ABSTRACT
When Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, deplores her exclusion from the carefully manicured grounds and hallowed halls of an Oxbridge college and its library, she has no illusions about the reasons why. She is a woman. ‘Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here [on the turf]: the gravel is the place for me’ she writes. Small wonder that she comments of her fictional, authorial self: ‘“I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being’ (Woolf 1929: 6–8), for its effects extend beyond the putatively anonymous authorship of this text. The exclusionary issue here is Woolf’s sexed/sexuate being. No doubt had she been otherwise other – not middle class, not white – she would have been doubly, triply excluded. But being a woman was enough. No such multiple identities were at issue, for in the actions and policies that kept her out, sexual difference overrides and sustains other differences even in their multiple modalities, affirming the outrageousness, the unthinkable invasion of a woman in the halls of academe. Equally compelling is the idea that the gravel is the place for her, which is literally and metaphorically far-reaching in its implications. This reference to place, to a lowly place at that, presages the ideas germane to the issues I will discuss here, where place, situations, spaces are ecologically, epistemologically, and ontologically significant in ways that their merely background taken-for-grantedness effectively obscures.
