“Women’s History,” post the first

As my thesitation takes me onto wobbly territory in the realm of what is commonly called “women’s history,” this seems an apt time to start to work out some of my own investments in that realm. The recent kerfuffle about one “Mercurius Rusticus” and his misogynistic blurt lets me know that, whatever progress has been made, the field remains vexed, and that those of us who are engaged in it had better stay engaged — and pay close attention to how we formulate that engagement.

First, some slightly irritated ground-clearing in response to two stupid questions. Please note that I use “women’s history” here largely as a signpost for “histories of the subaltern”: because I do not wish to speak to that of which I know nearly nothing, I stick to “women” and “gender.” But I have a feeling what I will say here and in future posts may apply to other areas as well.

To the question, “Why does women’s history matter?” I respond easily that I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it doesn’t matter, and that to challenge any category of historical analysis is to challenge the historical endeavor itself. Why does history matter? is an important question, but if “history matters” can be taken as a given, “women’s history matters,” “military history matters,” “culinary history matters,” “the history of imperialism matters,” and every other formulation, easily follow. The more interesting questions are, “how can we do women’s history?”, “where will women’s history take us, as historians, as literaturians, as educators?”, “how is women’s history different from any other history?”, and so on. Crucially: “What is the difference between ‘women’s history’ and ‘gender history’?” To this last I hope to return in a later post.

To the argument that those who are engaged in the history of women, of gender, and of the family are sapping energy from other areas, I respond easily, “What the hell are you smoking?” Every creative act committed means that a range of others were not committed in that moment, with that energy. The cynical way to see it is that arithmetic progress entails geometric loss. This is the fundamental principle behind the impossibility of a Key to All Mythologies: no one can do everything, and every mythos that gets recorded eats up some time that could have gone to the others. If you find a solution to this problem, please give Doctor Causaubon a call; I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

There are overtilled fields — many areas of Shakespeare studies and the American Civil War provide prime examples. A great deal of ink gets spilled producing largely unoriginal accounts of this or that. Yet the accusation to be levelled in that case is, precisely, of unoriginality, not of inutility.

The vast lacunae in the histories of women and of gender indicate that they will not approach supersaturation any time soon – not within my lifetime, anyhow. Scholars of early modern western Europe, for example, have only just begun, in the past ten years or so, to look for means to discover significant literacy rates for women of all classes. How women read, what they read, which women read, under what circumstances, to what purpose, and why any of this was so, are all open questions in the field of early modern studies. This is only one example. Because much of women’s political and creative agency took its roots in private or domestic spaces, in the informal economy, in manuscript rather than in print, through influence and string-pulling rather than through public action, their lives and the significance of their lives must be sought by means to which traditional historiography was never suited. Those means are not always obvious, the archive is often obscure, the problems vexed and multifaceted and their solutions roundabout.

In some ways, the unobviousness of gender history, of gendered historiography, is what makes it thrilling for its practitioners. Unobviousness is one place to which women’s history can take us: it enables us to question our assumptions about the nature of a given historical problem and about the materials by which we wish to assess that problem. Simply put, doing women’s history keeps us on our toes — a position especially necessary for wee mouse here.

There will be more on this. I am, for reasons obvious to my longtime readers, especially interested in how the historical and literary disciplines intersect in the “women’s history” enterprise. To be investigated.

Readers, your thoughts?

Breakthrough.

Reader/writer/recusant-mama to the rescue. Bless her.

She solved a problem I didn’t know I had — the best kind of solution. Or rather, I knew there was a problem, but I thought it was me. Now I realize I was missing a link. She is my link.

She started as an idle curiosity. I ordered up every early edition of her work — well, all but the latest, which lives exclusively at the Folger. [Sidenote: this dissertation should be subtitled, "Or, Getting the Most Out of a Year at the British Library."] When I went in today to look at them, I expected to spend an hour or two, make a handful of notes, and get back to bibliographing the books that are more central to the project. Instead, I found myself literally bouncing in my chair. Biting my lip. Grinning.

“Thank you,” I kept whispering. I damn near squealed.

