Abstract: The critical cultures of error, judgment, and dismissal we see in contemporary queer and feminist movements and organizing are not new, but rather have deep roots in feminism’s second wave. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist critics such as Andrea Dworkin and Kate Millett were dually judged to have erred by mainstream academic and literary communities and also by their own feminist peers. Those who faced the most rancorous judgment in their own moment are, unsurprisingly, now also the most forgotten and condemned. In this talk, I outline how figures such as Dworkin and Millett got their bad reputations in the first place: they were considered bad readers by the literary establishment. Their refusal to separate reality from representation marked their ideological reading practices as naïve and unsophisticated. I note the similarities between their literary critical practices and those of contemporary feminist activists who face mainstream scorn when they advocate for forms of redress such as trigger warnings. Informed by the affective turn in queer studies and increased attention to current queer and feminist critical cultures of shame and shunning, I also investigate internal critical cultures of judgment in the second wave and tell a cautionary tale about the consequences of evisceration as feminist method. 

Bio: Leah Claire Allen is Assistant Professor in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and English at Grinnell College. Her current book project In Praise of Bad Critics revisits feminist critics from the 1960s and 1970s who have been labeled “bad critics” or “bad feminists” both within and outside of feminist circles. Her Autumn 2016 article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society argues that Andrea Dworkin, a quintessential “bad” critic and feminist, is an unexpected ancestor of queer theory. This article won the 2017 MLA Women's Caucus Florence Howe award for outstanding feminist scholarship. Professor Allen's research seeks to assess the methodologies and pedagogies that founded academic feminism with the aim of tracing the surprising history of contemporary queer and transgender theory in the forgotten and dismissed figures of the feminist past. At Grinnell, Professor Allen teaches Introduction to GWSS, Theory and Methods in GWSS, the capstone Senior Seminar in GWSS, and Queer and Trans Literatures.