ABSTRACT
This question from my lover came to haunt me during a period of reflection on my current work. Although answers to questions such as this are inevitably complex—and one response surely is that my perception of our personal dynamics is somewhat different from his—my lover's challenge reverberated in an unsettling way with uncertainties I had already been sorting through before we met. These prior uncertainties, which arose in the course of my participation in a collaborative oral history project on the intellectual and political trajectories of radical, academic males, had to do with the relation between feminism and progressive men. More specifically, they had to do with the relation between what seemed at first to be male intransigence and feminist rectitude and what appeared at last to be something more—something involving difference, the different materialities of our male subjects' lives, and what appeared to be not feminist rectitude so much as feminist narcissism and egocentricity. My difficulties, that is, had to do with sorting out a relation between the political and the personal, the social “public” and the social “private.” They had to do with facing up to the realization that after several months of reading my transcripts of male-authored, oral history texts I felt less confident than before, to put it bluntly, about who the “bad guys” always were.
