Content Note: Sexual violence, gender-based discrimination
Transcript from Making Joyce Studies Safe for All. Roundtable and open forum organized by the James Joyce Society (September 15, 2023).
Katherine Ebury Statement
Thank you for including me in this forum. When I was first entering Joyce Studies in 2009, I had some uncomfortable experiences – I experienced a lack of professional boundaries and a culture of testing limits, intellectually and emotionally and sometimes physically. I remember what it was like to only know one or two older scholars in the field who had encouraged me to enter these spaces: no one had warned me about anyone or anything. Similarly, I did not tell them about my negative experiences. I am a working class, first generation, non-binary scholar: I learned to make my way in these spaces that were not designed for me, as I had made my way in other academic spaces. You could call this toxic resilience: I was aware of my strength because I was always using it. More importantly, I was also incredibly lucky: nothing too bad happened to me and I met my partner in the field of Joyce studies, as well as several close friends who shared my values.
As I found my place, moving from early career to mid career, other people increasingly told me their stories of harassment, bullying and assault, so much worse than my experience. I believed them: they were a part of my experience, even though I had been so lucky. But these were traumatic stories, stories that keep me up at night. Just as I carry a mental list of people to avoid in the field, I often name in my head all the people who are missing from Joyce Studies, those who I found myself powerless to help and whose research was wonderful. My own PhD student Dr Laura Gibbs recently left the field despite all the support I hoped to offer her. She has a bright future elsewhere but I feel very guilty.
I also know from other colleagues at my career stage and above that apparent seniority and respect do not always offer protection from bullying and harassment. In 2022 I chaired the Women’s Caucus at the Dublin Symposium and I hope this traditional space will continue to be revived: in this forum, some older scholars told stories of severe disrespect and of wishing to believe that women were now included as equals in Joyce Studies. Other senior scholars in Joyce Studies choose to keep publishing and keep up their networks without exposing themselves to a toxic culture through regular conferences. These scholars are missing too. I admit that it is challenging to deal with these issues amidst the normal excessive academic workload of teaching, writing, peer review and service, as well as now defending the humanities! My resilience tires me; my memories weary me. I could step back from Joyce studies. I work on several other authors, but I find my shoulder is to the wheel here. And people’s stories keep finding me…
My sense of my own limitation and my flagging courage is more poignant now that I am a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Joyce Foundation and especially as I am currently helping to organise the Glasgow Symposium in 2024. It hurts that I still think the recommendations of the James Joyce Open Letter from 2018, which I signed, would fix what ails us – we can all read this document and do better. Instead, five years have passed and the community is older and no wiser. If anything, I see more cruelty and volatility in the ‘bad actors’ in the field than previously. We have told them that their behaviour is unacceptable – but they do not wish to change. If anything, fear of reprisal is an even more reasonable fear than it used to be for people considering the brave option of making a complaint. I warn all my students, male and female, before sending them to conferences. I tell them both who to avoid and who to talk to if they feel unsafe. There are many people who might in all other circumstances be supportive and kind but who cannot fully be trusted with these kinds of disclosures – this is because of who their friends are and/or their interest in Joyce Studies saving face.
In a time of increasing scarcity in the academy I believe it is our responsibility as mentors to erect a world around our students, so that they have a decent chance to live the ‘life of the mind’, at least for a time; the world we make with our labour and our commitment to students should be safe. We need to do better as role models and fully implement the recommendations of the James Joyce Open Letter!
Casey Lawrence Statement
When I think about the question of why Joyce Studies seems to have trouble retaining female scholars, I think about all the times that I could have left, and many times maybe should have left, Joyce Studies. When I was a first-year undergraduate, I joined a Finnegans Wake reading group to make friends. Because I enjoyed it and thrived there, a professor suggested that I attend a Joyce summer school. While I appreciated the experience academically, there was a lot culturally that I wish I had spoken up about at the time. The summer of 2014, I was propositioned multiple times. There were many comments made about the skimpiness of my outfits and rumours ran amok about my relationship with a professor, which I hope he never heard. I was frequently pressured to drink alcohol at social events, despite being under the legal drinking age at home, and got drunk for the first time at a Joyce event. That evening I was pulled into the lap of an older Joycean and groped. The person who ‘rescued’ me from this situation later showed me his penis unprompted in public. This initiation into the culture surrounding Joyce Studies could very easily have scared me off. And maybe, should have.
