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.

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Content Note: Sexual violence, gender-based discrimination

Making Joyce Studies Safe for All

Roundtable and open forum organized by the James Joyce Society

September 15, 2023

Roundtablists: Katherine Ebury, Zoë Henry, Casey Lawrence, and Sam Slote

Moderator: Celia Marshik (also Joyce Society ombudsperson)

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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.

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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)

Celia Marshik: What kinds of damages are produced by the ongoing problems of sexual harassment that have been described here? What are some of the losses? What are some of the diminishments? What are some of the ways in which Joyce Studies has been shaped by these patterns of harassment?

Casey Lawrence: Many young women, especially students, are leaving Joyce Studies due to issues they have had early on, and we then lose their voices before they’ve even had a chance to contribute. Some of this exodus has been more public, as with Laura Gibbs’s wonderful tweet, but I know some who have just quietly changed fields or left academia altogether. We are poorer for it. That itself perpetuates the problem: if women are the ones who are primarily leaving, Joyce Studies continues to have a gender imbalance.

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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). 

Anonymous Attendee (chat comment): How might we include disability and accessibility more explicitly in this conversation?

AA (chat comment): In the United States, Higher Ed Ac Title IX can be used to file complaints against any US-based scholar, even if the behaviour did not take place at their home institution.

AA: One advantage of having an external ombudsperson would be that they would know about the various reporting facilities that do exist, such as Title IX, at institutions around the world.

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Margot Gayle Backus, Department of English, University of Houston

“Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” – An Afterword.

2/2/24

James Joyce was acutely aware of modern, literate societies’ rigid, hierarchical division of all human experience into either publicly-acknowledged (print) discourse, or into “unofficial” oral networks that simultaneously hide and informally adjudicate unspeakable matters on a case by case basis. In the course of his protracted literary campaign to break through this ethically and epistemologically distorting division, Joyce made extensive use of resources gleaned from many ancient and modern oral traditions, including those of the Irish bardic tradition. In particular, Joyce clearly admired the formidable satire wielded by the formally-trained fili to enforce “noble norms of comportment” on the part of their “elite patrons across Gaelic and gaelicized Ireland and Scotland.”^[1] Joyce would also have understood satire’s role in maintaining the powerful position of Irish poets themselves. In medieval and early modern Ireland, where honor was “understood . . . to reside in one’s good name,” satire represented a powerful weapon, the very threat of which could recall to their social responsibilities patrons who were neglecting either the welfare of their society, or their customary obligation to support the poets whose work upheld and renewed the Irish social order.^[2]

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