17 May 2024
Jonathan Goldman, New York Institute of Technology and Cathryn Piwinski, Rutgers University
Joyceans, as we are called, are brought together by both our criticism of and admiration of Joyce’s work — and even, some of us, by the principles implicit in that work. Joyce, it is clear, despised abuses of power, individual or systemic, and held particular ire for when the powerful wield their power against those without. The Ulysses scene in Barney Keirnan’s Pub is instructive. “I’m talking about injustice,” says Leopold Bloom,[1] and while he is referring to antisemitic subjugation, his words resound in the chapter as also addressing the way his peers relegate him to the borders of their society. It should not be lost on us that everyone present is marginalized; even the Citizen and other bar patrons are victims of colonial violence of which their chauvinism is partly a result. Ulysses demonstrates how mistreatment by those at the centre serves to keep others at the margins even within the solidarity of Irish republicanism.
Joyce’s work is also attuned to abuses of power rooted in gender. Molly Bloom notes that men “go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a spirit on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going” (U 18.298). Molly is outlining a double standard rooted in the uneven power dynamic between men and other people: men, she says, are allowed to take liberties in any interaction, physical or otherwise, while preventing others from sharing such privileges. She is not suggesting that everyone should access similar freedoms; rather, she points to the violence inherent in this dynamic. Thinking about how men “take whatever they like from anything at all with a spirit on it,” Molly implies the parasitic relationship between the men and this spirit, which violently disrupts its trajectory. In a contemporary context, we might understand this as the trauma that follows gender-based violence, which often upsets a survivor’s ability to continue their lifestyle or career paths as normal. As such, Molly is speaking to and against a systemic issue of gender-based violence that has persisted for centuries.
We at the James Joyce Society (JJS) keep Joyce’s attention to power dynamics and justice at the forefront of our work, and it was with these aspects in mind that we organized the roundtable of September 15, 2024, “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All.” Our clarion call was Dr. Laura Gibbs’s social media post of June 21, 2023, which announced her departure from Joyce studies due to the community’s ongoing inability to create safe conditions for its most vulnerable members. Gibbs cited abuses of power in the community and, in particular, incidents of sexual harassment against emerging and female or gender non-conforming scholars that have gone under-addressed for years.
Gibbs’s is, however, only the most recent public statement about abuse occurring in Joyce studies: the “Open Letter to the James Joyce Community” of 2018 sounded an alarm about sexual misconduct taking place in the Joyce community. Published by The Modernist Review, the “Open Letter” said the quiet part out loud, making public what many had been whispering in private. Its demands were instrumental in inspiring our own practices at the James Joyce Society, where we have strived to model how an organization can implement safety protocols. Upon taking over the stewardship of the JJS in 2021, we instituted an ombudsperson position so that anyone wishing to report infractions of our anti-harassment policy, which is available on our public website, could do so while bypassing the organization’s leadership. In our programming, we have prioritized offering platforms to speakers and to research that contributes to a less patriarchal, less colonial version of Joyce studies, aiming to achieve an inclusive scholarly spirit that would match our wishes for our community at large.
It is worth pausing here to clarify what we mean by the term “Joyce studies.” Joyce studies is an international community, composed primarily of professional scholars, but also including many non-academics, artists, and unaffiliated scholars, and actualizes in organized events such as the International Joyce Symposium and the North American Conferences, the annual Rome conference, the Dublin Joyce Summer School, the Zurich workshop, and the Trieste Joyce School. The first two of these are under the purview of the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF), and all are linked through overlapping leadership and participants. It is at or around these occasions where incidents of sexual harassment tend to take place. While there are pockets of Joyce-reader communities all around the world, many of which might have little to no contact with the IJJF and the events we have listed, our roundtable addresses institutionalized Joyce studies—those formalized conferences, schools, and committees — and the ongoing issue of sexual abuse within this network.
“Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” is part of an ongoing and widespread project across academia. The last several years have seen a growing awareness of sexual violence in academic contexts, which has in turn led to demands for more extensive and effective responses from academic institutions such as universities, independent organizations, and conference committees. The #MeToo movement, which was started by Tarana Burke in 2006 and later went viral in 2017, brought widespread public attention to issues of sexual violence in workplaces as well as to the insufficient and often harmful institutional responses.[2] While students, faculty, and staff in higher education shared stories on harassment during #MeToo, the definitive arrival of awareness and university response has been belated. Universities and affiliated organizations continue to struggle with handling incidents when they arise: although Title IX in the U.S. offers a legal framework that defines sexual violence and outlines the appropriate institutional response, it has been criticized as ineffective in achieving justice for survivors. By contrast, English universities have no legal mandate and instead rely on recommendations proffered by the 2016 Universities UK Changing the Culture report.[3]
In recent years, scholars have studied the institutional response to sexual violence in academia, many finding that these responses are often inadequate and, at times, actively harmful. This inadequacy can often be understood as “institutional betrayal,” a term which describes the “institutional failure to prevent sexual assault or respond supportively when it occurs.” Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd write that this betrayal has “the power to cause additional harm to assault survivors.”[4] According to Erin R. Shannon, “institutional betrayal… [is] a shared theme in US and English universities.” Specifically, their research concludes that “institutional betrayal often resulted from US and English universities prioritising the reputation of the university over survivor wellbeing,” which not only “[devalues] the survivor but also apparently [prioritises] the perpetrator.”[5] This can look like, to use Alison Phipps’s term, “institutional airbrushing,” in which the university “airbrushes” issues out. Phipps writes that this can happen in one of two ways: “complainants may be discouraged from pursuing allegations; or allegations may be acted upon, but alleged perpetrators allowed to withdraw quietly.”[6] Both Shannon and Phipps point to a trend in higher academia (specifically under the context of the university, but this often extends to para-university settings, such as conferences) that shows institutions will often act, or elect to not act, in their own interest to the detriment of survivors. These institutional failures take the form of implicit discouragement of reporting, denial of incidents of assault, zero or light punitive measures against perpetrators, and zero or little support of survivors.
The myriad instantiations of institutional betrayal have severe consequences not just for those directly involved in an incident, but also the academic community at large. As we saw in Gibbs’s tweet, unaddressed issues of sexual violence will push away promising scholars who rightly prioritize their and their peers’ safety. When an institution has nonexistent, unclear, or inadequate methods of reporting, it can give the impression to the institution’s leadership as well as to newcomers to an academic forum that sexual violence is not an issue. This means that academics such as Gibbs, as well as those who participated in our roundtable, are forced to take on an unofficial and therefore precarious role in warning rising scholars and creating contingent safe spaces for others. Offering no processes for remedy or restorative justice, an institution communicates that bad actors are tolerated, even rewarded, and therefore invites repeat offenses. The lack of a clearly articulated process and the resulting lack of a sense of safety also risk retraumatizing, per Smith and Freyd, survivors. We cite the above scholarship, therefore, to underline not just that there are pervasive issues of sexual harassment, but that individual and institutional resistance to significant change compounds the harm done to survivors. The above scholars, too, can provide us with a roadmap forward.
We sought this forward movement on September 15, 2023, and continue to seek it. When Gibbs made her announcement, the Joyce Society officers decided that one small step toward addressing abuse in Joyce studies was hosting a forum to give community members the opportunity to learn more about and discuss these issues. It aimed — and aims — to increase awareness of the crisis within the Joyce community, to establish institutional support of survivors of sexual harm, propose firewalls to prevent further injustices, and to interrogate institutions and individuals with power that fail to respond to a crisis of sexual violence. We convened speakers Katherine Ebury, Zoë Henry, Casey Lawrence, and Sam Slote; scholars at varying stages of their career and who represent a transatlantic Joyce studies.[7] At the meeting, we were prepared for their stark testimonies; we were less prepared for the intense conversation that followed. Over 120 people RSVP’d to the roundtable, and over 100 attended. Dozens contributed to the wider discussion, some expressing long standing frustration, others surprise and dismay. They debated measures for change, some drastic, some not. There was no debate of whether change is necessary.