When I came home to Flavia’s post on leisurely archive-perusing, my heart ached with wanting. The wonderful thing about the kind of program that I’m doing is that it gives time and space for that sort of thing during the term. With only two courses, very loosely structured reading lists, and vast swathes of unstructured time, I’d been able to wallow about in this and that, reading more or less whatever I chose. I was able to tailor what I read to a loosely defined area of research, so that when it came time to write the papers (except in one disastrous case), I was prepared to go whole-hog, and write swiftly. This is also how my undergrad thesis came to make any form of sense — I had a whole summer of idle reading on a fellowship to familiarize me with the field, so that I came to the project’s start vastly more prepared than I otherwise could have been.

Dissertating, by contrast, has felt hideously rushed. I chose to write in an area entirely new to me, where I did not have my bearings and where, frankly, I do not have time to get my bearings fully enough to be comfortable writing. I crashed through a handful of Seminal Works of scholarship, ingested most of my primary material in a single gulp, and have been progressing by fits and starts (emphasis on the “fits”) ever since. It’s disorienting and frustrating and I’ve cried about it more than I’m willing to admit.

I crave time and space. Now, I know that to a certain degree, that desire carries an inherent fallacy – work expands to fill the time allotted to it, and if there’s anything a writer wants, it’s always more time, more time. But this is at least a five-month project, not a three-month one. I need to stretch out and read more, instead of narrowly, intently reading only bits and scraps that I am absolutely certain will be wholly relevant.

This project is in many ways a promiscuous one, especially disciplinarily. It spans a lot of more or less discrete areas of study, and hopes to synthesize them in order to make new sense of a single author’s printed output. I’m good at synthetic work, and in the case of this project, I think this kind of approach serves particularly well. But synthesis demands a broadly-cast net and a lot of patient waiting — and what I’ve got is a jury-rigged fishing pole and about five minutes.

So when my (slightly insane) recusantish lady came to rescue me today, I counted it as a big old heap of blessings. I had somehow managed to reap a sliver of the benefits of spending ages in an archive without actually spending those ages. And praise be for it.

Breakthrough. Direction. Scope. Your little mouse is back on her game.

[... For now.]

In which mouse begins forthrightly enough, and then simply loses it — the story of her intellectual life.

Having made repeated announcements about my intentions to hie myself Parisward, I am pleased to declare that I have finally fracking done it. Naturally, I was disgusted to return to Perfidious Albion, who’s nevertheless doing his level best to charm me back to the fleeting anglophilia I once harbored. Yet something has changed, between me and Paris, or perhaps between me and France. This weekend, for the first time in five years, I was in France as someone who did not live there. I felt foreign in Paris for the first time, like a tourist-tourist, rather than an expat-tourist.

I want to find ways to bring France, the French language, the Francophone world, back into my life — if it means becoming a comparativist, so be it. I didn’t realize the extent to which my world here had gone entirely Anglophone — this year has been the first sustained period since childhood during which I do not speak, read, or write French on a regular, if not daily, basis. I started learning in the fourth grade, and took French language and literature courses every academic year until I graduated college; I taught high school French in the States for a year; I majored in French literature and culture in undergrad; I studied in Paris for a semester; I lived and taught in Toulouse for eight months. Before I fell unpredictably in love with the English Renaissance, I wanted to pursue Francophone post-colonial literature as an academic career. It seems strange, given that biography, that I am only now realizing how important the language(s), the cultures, the literatures and histories of the Francophone world are to me, how much of myself is bound up in them.

Here I am, in England, in a rigorously anglophone – despite its own best efforts – program. Here I am, headed off to an English department next year. Not a guttural “r” to be heard anywhere. Of course, one of the wonderful things about the Renaissance is that, at least in terms of cultural and intellectual history, national boundaries break down almost of themselves, resist the disciplinary boundaries of the modern academy naturally. It is perfectly natural, for example, to read Montaigne in a course on Shakespeare; to read Erasmus in a course on the English Reformation; to read Aretino or Machiavelli in a course on English drama. The period is not particularly kind to xenophobes, nationalists, or the monolingual (though it produced many such of its own). One needn’t define oneself as a comparativist, in this period, in order to be a Europeanist.

