Milwaukee -- Jane Gallop is used to creating a spectacle. She’s been causing a scene ever since she started wearing a skirt made of men’s silk ties on the academic lecture circuit nearly 20 years ago. At the time, she was just emerging as a feminist literary critic. Legend had it that the skirt was made of the ties of her ex-lovers. The story wasn’t true, but Ms. Gallop delighted in the myth.
Now Ms. Gallop has begun wearing the skirt again to promote a new book that talks about how her effort to create a scene, by passionately kissing a student in public, backfired and became the basis for a sexual-harassment complaint.
Ms. Gallop, a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a prominent feminist theorist, believes the idea that a feminist could be accused of sexual harassment is a kind of myth itself. But she plans to keep the sensationalism alive long enough to make her point.
The book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, is autobiographical. It revisits the accusations made against her and explores the sensitive topic of sexual boundaries between professors and their students. The book is to be released next month by Duke University Press. And Duke expects it to be hot: The press featured it on the cover of its Spring/Summer 1997 catalogue.
With this book, Ms. Gallop writes,"I’m hoping to produce a sensation. Not the hollow kind where sensation is achieved at the expense of thought. But the best kind, where knowledge and pleasure, sex and thought play off and enhance each other.”
Nearly five years ago, Ms. Gallop was accused of sexually harassing two female graduate students. While the university’s investigation found that Ms. Gallop and the students had engaged in sexual banter, flirtation, and, in one case, a French kiss, the university concluded that the behavior had not amounted to harassment.
But the university did find, in the case of the woman Ms. Gallop kissed, that the professor had violated the university’s policy on"consensual amorous relationships.” It requires professors who engage in such relationships with students to end any professional oversight of the students’ work.
This is not a book about regrets or apologies -- Ms. Gallop makes none for her teaching style; her sole misgiving, in retrospect, is that she had ever agreed to work closely with the student she kissed.
This book is about Ms. Gallop’s ideas about sexual harassment -- what it used to mean, what it has come to mean, and how it is that a woman who is a highly regarded feminist theorist, the author of six books, and a distinguished professor, could be accused of it. Ms. Gallop believes that the issue of sexual harassment has gotten out of whack when a feminist can be accused of it simply because she brings her own sexuality into her teaching. She says that the very idea for that style of teaching sprang from feminist thought.
Ms. Gallop’s thinking, for example, is heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. She speaks often of"transference” and thinks that students invest in their professors a kind of authority and desire once reserved only for their parents.
In the 101-page book, Ms. Gallop lays out her ideas about teaching and the way that the close, personal, even erotic relationships she develops with some graduate students is not only normal, but helpful to their work and her teaching.
“The experience that matters to me most -- it’s why I’m an academic -- is this enormous pleasure and intensity of working and thinking with people,” she says in an interview here."And to me that’s pleasurable, it’s sexy, it’s very close.”
Ms. Gallop believes that her brand of teaching came to be viewed as harassment, in part, because of the split she sees between"power feminists,” like herself, who are pro-sex, and “victim feminists” who are not. That split, she argues has helped lead to the perversion of the definition of sexual harassment on campuses, which used to be about sexism but has come to be about anything that’s sexual.
“The investigation revealed that I did not in fact respect the boundary between the sexual and the intellectual, between the professional and the personal,” she writes in her book."It was as if the university, seeing what kind of relations I did have with students, felt that I must be in some way guilty and was able, through this wrinkle in the policy, to find me slightly guilty of sexual harassment.”
She continues:"I was construed as a sexual harasser because I sexualize the atmosphere in which I work.”
Ms. Gallop details some of her most intimate sexual feelings and experiences in this latest book and in her earlier works. She earned her Ph.D. in French at Cornell University in 1976. Her dissertation was on the works of the Marquis de Sade, whose writings include graphic sexual descriptions of rape and torture. In her 1988 book, Thinking Through the Body, Ms. Gallop writes that Sade’s texts"moved me to masturbate.” In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, she recounts when she first had sex with a woman, when on separate occasions she slept with two male professors on her dissertation committee, and when she first began sleeping with her own students as an assistant professor.
Ms. Gallop says she does not sleep with students anymore. For 17 years she has had a monogamous relationship with Dick Blau, a professor in the film department here and the father of her two children.
There seems to be nothing Ms. Gallop won’t tell or show -- the cover of Thinking Through the Body is a close-up photograph, taken by Mr. Blau 11 years ago, of the birth of their son, Max.
She describes her sexual experiences in the context of her emergence as a feminist thinker, beginning as an undergraduate at Cornell. Close colleagues describe her now as"flamboyant” and"spontaneous” and"volatile.” In interviews, these colleagues describe her pedagogical ideas as"persuasive” and her teaching style as"courageous,” but they acknowledge, that for them, following her practices would be"troubling” and “precarious.”
Still, graduate students, even the two who filed complaints against her, were attracted to her because of her style.
In one of the complaints, Dana Beckelman, a Ph.D. student, recalled that she had been"intrigued” by Ms. Gallop’s “outrageousness.” The student also recounted that after she began working on her dissertation with Ms. Gallop, the two had exchanged sexual banter and"flirted.”
Ms. Beckelman, who has since earned her Ph.D. and is teaching in Japan, refused to comment for this story. But in her complaint to the university, she described how her relationship with Ms. Gallop became increasingly difficult and how she came to feel that Ms. Gallop was pressuring her for sex and grading her poorly because she rebuffed the advances.
