Anecdotal Theory

by Gallop, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780822330011
• ISBN10: 0822330016
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"Jane Gallop's essays are lucid, bold, and timely: she gives us our time through a series of brilliant lenses. I'm always grateful for the intelligence, the edge, and the generosity of her vision. We would all be more lost without her."--Judith Butler, author of "Gender Trouble"

Author Biography

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Anecdotal Theory	1	(12)
Part One. The Incident	13	(68)
The Teacher's Breasts	23	(13)
The Lecherous Professor: A Reading	36	(15)
The Personal and the Professional: Walking the Line	51	(16)
Resisting Reasonableness	67	(14)
Part Two. The Stories	81	(74)
A Tale of Two Jacques	93	(7)
Knot a Love Story	100	(12)
Dating Derrida in the Nineties	112	(15)
Castration Anxiety and the Unemployed Ph.D	127	(8)
Econstructing Sisterhood	135	(20)
Afterwords	155	(10)
Notes	165	(8)
Index	173

Excerpts

The essays in this volume come from three distinct periods: there are four essays from 1991-92, two pieces written in 1994, and three written in 1998-99. The chronology of these essays-and especially the gaps between the three periods-indicate a story.

Part 2 of the collection, "The Stories," includes three of the earliest essays and the two most recent ones, and none from the middle of the decade. The pieces in part 2 are the clearest examples of anecdotal theory: all attempt explicitly to ground their theory in stories from my life.

The first three essays in part 2 were written between November 1991 and September 1992. Although they differ considerably in theoretical topic as well as in the type of personal incident recounted, all three include memoir in their theorizing. Taken together, the three pieces explore the possibility of writing theory explicitly from the subjectivity of the theorizing subject, theorizing from the lived moment. By fall of 1992, I was thus launched on the project of anecdotal theory.

In November 1992, that project was interrupted. I learned I had been accused of sexual harassment by two of my graduate students. The university investigation did not reach its final resolution until February 1994. After that experience, I felt compelled to theorize about what I had been forced to learn. I spent the next four years writing about sexual harassment policy in the academy and its implications for the pursuit of knowledge. It was not until late in 1998 that I was able to get back to the project of anecdotal theorizing I had been pursuing in 1992.

Looking now at this interruption to anecdotal theory, I find it ironic. I was embarked on a theoretical project which aimed to tie theorizing to lived experience. And then that theoretical project was interrupted, derailed, by lived experience. Although I can't say that I like it, I can see that it is precisely this ability to interrupt and divert a project conceived in theory which makes incident a force with which theory must reckon. I can see that anecdotal theory must be, whether or not I like it, this juncture where theory finds itself compelled-against its will, against its projects-to think where it has been forced to think.

Theory has a considerable will to power; it wants to comprehend all it surveys. Theory tends to defend against what threatens that sense of mastery. Theory likes to set up an ideal realm where it need encounter no obstacle to the expansion of its understanding. By bracketing the incidents and situations in which it finds itself, theory can feel the exhilarating power to think untrammeled by feeling, life, and context. But this power is abstract, Pyrrhic. As heady as I find the freedom of that abstract power, I seek a more effective power. I theorize not just to feel powerful but in order better to negotiate the world in which I find myself.

Anecdotal theory drags theory into a scene where it must struggle for mastery. Theorizing in explicit relation to the here and now, theorizing because the subject feels the need to, theory must contend with what threatens its mastery. Subjecting theory to incident teaches us to think in precisely those situations which tend to disable thought, forces us to keep thinking even when the dominance of our thought is far from assured.

Part 1, "The Incident," consists of theory I wrote in response to my being accused of sexual harassment. This theorizing is thus also anecdotal, but in a different way. An anecdote can be defined as "a short account of an incident." Whereas the second part of this collection grounds its theorizing in such accounts, the first part contains theory grounded in an incident, although that incident is not narrated in writing the theory.

