The gender of future Pynchon Studies

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

The Warwick Pynchon conference 3 years ago was, in nearly
all senses, a great success---especially considering the short
time and limited resources with which Dan O'Hara had to work.
But there was one aspect of the conference that was not a 
success. If my memory serves me correctly, the 100 or so people
who managed to show up on the near-spur of the moment, less 
than ten were women.

Yet this should perhaps not having been surprising.

 I think if one looks at the amount of  critical essays published on
Pynchon, only about 10% have been published by women. If one
looks at the number of book-length studies of Pynchon, again, less
than ten percent have been written by women. There are long-term 
institutional reasons for this. 

Firstly, there are still more men than women humanities lecturers.
Of course this has been changing for a quarter-century. But,
if London University is typical and except for being larger than
most I think that it is, almost two-thirds of our humanities lecturers
are still male. And outside the Humanities, I believe our gender 
equality situation is worse.


  If one excluded QMW, which still has a largely female faculty, things 
would be worse even within the Humanities at UL. Probably twenty 
years ago less than ten percent were female. It has been a long uphill 
struggle for equality, even at the base level of equality of numbers. 
Equality of Tenure is of course an even more vexed and difficult 
battle in this age of Increasingly Elusive Tenure.  

Moreover, the long tradition of male-dominated education,
at least in the Humanities, meant that a fair amount of the time 
and effort of female lecturers has been spent in attempting to
widen the scope of vision in academia (and thus perhaps 
in society at large) beyond the traditional male-dominated one,
a task men themselves have only very  slowly begun to attempt 
to take on themselves in any numbers.

This has meant, to some extent, that the situation has required 
an emphasis by women on writing by women, and a re-reading of 
classic canonical texts with a view towards re-visioning the implicit
assumptions of Western Society in the light of the struggles for 
liberty by women, non-European western minority groups, and
post-colonial societies. Indeed, in a very real sense, all of the west
is attempting a gradual de-colonisation of our collective mind, and 
women and ethnic-minority lecturers at Western Universities have been
in the embattled vanguard.

Now, one of the things I love about CL49 is the implicit critique of the 
U.S. Mail/ and "us males". I fell in love with Pynchon in a reading group
in which I fell in respect with a brilliant woman lecturer, Jane Jackson, who 
was offering a penetrating and close reading---in large part a reading
which benefited from recent developments in French and American
feminisms. I was deluded. I imagined that lots of other brilliant women
would also love Pynchon and devote time and energy to investigating his 
work.

The time of Pynchon's writing has been the time of women's growing, 
yet elusive, empowerment. Yet  his scholarly readership is still, too largely,
male. What can be done to try to encourage a greater range of female 
scholarship in the field of Pynchon Studies? 

     This is a real question, and I can not answer it myself. I would 
like to hear what other people think. 

But I would like to suggest some goals, at least  in those
programmes for which I have some responsibility.
.
Firstly, I would like to see a good number of women attend and 
contribute to the PIPS seminar series. If  the series
isn't attracting enough, PIPS should make a special effort to find
them. Perhaps the list will also be able to help with this.

     Secondly, during the conferences and activities of International
Pynchon Week next June, Luc and I can make every effort to attract
female scholarship and female subscriptions in reasonable numbers. 
Simply stated, I would like IPW to attract nearly as many women to
IPW as there were people at the Warwick conference. 

We have almost three months  to go before the PIPS seminars begin, 
almost a year until IPW, and perhaps another six months to a year more
before the  publication of the resulting volumes of new essays. Given 
this time, what can we do to re-gender the future of  Pynchon Studies?  


Eric Alan Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk