Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

is Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow,” an essay of virtually iconic status in discussions of personal criticism. It opens with the words “[t]here are two voices inside me . . . One is the voice of a critic who wants to correct a mistake in the essay’s view of epistemology. The other is the voice of a person who wants to write about her feelings . . . These beings exist separately but not apart. One writes for professional journals, the other in diaries, late at night.”23 What follows is a phenomenological consideration of how she might go about reconciling those two voices, how to “move away from academic conventions that segregate intellectual concerns from meditations on what is happening outside my window or inside my heart.”24 It is difficult for Tompkins to integrate these voices: firstly because she is embarrassed to be writing about her “feelings,” because it seems self-indulgent, yet her feminist convictions require her to resist this sense of shame.

In Tompkins’s piece her emotional voice, struggling with the nature of academic discourse, is then joined by a resolutely embodied voice, with the sentences which provoked the most comment in response to the piece: “[m]ost of all I don’t know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind—the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.”25 This collapsing of the public/private dichotomy to such an extent—making reference to a friend’s suicide as well as needing to go to the toilet—marked a shift in the use of the personal voice in literary studies. The academic writer’s personal testimony became truly engaged rather than anecdotal or rhetorical.

The personal criticism of which Jane Tompkins’s “Me and My Shadow” is exemplary is routinely attacked for being emotional, uncontrolled, ‘too much information,’ ‘gossipy.’ There is, as Nancy Miller notes, a gendered element to this: “[b]y going/not going to the bathroom in public, Tompkins crosses the line into the dangerous zone of feminine excess.”26 This “calling attention to oneself” will more often than not embarrass the academic audience or reader; exhibitionism that leads to social discomfort may be regarded as ‘impolite.’ Miller asserts that the reader’s embarrassment provoked by the appearance of the personal voice in academic discourse is not a reason to avoid it; rather, it is “a sign that it is working.”27 Miller also notes—as does Tompkins—that she herself gains enjoyment from autobiographical detail in an academic piece of writing, preferring “the gossipy grain of situated writing.”28 Those who are discomforted by the immensely revelatory tone of Tompkins’s essay, Miller suggests, may be bothered more by her display of feminist anger, than by her reference to her bladder: “[i]t is her anger, that is ‘not supposed’ to show, but it does. ‘She’ is making a spectacle of herself. ‘She,’ as has often been said of me, is ‘being emotional.’”29

The use of the personal voice in academic writing makes one vulnerable to attack that goes deeper than the intellectual. More unpleasant than a male audience member’s comment on Elspeth Probyn’s paper on eating disorders—that her speaking of her personal experience of anorexia made him “nervous”—was a feminist’s response to the printed version, that Probyn’s “weighty words” of confession “lacked sweat and blood” in their invocation of the female body.30 This insensitivity to the point of cruelty in choice of vocabulary is a reminder why so many choose not to write from a personal perspective. The use of the impersonal tone in academic discourse serves to distance oneself from one’s own intellectual positions, a distance that ensures that—however violent the assault—no one will get hurt.

      Autobiography and Selfhood

While objections to personal criticism on the grounds that it is ‘embarrassing’ may rightly be dismissed, there are more profound problems with the presence of the personal voice in academic writing. Tompkins acknowledges her anxiety over the use of the personal voice: “[t]he voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar. I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don’t even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will.”31 These words are inspiring, but what is troubling is the notion of a distinct “voice,” a unified essence that has been obscured by the conventions of patriarchal scholarship, struggling to break through. Here the turn to autobiographical criticism runs the risk of implying that the personal voice is invested with inherent authority, because it is implicitly associated with a ‘person’ in a way that ‘objective’ writing is not. In the words of H. Aram Veeser, it can be argued that personal criticism “builds on the hypothesis of liberal authenticity: ‘I felt it, therefore it is true.’”32 Aside from questions of validity or truth, privileging one’s own voice in this way may lead to a silencing of, or failure to listen to, the voices of others. This begs the question, “[c]an stories be told through selves and through emotions without being at the expense of other stories and selves?”33 Probyn writes in the engaged, autobiographical mode, but in the hope that it is possible “to construct ways of thinking that are marked by ‘me’ but that do not efface actively or through omission the ways in which ‘she’ may see differently.”34 This requires resistance to “a simple reification of either experience or the experiencer,”35 acknowledging that there is no “unmediated innocence”36 to the self and to experience.

Feminist theology has a methodological commitment to the authority of “women’s experience,” but problems inherent in this were apparent from its earliest days, and extended and profound critiques are in no short supply.37 The two main criticisms are the philosophical naivety of its notion of ‘experience,’ and its failure to account for difference in grouping together the experience of white middle-class westerners with that of women from different social contexts. Taking on the criticisms of womanist theologians, in 1989 Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow admitted that “[t]he notion of women’s experience must be taken as an invitation to explore particularity rather than to homogenize significant differences.”38 Therein lies the enduring significance of feminist theological method: that particularities matter; that theological truths do not necessarily hold for everyone, and that theology is always done with an agenda, whether or not it is acknowledged. Emphasis on women’s ‘stories,’ rather than ‘experience,’ could underscore that experience is never unmediated; rather it is constructed and interpreted. The communal nature of ‘story’ may guard against the charge of solipsism, and the accusation that liberal belief in the authority of experience rests on Enlightenment notions of the autonomous individual. At the same time, the particularity of ‘story’ can prevent white, middle-class feminist theologians from committing the error of confusing their own experience for ‘women’s experience.’

We do not look inside ourselves and find our stories there, submerged and waiting to be brought out into the light. The stories we tell about ourselves are produced—albeit from the ‘stuff’ of experience, however fragmented and unreliable our memory of it—within particular contexts and for particular purposes. This is especially the case with academic life-writing; for example, Probyn’s story of her experience of anorexia, given as part of a conference paper, “was,