The writing in part 1 is more typical of how anecdotal theory usually exists in the world: while the impetus for theorizing is often the need to think through a life occurrence, the occurrence is generally not included as part of the theorizing (although it may sometimes be alluded to in prefatory material). If one includes the essays in the first part of the book in the concept of anecdotal theory, then a whole lot of theory turns out to be "anecdotal": that is, the thinking is inspired, energized, or made necessary by some puzzling, troubling, instigating life event.

The second essay in part 1, " The Lecherous Professor ," was written in 1994, immediately after my experience of being investigated for sexual harassment, It is a close, symptomatic reading of a feminist text, the sort of critical reading I'd been doing for two decades, the kind of work upon which I had built my scholarly reputation. Written for an academic conference, the essay was an attempt to bring the topic of sexual harassment into the domain of my expertise. Turning my methodology on a text which represented the discourse under which I had been accused was an attempt in theory to reassert the mastery the investigation had taken from me.

Rereading the essay now, I don't much like it; I find it bitter and adversarial. I prefer reading to explore a text, but this essay is not exploration, it is investigation. Like the investigation I had just undergone, the essay goes about trying to determine good and evil, looking for evidence of harm and finding culpability. I can see now what I could not see then: that it represents a fantasy reversal, the fantasy that I could turn the tables on my judges (the feminists making and enforcing harassment policy). That fantasy dictates the terms of the reading: I had been accused not only of sexual harassment but of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (the students filing complaints were both lesbians); my reading of The Lecherous Professor accuses harassment policymakers of homophobia and heterosexism.

Rereading the essay for this collection, I have been tempted to leave it out. I have decided to keep it in because it represents an important, if not very appealing, aspect of anecdotal theory. This is not the anecdotal theory I am proud of; it is the anecdotal theory that embarrasses me. I see myself in this essay struggling to theorize there where I feel so embattled. The writing and the thought are marred by the strident tone of my desperation. This may be anecdotal theory more as acting out than as working through.

If in the present context of proclaiming anecdotal theory this essay embarrasses me, it seems worth noting that the essay displays its own embarrassment at the anecdotal nature of its theory. In the 1994 introduction to the piece, I wrote: "In the last two years I have had a run-in with academic sexual harassment policy. While I will not here recount the gory details, I must refer to this experience in order to explain why I'm talking about this book." The "must" suggests that, although I do not want to, I find myself forced to "refer to this experience" "I must refer" but at least "I will not recount." Expressing a certain disgust for narratives of experience, I promise to spare the reader (or myself) "the gory details."

Anecdotal against its will, " The Lecherous Professor " would like to rise above the mire whence it originated. Trying to take as much distance as possible from the anecdotal, I am running scared. Running from the experiment in anecdotal theory I was pursuing less than two years earlier. Running for the safety of writing where the incidental roots of theory are relegated to their proper place-referred to briefly in the introduction but not recounted in the text proper.

I include " The Lecherous Professor " in this collection even though it represents a theorizing which would escape its anecdotal nature if it could. I include it precisely because I believe that the urge to escape the anecdotal is an inescapable part of anecdotal theory. To read this 1994 essay is to see theory struggling to overcome incident, and thus to understand better the stakes of anecdotal theory. No piece of writing in this collection is less anecdotal-less open to exploring the connections between its theorizing and lived experience. Yet, by the same token, no piece of writing in this collection is more anecdotal: no other theorizing was more compelled by incident.

The next essay in this collection was written just a month after " The Lecherous Professor ." If my first essay after the harassment incident wanted to drape itself in the mantle of scholarship, my second took on an utterly professional identity. Written for Academe , the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, "The Personal and the Professional" speaks as a professor to professors.

From the point of view of anecdotal theory, this essay has a lot of the same problems as the preceding one. Its introduction displays a similar reticence to speak of my personal experience: "This essay will outline what I have come to understand about the contradictions surrounding harassment policy in the academy. But since feminist epistemology has taught me the value of revealing the concrete conditions that produce knowledge, I feel I must speak, if only briefly, about my unfortunate personal experience." While we find here the same apologetic "must," this essay, unlike the previous one, specifies why I feel I must speak of my experience. This essay grounds that obligation in theory, in "feminist epistemology."

