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Devoney Looser Michael Sprinker and Feminism It would be misleading to claim that Michael Sprinker lived his life as an academic feminist. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was a professor from 1984 until his death in 1999, Sprinker was not involved with the Women's Studies Program. He rarely made feminist theory central to his courses, atleastwhile I was enrolled in the doctoralprogram in English from 1989 to 1993. 1 never heard him mention his colleague Michael Kimmel—a professor in the Department of Sociology known for his work with the National Organization of Men Against Sexism—whose office was several hundred feet away from the Stony Brook Humanities Building. Yet Sprinker's intellectual influence on feminist graduate students in English and Comparative Studies at Stony Brook was immense. To begin to describe that influence is what I hope to contribute in this essay. Richard Ohmann has written, "the personal turn has I think been more benefidal than not. It is in any case irreversible. I hope we can keep alive in it the sodai and the political, from which it has historically been inseparable , and without which it is at best incomplete and isolating" (354). This eloquent recasting of the feminist slogan "the personal is political" resonates as I consider Sprinker and feminism. In what follows, I draw on the personal in order to tell a story that is a kind of tribute, as well as (I would like to believe) a historically and politically meaningful narrative about graduate study in the humanities in the 1990s. I have never met Ohmann but felt I came to know him by reputation. Michael Sprinker clearly revered him, and those of us who were Michael's graduate students relished stories of his own mentors. These narratives of Michael's generally had more energy than sense. It wasn't the punch line you waited for (when there was one, it was inevitably disappointing) but the excitement he worked up in the telling. In the spring of 1991, he spent a semester at Wesleyan University at the Center for the Humanities and regaled us with anecdotes of "Dick" Ohmann. Michael seemed larger than life at times, so Dick was naturally cast as extra large, espedally if you could imagine figures of that stature playing raucous late-night poker. Michael's stories were elaborate verbal tableaus of Marxist critics sitting in smokefilled rooms, trying to take each other's money. These poker narratives were decidedly male-centered ones of bravado and bluffing. If there were women at these gatherings, Michael didn't mention them. I hadn't even imagined the possibility of a woman present on poker nights, until some months later when the rumor circulated that Michael would be briefly returning to Stony Brook. A group of English department men (professors, instructors, and graduate students) were being recruited to play poker at the home of a department couple—he an instructor and she a graduate student. As this news made the rounds, a few male 144 the minnesota review graduate students joked about the woman of the couple being there to serve the sandwiches. To these guys, I suspect, the joke was in keeping with the macho ethos the poker games (and Michael) were thought to perpetuate. And in a sense, they were not far off. The most outward features of Michael's academic persona were of the Robert Conrad-esque "I dare you to knock this battery off my shoulder" variety. Michael was famously pugilistic. Before he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the fall of 1991, he was notorious for involvement in threatened and actual fistfights—whether in the student union or in faculty meetings. He was not above suggesting that graduate seminar debates be turned into opportunities to "take it outside." He had a tendency to cultivate and celebrate spaces from which women were implicitly or explicitly exduded, growing out of the poker games, the madio drinking and smoking , and the fighting. It was irritating as hell, and he seemed largely unapologetic about it. He didn't always "know better" either. One of the first times I heard Michael speak was at a department...

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