We committed to publishing the proceedings because we recognize that historical records are not only sites of conflict, but also important spaces for productive discussion and change. Again, we are indebted to Joyce for teaching this lesson. In Finnegans Wake, Book I, Chapter IV, the documentation of the Festy King/HCE’s transgression is too contradictory and obscure to serve as evidence. Meanwhile, the Four Old Men are both sitting in judgment of and are implicated in the crime:
… even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer’s setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it!) uncover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blue or as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all mankind have foliated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner’s stotter all the soundest sense to be found immense our special mentalists now holds (securus iudicat orbis terrarum) that by such playing possum our hagious curious encestor bestly saved his brush with his posterity, you, charming coparcenors, us, heirs of his tailsie.[8]
As HCE tries to hide by blending into the scenery, the narrative “framing up” is not capable of recording the “true truth.” It serves as hagiographical whitewashing, a “brush” painting over patriarchal violations. The Four’s complicity (and that of us all, of “you”) along with HCE’s evasions keep the transgressions out of the public record, maintaining his reputation. But the Four, we all know, are stuck in the past. Joyce studies must move forward by acknowledging recurring harm in order to deter it. Troubles can not be covered up if a community is to heal. By publishing “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All,” we are speaking of injustice. We do so out of love for our community and a desire to make it welcoming and safe for the broadest set of scholars who want to engage, professionally and intellectually, with Joyce’s work and other Joyceans.
Go to:
Editorial Page
Transcript of the James Joyce Society Welcome Address
Personal Statements by Katherine Ebury, Casey Lawrence, and Sam Slote
Roundtable Transcript
Anonymous Open Discussion Transcript
Afterword by Margot Gayle Backus
Sources
Feature Image Credit: Lipnitzki/Getty Images
[1] James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 12.1474. All future references cited parenthetically.
[2] Sandra E. Garcia, “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags,” The New York Times, October 20, 2017. For further information on sexual violence in higher academic settings, see Bonnie S. Fisher, Francis T. Cullen, and Michael G. Turner, “Research Report: The Sexual Victimization of College Women,” Bureau of Justice Statistics at National Institute of Justice, December 2000; Geraldine Smith, “Hidden Marks: A study of womens students’ experience of harassment, stalking, violence, and sexual assault,” National Union of Students, 2010; David Cantor, Bonnie Fisher, Susan Chibnall, Reanne Townsend, “Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survery on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct,” The Association of American Universities, September 21, 2015; Nancy Chi Cantalupo and William C. Kidder, “A Systematic Look at a Serial Problem: Sexual Harassment of Students by University Faculty,” Utah Law Review 2018, no. 3, article 4 (2018): 671-786; and Alison Phipps, “Reckoning up: sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university,” Gender and Education 32, no. 2 (2020): 227-43. There is also an increasing amount of academic work that brings #MeToo to the study of modernist literature, such as Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan, eds., #MeToo and Modernism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2023).
[3] Erin R. Shannon, “Protecting the perpetrator: value judgements in US and English university sexual violence cases,” Gender and Education 34, no. 8 (2022), 907.
[4] Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd, “Dangerous Safe Havens: Institutional Betrayal Exacerbates Sexual Trauma,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 26 (February 2013), 119.
[5] Shannon, “Protecting the perpetrator,” 907-908.
[6] Phipps, “Reckoning up,” 231.
[7] Zoë Henry’s statement, per her request, has been excluded from the published transcript here. Her comments during the roundtable discussion remain.
[8] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 96, 26-35.
The Modernist Review 