In Reply

Dearest Amy, Anu, Jackie, Lisa, Louis, Miriam, Patty, Ruby, Ryan, Tom, and Victor:

Thank you so very much for these wonderfully warm and generous letters. They are moving not only for their affection and sparkle but also because there is something extraordinary, so unbelievable, about having been read so well. Thank you, thank you. And I'd like to take this occasion to repeat what I did at the time your words were delivered at the SCMS Atlanta event, and thank some other people, people who said yes, do it, to things I proposed at crucial moments: Angela Martin, Christine Gledhill, Ann Kaplan, Jim Hillier, Victor Perkins, Kobena Mercer, Ginette Vincendeau, and Chris Straayer.

One thing that struck me across the letters is the way you all weave together so readily and adroitly the personal, political, and academic. This is not just in remembering those moments in which friendship and professional association merge, those conversations where as much intellectual work gets done as in the display of such work in formal presentations, but also in identifying something personal in what and even more how I write. I remember how in a conversation (there you go) after an examination, the art historian Lynda Nead raised the personal as a difficulty in academic work. I've always felt it was important neither to exclude it nor to make it the point of what one is doing. On the one hand, the personal is one element of that fact about knowledge, even in the natural sciences and a fortiori in the human sciences, that we can never be wholly separate from that which we study. This is one of the principles elaborated for me in the work of H. P. Rickman and Janet Wolff (and behind them Alfred Schütz and Wilhelm Dilthey), given extra grounding in feminist discussions of situated knowledge (see Anderson's "Feminist Epistemology").¹ You cannot exclude yourself from what you are writing about and should not think you do. In part, you mention the personal to help the reader resist you, even to help you resist yourself. You need to recognize the ways in which you are representative of wider sociocultural categories that limit and make possible what you can say. These are the circumstances not of your own choosing within which nonetheless you do the work.

Then there's the matter of theory, its absence or covert presence in my practice. I hope I have never in so many words said that I didn't do or was against theory. It all depends what you mean by theory. If theory means reflecting on the grounds of one's knowing things, on the frameworks of understanding one brings to bear, on one's assumptions about how the world is, then I am all for theory. We do after all always draw interpretations, choose evidence, think the world is so and not so, and there is no merit in not assessing the validity of drawing, choosing, and thinking so. Whether one needs to spell it out all the time or be someone who focuses on it are other matters, but these are not the main reasons I am wary of writing with theory on my sleeve (as so many of you gently point out). I remember when I was a graduate student in Birmingham, Alan Shuttleworth, whom many of us regarded as among the most brilliant among us and who, like many brilliant people, did not stick with academia, was accused by others of being against theory; "I'm not against thought," he replied with some urgency, "it's 'theory' I'm doubtful about." There are strategic reasons to be wary of theory in this sense. I know it can be very empowering for some students, but for many more it is alienating, inducing cynicism and humiliation. The use of a certain kind of vocabulary may be a form of defensiveness, but it results in being intimidating; the recourse in theoretical discourse to naming theorists not only may stand in for actually making an argument but is also often about establishing the writer's position in the lineage of authority. None...