Jane Gallop Is Talking About Sex Again

Darren Hauck for The Chronicle

Jane Gallop walked gingerly across the restaurant to our table at the Midtown Hilton in New York. In 2001, just before she turned 50, Gallop was diagnosed with a ligament condition in her feet, and she can no longer walk long distances. During the 2018 Modern Language Association convention, when we met, Gallop was often ferried by her partner, Dick Blau, in her wheelchair — no easy thing during the blizzard that blanketed the city that January.

Gallop has been a recognized star in the galaxy of literary theory since the publication of her 1982 book, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Cornell University Press). That book helped bring French theory and figures like Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida to Anglo-American literary studies, and turned psychoanalytic theory on its ear, critiquing its inherent sexism.

Gallop also projected a distinctive persona, revealing personal details in her writing — like that she “had a series of affairs with thirty-six-year-old men [when] I was in my mid-twenties” — and giving her papers titles like “BS” and “The Teacher’s Breasts.” In the 1980s, she was known for giving talks in a patchwork skirt of vertical strips of cloth. It was made, she would remark during lectures about female agency and Lacan’s theory of desire, from the neckties of former lovers.

Her style struck a contrast to the standard-issue attire for younger academics at the time — often jeans, t-shirts, and black leather jackets. Gallop is one of the few scholars born after 1950 included in David Shumway’s 1997 account of “The Star System in Literary Studies”; her “performance,” he observes, “is a burlesque of conventional notions of femininity, which might include heavy makeup, seamed stockings, and a form-fitting dress. Gallop may choose to sit on the speaker’s table rather than behind it.”

That tendency to transgress norms can cause trouble. In the early 1990s, Gallop became notorious for quipping at an LGBT conference that “graduate students are my sexual preference.” She was subsequently accused of sexual harassment by two graduate students who claimed that Gallop had tried and failed to seduce them and that she retaliated by treating them harshly. The case received a great deal of press, and Gallop offered her side in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Duke University Press, 1997). She avers she didn’t sleep with the two students — or with any students since 1982, when she fell “madly in love with the man I’m still happily with,” Blau — but that she had talked intimately with them about personal as well as intellectual issues. And she unapologetically acknowledged that she sexualizes the classroom — because she studies sex and believes that we cannot separate our bodies from our intellects. For Gallop, pedagogy is intrinsically erotic. Such a view, controversial then, is nearly beyond the pale now.

Twenty years later, Gallop is again talking about sex, in a still forthright but less heady way, tempered by age and the limitations of one’s body. In a new book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (Duke University Press), she combines an autobiographical account of her and Blau’s health issues with literary theory.

Indeed, the book is a bid for the continuing relevance of theory. The 1990s saw questions about the public relevance of theory and an embrace of cultural studies. French theory no longer maintained as dominant a hold, and Gallop recalled “how painful I found the atmosphere in the post-theory era when the stuff that seemed lively and vital to me was understood as belonging to the past.”

The new book has a different tenor than early theory, which was more in your face. It purported to overturn the assumptions of Western thought, to critique sexism and capitalism, to throw into question every hoary norm and every received truth. Now it carries a more sedate if not melancholy cast: For Gallop, theory offers solace in the face of life’s difficulties, and the book is often quietly moving.

The rise of literary theory was often seen, both by advocates and antagonists, as a revolution. What happens when the revolution becomes distant, and the revolutionaries grow old?

At the start of the 1970s, books like The Total Woman (1973), which sold 10 million copies, still advised women to be subservient and please their man. Female authors made occasional cameos in literary studies, but they were usually consigned to a lesser status or treated as anomalies. The women’s liberation movement changed all that.

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) attacked the sexism of several major modern writers, such as D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, and over the next two decades literary study underwent a transformation. Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) recovered a substantial female literary heritage, leading a wave that renovated the canon and culminated in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

Gallop arrived at Cornell in 1969, where, like many of her generation, she gravitated to feminism. In some of the first women’s-studies courses — taught by the science fiction writer Joanna Russ — Gallop embraced the subversion of gender norms in the gay and lesbian movement. “I was just blown away,” she says. “Being a woman could actually change the way we view everything.” She finished college in three years and then continued on at Cornell for her Ph.D. in Romance languages, which she earned in 1976.

Distinct from most other feminists in literary studies at the time, Gallop, rather than re-evaluating works and authors, dwelt on theory. With such books as The Daughter’s Seduction, Reading Lacan (1985), and Thinking Through the Body (1988), she became the American scene’s prime informant on French theory. She argued that psychoanalysis, which purported to speak for humankind, suffered from a blind spot regarding women, and that feminism could draw out its political potential. At the same time, she held that feminism needed a theory of desire; psychoanalysis could “unsettle [feminism’s] tendency to accept a traditional, unified, rational, puritanical self.”

When I spoke with Gallop, she mused on her good fortune at being in the “right place at the right time” — at Cornell, participating in emerging feminist and gay and lesbian movements, trained in French and so in a position to bring the first wave of Continental theory to larger audiences in English and other humanities. Her status as a conduit for European thought helped land Gallop jobs at several places, including Rice, Emory, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. As the French theorist Julia Kristeva told her in the 80s, “You translate what we do into American.”

