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  • Yeats's Girls:Rereading "Leda" in the Light of #MeToo
  • Elizabeth Cullingford (bio)

Weaving together the personal and the professional, teaching and scholarship, Irish Studies and feminism, this essay tries to do several things at once. My discussion of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," a poem depicting an aggressive sexual assault on a "staggering girl," raises broader questions about how to teach works about rape and other sensitive topics that call into question traditional approaches to canonical literature. Hard lessons from my stint as an administrator, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the predicament of Sandra Oh's character Ji-Yoon Kim in Amanda Peet and Annie Wyman's 2021 academic comedy The Chair, jostle against scholarly interpretations of poems rendered problematic by the force field of #MeToo. My essay emerges from a collision between two kinds of feminism, acted out in the glare of negative publicity and amid a social-media firestorm, which forced me to reconsider both my position as a senior academic woman and a poem about which I thought I had nothing further to say in print. Under the expansively tolerant aegis of "Weak Theory," I allow the personal to inform my academic writing. Despite the Yeatsian focus of this essay, I hope it may be relevant to those in other fields who are attempting to come to terms with experiences like mine.

Weak theory was a response to what in the 1990s became known as "the hermeneutic of suspicion," a method of critique that excavated the hidden political, racial, or sexual biases embedded in the unconscious of literary works. Concerned about the pervasive negativity of suspicious readings, several prominent theorists, including Eve Sedgwick, Heather Love, Rita Felski, and Wai Chee Dimock, have proposed reparative, surface, or descriptive readings that attempt to discern what the text is saying rather than what it is hiding from itself. By liberating me from the kind of New Historicism that sees [End Page 7] a snake under every flower, though not from the necessity of history itself, the work of these theorists moderated my habits of critique, mitigated my tendency to know better than the text, and turned me back toward interpretation. The essay that follows foregoes strong, conclusive arguments in favor of what Paul Saint-Amour calls "the proximate, the provisional, and the probabilistic" (440). As Kathleen Stewart recommends, it comes "unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters" (72) and experiments with what Dimock describes as "long networks" of association that replace causation with correlation (736). In responding to a new set of cultural and feminist circumstances that caught me personally unawares, I theorize from a position of weakness not because it is currently fashionable but because that is where I am.

Me (Too) in the Academy

I recently stepped down after twelve years as the head of my department. If readers think that so much time spent in academic administration is evidence of serious masochism, they may be right. But until recently I would have disagreed: my position as the first female chair of English at a large state university satisfied my practical feminist ambitions. I enjoyed problem-solving, helping colleagues get promotion and teaching prizes, and hiring new faculty. Frankly, I enjoyed the power, and my salary went up too. Yes, my e-mail exploded, my letters of nomination would fill volumes, and my scholarship slowed to a glacial pace, but the world was not holding its breath waiting for another book from me. I had just one project I wanted to finish before I returned to full-time teaching and writing: an overhaul of our graduate program.

Then came October 2017 and the Harvey Weinstein scandal. The company he cofounded, Miramax, had made the Irish films My Left Foot and The Crying Game into international sensations and had distributed The Magdalene Sisters, a brilliant, disturbing account of the abuse of women by the Catholic Church. But when articles appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker exposing Weinstein as a sexual predator, I was not surprised: I assumed that this kind of behavior was pervasive in the media world (Kantor and...

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