I want to be a Europeanist. I think. (This feels like coming out.) I need to learn Latin, like, yesterday. And I want Italian. At least. My fledgling Spanish will come back to me swiftly — it will take some muddling, but the Romance languages will come swiftly, I think. I have an ear for language, though perhaps not the one I had ten years ago. Latin will be like a puzzle, I think — the pieces will look as though they fit together one way, but surprise and delight me by going exactly the other way. I will re-learn my own languages through learning my way around that puzzle. I envision my future apartment* covered with index cards mapping declensions, post-it notes exhibiting in bold capitals those stubborn words that won’t get themselves learned, then scraps of Virgil and Cicero, lists of medieval neologisms, humanist diatribes on the status of Latinity, and so on.** I will begin this next fall. There will be a summer in Italy there, somewhere. Someday, there will be Dante and Boccaccio and Aretino. A Europeanist, yes. Why not?

All this, for Paris. For money and an excuse to take me to the Bibliothèque Nationale, for leisurely picnics of Camembert and cheap wine, for that language, that language, ever in my throat. For those r’s. For Montaigne. All this, really, for Paris. Reader, I know you: you, just like me, think this is perfectly sane and good and right. Paris. Yes.

*My apartment, ahem, in the City of Abundant Fraternal Devotion, whither I am officially bound. Cheers, please.

** This is why I can’t live with other people. My madnesses take up physical space.

Far afield.

The thing about doing a degree in early modern studies, reader, is that your life swiftly goes all early modern, all the time. I’ve no cause to complain — that is, after all, why I’m here, to bury my head in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and rarely to escape them. To attempt to dwell there.

The other day, loitering and smoking, I spoke with a nice young American man who told me he was studying in the Netherlands and urged me to travel there. I told him I had heard Antwerp was nice. He told me that Antwerp is in Belgium. I gave him a sweetly perplexed smile and said that it’s all the same thing, isn’t it, and anyway it belongs to Spain.

These things happen.

Another thing is that this term has organized itself, quite by accident, to be profoundly unqueer. One of my term papers is about Thomas More, for chrissakes.

I happen to like Thomas More. And I love things that are old. But I miss things that are queer, and I miss things that aren’t old.

This afternoon I went to a beautiful talk on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil poems in the New Yorker — reader, it was so squeakily modern! Modernists speak differently than their dustier counterparts do — they use a lot more theory-inspired jargon, for one, and they are relatively un-self-conscious about it. In a pleasant, refreshing way. They speak in longer sentences, and more abstractly.

The various programs within English, not to mention the various disciplines, tend to break down into territorial little groups here, so every time I attend a seminar not in early modern English things, I feel like an invading outsider. People look at me, going “who’s that?” They all know each other, they all speak the same language. It’s like observing a species kin to me, yet far removed in space and time.

Today, they were breathtaking, reader, these modernists. They were all so hip and pierced! Some of them weren’t white! Some of them were even American!

One woman with a beautiful accent spoke rapidly and fluidly about Marx and postcolonial economies, smiling through her wild grey hair and over her elegant scarf. They weren’t afraid of sentiment and they weren’t afraid of abstraction. A fight erupted over our positions as self-congratulatory readers looking back at “the past” through the lens of difference. The 1950’s, “past” and distant! Reader!

The print on the handout was in fonts and layouts I grew up with. The New Yorker, reader! It still exists! It takes its very life from a robustly industrialized, incipiently globalized capitalistic consumer society! It even spells things the same way I do! Shiny! Modern! Oh, brave new period!

Wow.

I need to get out more.

Now back to … uh, back to Marian production of the works of Thomas More. Right.

Conferences, collaboration, and academic narcissism (v. 1)

I now know why people often find it so instructive (among other less superlative qualities) to attend academic conferences. The recent one at Brit Uni, on Early Modern Stuff and Things, gave me a great deal to think about, and not only in terms of the field or the content of the papers presented.

One of the wonderful things about this conference — which reflects a wonderful thing about Brit Uni’s early modern bits — is that it was genuinely interdisciplinary. Historians and literary scholars, comparativists and… nationalists?, chattering productively and incorporating each other’s domains to give the wee neophyte spectator (yours truly) a real sense of scope, of what breaking down disciplinary boundaries can actually produce. I listened to whole historical papers without ever realizing they were presented by historians, so literary were their reading practices; I was astonished by the archival footwork and periodized story-telling accomplished by papers on verse forms. One gets the sense that academic study of this period is, at long last, and slowly, slowly, slowly, shedding its disciplinary corsets and moving toward what Timothy Burke, sundry at the Valve, and others have been flippantly calling “everything studies.”

