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Eve at Amherst

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Eve's Tenure at Amherst—She Taught in the English Department from 1984 TO 1988—Coincided with the Tenth Anniversary of coeducation at the college and the early years of the AIDS pandemic. She found on her arrival a culture that had neither fully welcomed its female students and faculty members nor begun to acknowledge its homophobia. Eve gave early on a witty and provocative lecture to the campus community called “Sabrina Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” which enlisted as a feminist icon a nude female statue that had been glorified and abused throughout its long association with Amherst. Known today mostly by Eve's former colleagues and students (and the occasional still-disgruntled alumnus), the talk catalyzed campus activism and lead ultimately to the founding of the Women's and Gender Studies Department, perhaps the first in the country to adopt that compound name. Those familiar with Eve's later work may be surprised by her lecture's full-throated feminism—Between Men had yet to appear, and queer theory was hardly a gleam in anyone's eye. Even after a quarter century, however, its inventiveness and turnings of phrase could be mistaken for no one else's. Readers of PMLA may appreciate particularly the opening section of the talk, reproduced below, for the window it provides onto an academic culture then on the brink of transformation. It also powerfully conveys, beyond any reminiscence I could provide, what Eve sounded like the moment I first heard her speak in public.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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References

Note

1. The talk was published in Passages of Time: Narratives in the History of Amherst College, ed. Douglas C. Wilson (Amherst: Amherst Coll. P, 2007; print; 279–91). I am grateful to the Trustees of Amherst College for their permission to reproduce pages 279–81.