Despite this initiation, I didn’t leave. I presented at the International James Joyce Conference in Toronto in 2017, an experience about which I wrote a now-notorious blog post. During the Q&A of the “Women in Joyce” panel, an older Joycean polled the panellists and the audience about whether we believed Molly is masturbating in “Penelope.” None of the papers were on that subject. I voted ‘yes.’ After the session, someone who had been in that audience followed and cornered me in a dark stairwell to tell me I was wrong. I was sitting in an armchair and he stood toe to toe with me, so that his crotch was at eye level and I could not stand up or leave. This man proceeded to mansplain female masturbation to me, including the horrifying fact that he had apparently “polled his female students,” who all said that they don’t masturbate on their periods. When I passed this event off as a joke at dinner the next night my supervisor was horrified, but by this point, I had already experienced untold counts of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behaviour in academia, and in Joyce spaces in particular. I was 21. Since then, I have personally been a victim of groping, nonconsensual kissing, sexual coercion, verbal bullying, online bullying, and other forms of gender-based harassment. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of horrific and traumatizing abuse; one time I even witnessed someone lift the skirt of a grad student to ‘check’ if she was wearing panties. Many of these events took place after the Open Letter.
Someone who I considered a mentor once told me that I had only gotten a travel grant because I had “great tits” and the person in charge wanted to look at them. I was also told that if I accepted an educational opportunity from a male colleague, that I was going to be sexually assaulted, and that it would be my fault. I was once told that I didn’t have to worry about a known predator in Joyce Studies because I “wasn’t his type.” I was once told that all female scholars have to “put up with” a certain amount of harassment in order to succeed in academia. I was once told that I would never succeed in academia if I continued to “write like a woman.” I was once called “pretty wallpaper.” On three separate occasions, in different contexts, I have heard groups of women in Joyce studies referred to as a “harem.” All of these comments came from various people, from different institutions and positions. At many points during my academic career, I would have been ‘justified’ to walk away. The only reason I didn’t is because, until recently, I didn’t recognize many of these instances as abuse. They became so normalized that I didn’t know there was a problem in our field, let alone that I had been a victim of it.
So, when people ask why Joyce Studies is haemorrhaging female scholars, I think of the fact that every woman I know has at least one story just like this, if not many. These problems overwhelmingly target young women, especially students without the support or confidence to speak up. Students are often seen as ephemeral in academic spaces. Due to high turnover, it isn’t always obvious when they quietly leave. But their absence nevertheless speaks volumes.
When I published a blog post in 2022 about some of my experiences, my supervisor received an email demanding to know why he had “let me” publish it. Because the culture in Joyce Studies is silence and whispers. By the time I was inducted into what we call the “whisper network,” it was already too late. The whisper network model puts the impetus on potential victims to protect themselves, which may include removing themselves from situations (such as conferences) or from Joyce Studies altogether. My hope for this roundtable is that we may say the quiet parts out loud, because when we keep quiet, people get hurt and then, they leave.
Sam Slote Statement
Sexual harassment in the Joyce world is multiple different problems, albeit inter-related, and, as such, they require different types of responses. The problems range from physical assault (which has happened) to sexual coercion to inappropriate behaviour. As Katherine, Zoë, and Casey have shown, female Joyceans have a fundamentally different lived experience than male Joyceans, one that is far more sinister and threatening. I have never had to endure the kinds of experiences that all three women have related and that is precisely because of white, middle-class, male privilege.
One of the big frustrations of the last few years has been an unwillingness within the Joycean community to acknowledge the problem of harassment and its extent. This resistance has itself become one further act of oppression. Indeed, a unifying feature for these different manifestations of harassment is a lack of respect. And the prevalence and persistence of harassment reflects very poorly on the Joycean community.
I’ve asked colleagues in a variety of other disciplines what their sense is of the scale of harassment in their fields. The typical answer is that there are a few problematic individuals, who tend to be older, but that it is primarily limited to just these individuals. And this is where I think the Joyce world might be worse. We have over the years turned a blind eye to a number of bad actors – to be clear, this is multiple individuals. Through years of inaction, these bad actors have defined one aspect of our community’s standards and behaviour. And this behaviour has filtered down to younger generations of scholars.
One factor that can enable sexual harassment is Joyce’s explicitness as a writer. To take one specific example, a number of years ago, an older male Joycean – now deceased – admitted that the reason why he turned to Joyce studies was that it gave him the chance to talk about sex with female undergraduates.
The Open Letter proposed four courses of action, some of which have been implemented, at least partially. I think this is a good starting point for discussing where we need to go from here. Some things need to be done bureaucratically, that is having the Joyce Foundation and other relevant entities adopting and enforcing specific policies, but some of the things we need to do cannot be legislated and thus are at the level of changing our culture.
Go to:
Editorial Page
Introduction by Jonathan Goldman and Cathryn Piwinksi
Transcript of the James Joyce Society Welcome Address
Roundtable Transcript
Anonymous Open Discussion Transcript
Afterword by Margot Gayle Backus
Sources
Feature Image Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images
The Modernist Review 