In spite of this slow-gathering momentum, which seems to facilitate expansion out of disciplinary hidey-holes and into a broader collective effort at grasping “the past,” what it is and what it means, there remain some aspects of academic behavior that are very puzzling to an idealistic wee mouse. Now, I’ve done enough careful listening (thanks, Petri Dish faculty, for imparting knowledge you didn’t know you were imparting — in the words of Stephen Sondheim, children will listen), blog-reading, sardonic-academic-novel-reading, and attended enough talks to know that certain phenomena I observed at this conference are not unique to it.

I am totally freaked out by the persistence of academics’ tendency toward individualism and narcissism. I can’t possibly be the only one. Reader, I know it sounds so naïve, so eager-young-studenty, but this thing we are engaged in, this Scholarship, this Academy, is it not, well… that is, isn’t it a collective effort? Are we not, in the end, when the bureaucratic hoops of fire have been jumped through, the markets negotiated, and the administrative kinks worked out or put to bed, all working together to seek understanding of, a language to describe, a way of interpreting the worlds we inhabit? I think we are — and yes, god damn it, I include myself in this. I may be wee, I may be inexperienced, I may be in all things a neophyte, but I may also have something to bring to the table — and even if I don’t, I am an apprentice to this trade and you, Professor X, can’t survive, can’t perpetuate yourself, without me.

Self-defenses aside, I continue to be bowled over by the vigor with which academics guard their terrain, guard it as their personal property. I understand that work is precious, that if one loves her own ideas she is not to be faulted for it, if another feels he needs to defend his own agenda against the inevitable onslaught of oblivion, then defend it he must. However, a few points.

1. It is not an indignity to cite — copiously, if appropriate — the work of those who have gone before and paved the road for you, even if their particular area is not exactly parallel to yours. (“Everyone knows that…” is not a legitimate citation, by the way. It is true, however, that most or all of your audience is familiar with the source of your methods/theoretical foundation/purpose/etc, and you embarrass yourself by not acknowledging that source.) Kudos to Grandmotherly Big Name for presenting a genuinely collaborative paper.

2. Neither is it illegitimate to present a paper that asks genuine questions, which genuinely seek answers and are not merely grand statements in disguise (thanks to a Hilarious Historianess for presenting just this sort of paper last week). You do well, not ill, by your own work if you openly ask for comment on one bit or another of your paper or project — the most successful paper sessions I attended last week contained a good bit of this; the least successful ones were composed of ideology polemically presented, masquerading as thoughtful papers. Ironically, students and junior sorts are the worst offenders in this regard.

3. Do not be perplexed by me, or by any other neophyte you may encounter. Do not give us the “Well isn’t that cute” look, nor the “What are you doing here?” look, nor the “And just how do you know that?” look. We are the next generation, and we are trying to learn from you. You are teachers, whether you like it or not, and you are just as much so at the tea break between paper sessions as you are in a classroom. We try not to be in your way, and we will do our best not to make you go beyond the call of duty. But say hello, why not? If you and we are both sitting alone, why not join us, just once, just once remove the burden of socio-professional awkwardness from our shoulders. You are secure in your positions, we are not. You will not be damaged by being seen to take a youngling, however briefly, under your wing, to put her at ease with inane chatter regarding the quality of the tea. If we do something stupid, feel free to smack us down, put us in our places — but be direct about it. Don’t just pretend we don’t exist, and when we insist on existing, don’t be so obviously put out by it. Please. Oh, and should we actually do something intelligent? Should we — just hypothetically — ask the thoughtful question that gets the otherwise dead discussion finally rolling? Please, please try not to look quite so astonished.

4. Oh, and if you really are only here to present your paper? At least make the gesture of attending, say, one other session. To do otherwise is rude.

I have more to say about the issue of collaboration in the academy, but those were the bugbears of this past conference — which, by all accounts, was a much friendlier, cosier, more comfortable one than most. I witnessed almost no open antagonism, no one to my knowledge fell asleep at any inappropriate time, nor were there to be found (undue) drunkenness or lasciviousness. Nearly everyone admitted having learned a great deal, and seemed actually to mean it. Nevertheless: what is up with the narcissism?