While " The Lecherous Professor " only referred to but did not recount my experience, this essay gives an account of the incident. That account is very controlled ("if only briefly") and thoroughly professional-hardly the "exorbitant" anecdotal writing I was doing at the beginning and end of the decade. While thus a poor example of the project, this essay does present some of the feminist argument for anecdotal theory: "Breaking down the barrier between the professional and the personal has been central in the feminist effort to expand the institution of knowledge to include what and how women know.... Feminist teachers saw the inclusion of the personal within the academic as a way to consider thoughts, responses, and insights which would not traditionally be recognized as knowledge."

The feminist argument for including the personal appears in this 1994 essay not for the purpose of justifying anecdotal theory but rather in order to counter the direction of sexual harassment policy. Because sexual harassment was framed as the intrusion of the personal into the professional, antiharassment activists were demanding we police the border between the professional and the personal. In order to question the feminist antiharassment demand for depersonalizing the academic, I juxtaposed it with the feminist epistemological claim for personalizing the academic. That juxtaposition not only delineates a really thorny theoretical problem in feminism but it also points toward connections between my resistance to sexual harassment policy and the project of anecdotal theory.

Writing the two 1994 essays did not slake my need to turn the harassment incident to theory. After writing the second essay, I decided to devote a whole book to explaining what I had been forced to learn. I wrote that book in 1995-96, called it Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment . I didn't know what sort of book I was going to write, only that I felt compelled to write it. It turned out to be another experiment in anecdotal theory.

A lot of readers did not know what to make of the book's combining memoir with theory. Often faulted either for failing to give enough of the story or for failing to make a coherent, unified argument, the book was as disappointing to those who read it for memoir as to those who read it for theory.

The content of Feminist Accused was so flashy and high-profile-the topic so sensational, the position so controversial-that the question of its genre, its experiment in theoretical writing, was seldom noticed. It was a book whose topic could not help but overshadow its form. I think there is a connection between the book's argument and its form. Both challenge the divide between feeling and thought, between the passions of the thinking subject and her thinking. In the present book, I hope to make the epistemological stakes of the genre clearer by treating the practice (anecdotal theory) separately from the topic (the erotics of pedagogy). Nonetheless, the persistence of the latter topic in this book suggests that in my experience the two enterprises are so tightly entangled as to be separable only in theory.

A year after the publication of Feminist Accused , I wrote one more essay on sexual harassment policy. Although I no longer felt compelled to write about it, I had been, because of the book, invited to speak at a conference on the topic. The sense of professional legitimacy due to the invitation combined with the absence of personal urgency produced a tone unlike either the strident bitterness or the earnest professionalism of the 1994 texts. Rather than pointedly demonstrating my professionalism, I was by 1998 "Resisting Reasonableness."

This final essay in part 1 is one of the three pieces from the end of the decade. By 1998 I had returned to the experiment of theorizing through anecdote. This last essay on sexual harassment policy takes us to the end of "The Incident," to the place where we can (once again) take up "The Stories."

The story that gives rise to the theorizing in this essay does not, however, come from my own life; it is a story confided to me by someone as a result of her reading Feminist Accused . Whereas I had conceived of the book as beginning in story and proceeding to theory, in fact a number of readers responded to the book by telling or writing me their stories. Anecdotal theory, it turns out, is not a one-way street from story to theory, but a busy two-way traffic.

Basing its theory in a story confided to me, this essay is rooted not just in personal experience but in personal conversation. Many personal conversations are sites of anecdotal theorizing: friends and confidantes exchange stories from our lives and together try to make sense of them. "Resisting Reasonableness" attempts to bring this mode of intimate and intersubjective knowledge production into the academic realm of formal thinking and legitimated knowledge.

That last image sounds, however, too much like a one-way street again-as if we move from the personal to the professional and never go back the other way. In fact the exchange behind this essay did not take place in some strictly personal realm. This woman read my book, then sought me out to confide in me. When I decided to write about her story, I did so with her full knowledge and support. The personal conversation took place between these two publications-result of one, impetus to the other. This crossing back and forth between private and published exchange is not so uncommon.

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Excerpted from anecdotal theory by Jane Gallop Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.