ABSTRACT
Like the ways to God, the ways to becoming a feminist literary scholar can involve affirmation or negation. I suppose the way of affirmation involves community, even sisterhood (1 am thinking back to the days when sisterhood was possible, if not powerful), mentoring, women closing their office doors and going back to their desks and saying "Look-" very firmly, and then it came out, what you always knew or what you needed to know. The problem was that when 1 went back to college 1 flung myself into the bosom of the most established patriarchy I had heard of, and although there were women in some of those offices they were basically telling me how to survive that patriarchy, never mind thinking differently. A number of these women were named Sister, by the way, and they weren't powerful. The men were all named Father. My way was the way of negation, and I mean by that to suggest St John of the Cross and not St Theresa, who was a flake according to those suave and soutaned Jesuits with whom I fell in, late, an outsider, alternately oppositional and collusive. I learned feminist scholarship by learning masculinist scholarship.
