Cirrus@Austlit

'I am writing this response just after the Avital Ronell story has hit the mainstream media in the United States. Ronell, a well-known professor long allied with deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, has been accused by a former graduate student of inappropriate, sexualized conduct. Ronell has denied the charges. After an eleven-month investigation, Ronell’s institution (NYU) has found that she behaved improperly towards this student and has suspended her, without pay, for the 2018-2019 academic year. One of the first reports I read about this suspension was from the online NYU student newspaper, the Washington Square News, which drew extensively from the original reporting in the New York Times just a few hours earlier. Somewhere around the sixth paragraph of the Washington Square News story I became confused. It appeared that the reporters had accidentally transposed the student’s name for Ronell’s, so that it was the student (not the professor) who was denying allegations of inappropriate contact; it was the student who wasn’t aware that his conduct had made the professor uncomfortable; it was the student who was defending himself by saying that his language was merely flamboyant. I didn’t take a screen shot of this paragraph and the next morning when I looked again at the online report, the language and the identities and the behaviours had all been corrected and everything made sense again: it is now the professor not the student who is the author of unacceptable conduct.' (Introduction)

'Rosalind Smith’s essay, ‘Cultures of Complaint: Protest and Redress in the Age of #Metoo,’ begins and ends with a reflexion on gendered genres of complaint. In contrast to the early modern female complaint that upheld the romantic and marital mores it lamented, the complaint emblematic of the ‘#metoo’ and ‘#timesup’ movements seeks redress: it demands at least reparations for some wrongdoing, be it through legal process or not, and in certain cases the rectification of the structural or institutional inequality that enables sexual harassment. And yet, as Smith notes, feminist efforts to make the complaint a catalyst for political change are thwarted by the kind of defence of men accused of sexual harassment at play in Laura Kipnis’ Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017) and one of its predecessors, Helen Garner’s The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power (1995). These books, the former from the United States and the latter from Australia, cast specific men accused of sexual harassment as the legitimate complainants, wronged by the system tasked to investigate and rule on their alleged wrongdoing. Whereas the early modern complaint, relayed by a male narrator, made the female complainant a target of empathy but maintained the patriarchal status quo, Kipnis and Garner’s ventriloquising of the male complaint makes men targets of empathy to protect the patriarchal status quo.'  (Introduction)