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In Theory (Part 1)October 11, 2007 Many (many, many) years ago I heard feminist theorist Ti-Grace Atkinson speak. The venue was Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania, which means the speech was given while I was a student there, between September 1972 and May 1974. Irvine is (or was -- I haven't set foot on the Penn campus since the late 1970s) an ornate, cavernous hall of the sort common on old college campuses. By day it was a lecture hall for those huge freshman courses with rosters in the hundreds; by night, especially weekend nights, it hosted non-compulsory events like concerts and speeches by visiting scholars, celebrities, and political candidates. The place, as I remember it, was packed. Atkinson stood at a podium way down house left, on the floor, not the stage. I was sitting about two-thirds of the way back on the diagonal, almost as far from the speaker as possible, which is why my physical memory of her is distant and flattened by the light that lit the podium. In subsequent years I saw occasional photographs of her, but those impressions of her features haven't insinuated themselves into my recollection of the event. What I remember most vividly is that she emphasized, re-emphasized, and underscored the importance of theory. I didn't embrace this idea, no way: I argued with it. I argued with it off and on for years, many, many years. Several times I thought I'd settled the argument one way or the other -- "Yes, theory is extremely important" or "No, anyone who gets that excited about theory is screwed up" -- and laid it to rest, but always the rest turned out to be remission and the argument came roaring back. The moral of this story may be that the things you argue with take much deeper root than the things you embrace, so pick your arguments very carefully, especially if it looks like they're going to go on for a while. It's possible that in that speech Ti-Grace Atkinson talked about nothing but the importance of theory, but I doubt it. So why did this hook me, and why couldn't I disengage? Damned if I know. I don't remember what was in my head that night, so I have to extrapolate as if I were Susanna's biographer, knowing no more than a reasonably knowledgeable and somewhat perceptive biographer would know, which is to say a fair amount about Susanna's previous years as a student activist and her (many more) subsequent years of restlessly -- some informants use words like "relentlessly" and "tediously" and "obsessively" -- trying to understand why she and other people do what they do and don't do what they don't do, and how we rationalize it all before, during, and after the fact. Extrapolating from all that, what I come up with is this: In my family, the religion was lukewarm and the politics were bipartisan. My mother was a Republican and my father was a Democrat, but their arguments derived less from ideas and ideologies than from his ruthless logic and her inability (or unwillingness) to get her facts straight. (I absorbed, or maybe inherited, a hefty dose of both, which is why my brain used to be such a turbulent, even downright dangerous, place.) The religion, Low Church Episcopalian, was sedate and unpassionate and nonprescriptive. I learned the prayers and creeds but was never more than vague about what I was supposed to believe. More important, I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I was a teenage Arabist, so it's not really surprising that I flirted with Islam all through high school. Islam was quite clear about what was expected. You knew when you were doing it right. So this young woman with a political and religious background the consistency of cream of wheat, or maybe a goose-down mattress three feet deep, takes a flying leap into -- what? A Jesuit university at the height of the antiwar movement. Can you say "Thesis/antithesis"? More than three-quarters of the student body at Georgetown U. was Catholic, and many had been to Catholic schools. This was bracing, fascinating, spellbinding stuff. True, many of my friends were in the early stages of recovery from guilt, trauma, and absolute authority, but I was so jealous of their stories. Fortunately I was encountering at the same time both the women's liberation movement and compelling evidence of why it was necessary -- in those days, sexism could parade utterly naked up and down the street, and nowhere was it taken more for granted than among the somberly dressed Jesuits (whom I, of course, quickly learned to call "Jebbies"). Without that powerful countervailing force, my longing for ritual, belonging, and authority might have led me into Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism or further into Islam -- or, even more likely, one of their secular counterparts. More TK -- I really do have to get some work done.
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