my bent. That said, my last chapter may move back theory-ward as I’m stirring in some Marxists at the moment. And I’ve always been much more comfortable with materialism than psychoanalysis.
Our department has been _pretty_ good with women and gender (hey, you didn’t even mention queer theory — we could add Judith Halberstam, Eve Sedgewick, Teresa de Lauretis, Rosi Braidotti, et al — plus I would list some Marxist feminists, but there I’m getting fuzzy with what is a theorist vs a critic). Where our department has really fallen down on the job and stonewalled grad students right out of the profession has been around race —- our grad students of color should only study themselves in the present, and if they want to make racial critiques in earlier time periods they run into all kinds of trouble.
So, yes —- I agree with the people who say it’s going to vary by departmental culture from one place to another. And some of the studies of English have found that there are gender pressures at the grad and job market level, the real “ceiling” for women is at the Associate prof level. I’ll go find a link if I remember.
I do enjoy theory. People have been surprised by how much I engage with theory in my work. Not sure why that it. Maybe I don’t fit the vampire-type stereotype. Maybe it’s the fact that I can come off like an airhead girl.
Anyway, I’ve never had the relationship with teachers/professors/school the way so many others in grad school have. Most of the people around us are the good-student type. I never was. The terms and phrases commonly used for me were “underachiever” or “has a bad attitude” or it was just assumed that I wasn’t very smart. My approach to learning has always been very independent and somewhat unconventional. I make connections between ideas in ways that aren’t always sanctioned by conservative models of education and disciplinarity.
What this means is that my approach to using theory works for me, but I rarely talk about it the way those called “theory heads” do. They don’t always take me seriously (but yeah, I also have the ditzy girl thing going on). But, I think that we have to keep in mind that there are many ways that educational institutions disenfranchise far too many people. What Sisyphus wrote reminded me once more of some of the many ways this happens.
Huh, I wish I’d gotten exposed to a bit more French feminism, simply to familiarize myself with them. It’s certainly not true in my program that everyone will have come out of it having read the key texts, beyond snippets of Kristeva and Irigaray.
But, to clarify, my department’s more theory-focused than many, including both men and women. The theory vampires (great term, k8!), though, all tend to be men. Personally, I enjoy reading and discussing theory, but when I write, I write about literature, and the theory comes in when I need it, rather than providing a motivating framework. Writing about theory directly is something I’ve never been as comfortable with, simply because it starts to seem like a discipline (philosophy) other than that which I’ve been trained in.