Three qualities make Gallop’s work stand out. First, she writes with unusual clarity. Another hallmark, especially in her early work, is wit. She did not adulate the master theorists, as many who wrote about them did, citing and imitating them like church fathers. Rather, she transposed them into colloquial English, and she wasn’t afraid to make jokes: “Lacan’s sadistic capriciousness reveals the prick behind the phallus.” People don’t usually say those kinds of things in scholarly writing.

The third quality is her fondness for shock. The cover of Thinking Through the Body shows a photo of a woman in a hospital gown, lower body exposed as she is giving birth, the baby’s head crowning. The woman is Gallop. Her book Living With His Camera (2003), a collection of commentaries on photos taken by Blau, includes an image of her nude on the couch, her small son nude on the other end of the couch. It is the kind of picture one might hesitate to show friends, much less the reading public.

Gallop helped pioneer the 1990s turn to “autobiographical criticism” and academic memoir, what she calls “anecdotal theory.” This genre can look self-indulgent, but Gallop rejects such a characterization. “I’m much more comfortable with certain kinds of exposure than most people are — which maybe means I’m an exhibitionist, not a narcissist. I feel like what I can offer the world is a certain honesty about exposing things that happened to other people but that they don’t tend to expose, so it allows me to offer the possibility of people thinking through that experience.”

Does such an approach produce good criticism? Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts includes a scene of Gallop presenting photos from Living With His Camera to a graduate seminar at the City University of New York. The art theorist Rosalind Krauss served as a respondent. After a respectful preamble, Krauss brought out the knives: “The importance of her early work is why it is so deeply disturbing to behold the mediocrity, naiveté, and soft-mindedness of the work Gallop has presented to us today.”

Nelson consigns Gallop — with “that bad but endearing style that so many academics have — kind of stuck in the ‘80s” — to a decidedly unfashionable past. (Nelson is herself no stranger to self-exposure, and perhaps killing off one of her influences here.) Gallop herself has long been attuned to the threat of generational obsolescence. As she put it in a 1997 interview, “I spent a lot of effort trying to figure out psychoanalysis and feminism, poststructuralism and feminism, … and one day I turned around and it was not in fashion anymore.”

Also not in fashion these days is Gallop’s libertarian attitude toward sex. In her own case in the 1990s, the university made a determination that she was not guilty of harassment but of having an “amorous consensual relationship.” In Feminist Accused, she rebutted, “If schools decide to prohibit not only sex but ‘amorous relations’ between teacher and student, [what] will be banned might just be teaching itself.”

At a time when almost all colleges and universities have formally disallowed romantic relationships between teacher and student, she still thinks such prohibitions roll back the gains of feminism by robbing women of agency, like Victorian maidens who need to be protected. She also opposes policies prohibiting co-workers from dating, particularly since all the young people she knows, including her 20-something daughter, work so much that such strictures close off a major part of their lives. As she wrote in Critical Inquiry last year, she’s “alarmed that feminist advocacy of women as sexual agents is being sacrificed in the bureaucratic takeover of the struggle against harassment.”

However, she is glad that young women feel empowered by the #MeToo movement. Over breakfast she succinctly defined the problem: “How do you protect women from sexual predators without denying them their sexuality?” But, she held, “The solution to sexual harassment isn’t getting rid of sexuality; it’s like saying that the way to get rid of domestic abuse is to outlaw marriage.”

Darren Hauck for The Chronicle

Gallop’s new book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, is a compact volume. The first half describes Gallop’s problem with her feet, and how disability has caused her to think about her life differently. The second deals with her partner Dick Blau’s prostate cancer and the consequences of a prostatectomy. A major element is how it all affects their sexuality. They’re still having sex, she tells us — and it can still be good.

Theory helps her understand these hardships. From psychoanalysis she takes the concept of castration, expanding it to apply to debility; from disability studies she adopts the focus on nonnormative bodies; from age studies she sorts through the unexpected changes life brings over time; and from queer theory she promotes the multiplicity of sexual practices. “Sexuality survives,” she writes, “but transforms, outside coitus.”

The most notable departure from her earlier work is that her irreverence has been replaced by earnestness. Her use of theory seems apt but sometimes laborious. At points it seems a way to rename ordinary experience; for instance, it is not entirely surprising to “reconceptualize sexuality as developing across the life span,” which is something that ads with graying actors on late-night TV tell us to do all the time. Her use of theory isn’t about blowing up previous thought; it’s about finding consolation, which literature or philosophy is often said to provide.

The midcentury literary critic Kenneth Burke coined a resonant phrase to justify literary study: Literature as “Equipment for Living.” (This might also serve as a justification for the humanities.) For Gallop, theory is equipment for living. It is not an obscurantist set of abstractions floating above real life. “If theory is to be valuable and survive, it is not just something that you take as a course in school and apply to some literary text,” she says, “but something that is a way of thinking better, maybe even a way of living better.”

Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the third edition of which appeared last year.