The student dates her complaint to a 1991 national conference at Milwaukee -- the First Annual Graduate Student Gay and Lesbian Conference, called"Flaunting It.” It was there that Ms. Gallop remarked that"graduate students are my sexual preference.” And after the conference, at a bar, in front of many students, Ms. Gallop and Ms. Beckelman kissed. In her complaint, the student said she kissed Ms. Gallop back,"more as a vindictive act than a reciprocally sexual one. I was angry and hurt and saw kissing her as a form of revenge, a way to manipulate her desire knowing I would never go any further.” Later, Ms. Gallop commented on Ms. Beckelman’s breasts. The student filed her complaint in November 1992.
In a 97-page response, Ms. Gallop denied Ms. Beckelman’s interpretation of many events. She agrees that their relationship was often strained, but she says she had believed that the sexual banter helped level the playing field between them to make Ms. Beckelman less concerned about the professor’s position of authority. Ms. Gallop says that Ms. Beckelman couldn’t take any criticism of her work.
Ms. Gallop says that her comment about graduate students came in the context of a long question she had asked at the conference and that it was a joke. She concedes that no one laughed. The kiss, she says, was part of a performance, a “spectacle” that she believed both women freely engaged in, in the context of the conference.
The second complaint was filed at the same time by a female master’s student who also referred to Ms. Gallop’s remark at the conference. This student, who has never been publicly identified and who could not be reached, accused Ms. Gallop of making sexual advances toward her that had nothing to do with teaching. She complained for example, that Ms. Gallop had once used her bare foot to rock a chair the student was sitting in.
The student said that Ms. Gallop had refused to write her letters of recommendations for Ph.D. programs. The university found that the complaint lacked merit.
In her book and in an interview, Ms. Gallop argues that to accuse a feminist of sexual harassment strains the original definition in so many ways that she’s not sure such a claim could ever have merit.
She explains that the term was originally used to describe a kind of discrimination, the way that men used sex to exert their power over women, to not take women seriously, and to keep them from being able to work and learn. But, she argues, no one ever considered what it would mean to change the gender of either party.
“I’m trying to say, ‘Let’s stop,’ because if we expand the model, I think what we’re losing is the basic assumption that this is about the oppression of women, rather than that sex is bad.”
While Ms. Gallop acknowledges the power she has over her students, she says that her power, as a feminist, is different from a man’s. She says, for example, that as a woman she could never neglect to take seriously the work of a female student.
As for dating students, Ms. Gallop says that given the choice of whether to label that as harassment or as a conflict of interest, she’d take the latter. But she argues that the university is rife with conflicts, and she’s not sure dating is the worst one.
In fact, in the book she says that having sex once with each of her two professors at Cornell did not damage her working relationship with them."In fact, it seemed to make it somewhat easier for me to write. Seducing them made me feel kind of cocky, and that allowed me to presume I had something to say worth saying.”
Richard Klein, a professor of Romance languages at Cornell, was one of those professors and sees things a little differently. He likens sex between a professor and a student to"a shrink sleeping with a client.”
Although he is not named in the book, Mr. Klein says he felt “outed” when Duke University Press called him to write a blurb for it. So he wrote about having slept with Ms. Gallop when she was his graduate student, saying:"For decades I have felt guilt and shame for having performed toward her in a way that was unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy in bed. Her book has convinced me, with the cogency of its feminist arguments and the persuasiveness of her personal testimony, that she, on her side, feels only gratitude and admiration for my performance.” Duke rejected the blurb, Mr. Klein says.
Other academics reject Ms. Gallop’s ideas about teaching. Among them, Billie Wright Dziech, an English professor at the University of Cincinnati and an author of The Lecherous Professor, a book many credit with exposing the problem of sexual harassment in academe."She has every right to do what she does, if the taxpayers and supporters of her institution are willing to pay for that kind of behavior, but she shouldn’t be surprised or shocked when it gets her into trouble,” says Dr. Dziech.
Professor Dziech is especially riled by the notion that the policies she supports prohibiting dating between students and professors"infantilize” students, as Ms. Gallop claims."Wal-Mart says managers may not date cashiers,” Dr. Dziech says. “That’s it, end of discussion. I don’t understand what makes educators think they are an exception to that rule.”
Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at the University of the Arts, thinks feminist theorists have been too wrapped up in theory even to be aware of reality. Ms. Paglia has herself been outspoken against"puritanical” campus sex-harassment policies, and she has been labeled a"do-me” feminist. Nonetheless, she argues,"Of course there’s an erotics in any hierarchical situation, but it has to be resisted.”
But Chris Amirault, an adjunct professor at Brown University who recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, argues that to resist those close relationships is to"resist learning.” He never slept with Ms. Gallop, his dissertation adviser, but they worked closely on his thesis and on her latest book.
He explains that their work together would include"a moment of intimacy, a moment of vulnerability where you’re allowed to share your fears and desires of who you are and who you want to be with someone who’s reciprocating. I don’t think that that can in any way not be sexual.” He adds:"I can understand how that would be controversial with some, but I don’t find that terrifically troubling.”
As always with Ms. Gallop, she hopes to create with this book a bit of controversy.
“I want to shock people, and I want them to love me for shocking them,” she says."I want them to see that I’m right. Does that seem so crazy?”
