ABSTRACT
Would this exchange-it is an answer to a question-be funny if spoken by a man? if spoken from this same place but slightly in the past, this morning? Yes, of course, why not? The answer’s a quote, so perhaps I’m quoting Stephen Heath or Andrew Ross or Paul Smith. There’s no way to tell in this context because the “I” of a phrase like “I’m giving a paper” does not state its gender, much less its proper name. What is more, in the quote, the dual structure of gender is reproduced and repeated by the dual structure of the roman numerals I and II of “Men in Feminism” (which I’m going to propose we try to pronounce according to the graphic rebus “femmeninism,” although this runs the risk of introducing a new shibboleth, a word with which to discriminate insiders from outsiders merely by one’s ability to pronounce it). Within this symmetry, how can we-you and me, you plural and you singular, me singular and me plural-how can we be sure who’s speaking here? Fortunately (but also unfortunately), a certain organization of rules and exclusions, a whole institutionalized, incorporated legal apparatus of convention is in place to provide some measure of certainty. But what are we supposed to think about the certainty of the “I” as conventionally structured, for example by the procedural rules of the MLA convention? The question is that of the spatial limits of conventional metaphor which it is crucial to set out, to posit or suppose if one is to be able to state, with any reliability, where one stands with relation to “femmeninism,” inside or outside, for or against, left or right, in rejection or projection. If the decisive question to be put here is “where do I, where does the ‘I’ stand,” then
at most we have a thread to follow through this crush of conventional spatial metaphors, obligingly given an incorporated reality every year by the MLA, and which this year we celebrate-but by what kind of coincidence?—in Washington, D.C. I’m proposing to follow the thread from a conventional question such as “Are you giving a paper at the MLA?” to watch how the “I” answers when constrained by place and by time to decide where it stands. If you like, I will say I am borrowing-or quoting-this way of reading from A Room of One’s Own where the narrator is both an admiring and an admirable reader. “All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I.’ One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it… Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I.’ One began to be tired of ‘I.’ Not but what this ‘I’ was a most respectable ‘I’; honest and logical; hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that ‘I’ from the bottom of my heart.” As you can see or hear, perhaps, such a reference has already considerably complicated the thread to be followed. Woolf’s “‘I’”/“I” is not a beam of theoretical light, but “a straight dark bar, a shadow…”
Who, when, what, and where is the “I” that has to answer all these questions, that also has to answer for all these questions?
