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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tyler, Carole-Anne
Female impersonation/Carole-Anne Tyler.
p.cm
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-91687-9 ISBN 0-415-91688-7 (pbk.)
1. Feminist theory. 2. Sex role. 3. Women. 4. Femininity. I. Title.
HQ1190.T95 2002
305.42'01dc21 2001019650
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As anyone who has written a book knows, they are always collaborative endeavors, even if signed by a single authorthough I am afraid I cannot blame this volumes flaws on anyone but myself. I must thank first and foremost my family, beginning with Rick Keane, who perhaps more than anyone else knows what a struggle it is to write, having been forced to live with and suffer through the drafting of this book along with me (and on bad days perhaps instead of me). I must also thank my siblings, particularly my sisters Brenda and Roey, whose questions about this and other writing projects over the years have forced me to try to clarify my thinking. To my parents I owe a great deal. Though they never had the chance to go to college they wanted their children to have an education and the chance for a better lifeor at least for a better income. They encouraged me to work hard and think harder, and to continually question the inequitable distribution of opportunity in the world; I hope they see some of that reflected in this book; even if, they are still bemused by the connection that female impersonation might have to something called English.
I have been most fortunate in my friends, colleagues, and mentors over the years and only wish I had better profited from their examples. I must thank Bob Scholes and Mary Ann Doane for shepherding me through the final stages of graduate study and commenting on early drafts of many of these chapters, as well as for introducing me to the methodologies without which this work would have been impossible. My first graduate class, with Bob Paradigm, Schema, Epistemeintroduced that discontinuity in my approach to the analysis of literature and culture, which the course treated and of which this book is the result. When I wrote up my first description of the project, Mary Ann told me I would have a hard time convincing her of any of it; I fear I have probably not succeeded in doing so, but her tough questions and scrupulous scholarship have inspired me to do the best work I could. Without the encouragement of Bob and the late Roger Henkle I might have left Brown University satisfied with my M.A. in Creative Writing; instead, they persuaded me to disregard the English program graduate advisors warning that in the Ph.D. program one could not write a creative dissertation too many; (I hope that despite the rules some spark of creativity might have been found in that first draft and the revisions to it). I must thank many other Brown faculty for their encouragement over the years, their comments on early drafts, and the example of their own scrupulous feminist scholarship: Ellen Rooney, Elizabeth Weed, and Naomi Schor, who were kind enough to publish in differences what became parts of chapters and to offer extensive advice for revisions at that time; Karen Newman and Kaja Silverman, who also read drafts of some of the chapters and offered advice and support, and Keith Waldrop, who tried to instill in me some selfconfidence from my earliest days in the creative writing program and shared with me some of the books that helped me arrive at this books focus.
In addition, I am very indebted to the incredible cohort of graduate student colleagues at Brown and to the Pembroke Center Fellows, who taught me so much in small and large reading groups and informal dinners or discussions over martinis late at night: Diana Fuss, Katherine Stockton, John Murchek, Evelyn Roberts, Virginia Blum, Rey Chow, Kari Weil, Mimi White, and Lynn Joyrich. Over the years Dale Bauer has provided encouragement just when I needed it most, as well as another example of the best kind of feminist scholarship. My debt to my present and past colleagues at the University of California-Riverside is also immense. I could hardly have asked for a better circle of friends and critical interlocutors than some of the junior faculty I was hired withParama Roy, Katherine Kinney, and Joe Childersor the person who hired me, Kim Devlin; I have also benefited from conversations with George Haggerty and the faculty in the gender and sexuality focused research group and in the Center for Ideas and Society seminar groups in which I have participated. Emory Elliott has been a wonderful mentor not just to me but to so many younger scholars when they were starting out. Jennifer Brody was a later but equally important UCR friend and interlocutor, as was Kathleen McHugh; they and Parama have shared my moments of misery and miraculously persevere in their friendship and support. To them in particular, and to Diana Fuss, I owe special thanks, not just for their friendship and encouragement over the years but for their willingness to read and comment on drafts and to share their own work with me; they have explored with me and in their scholarship the difficult questions about identity that have so engaged me, and this project is the better for that. I wish it were better still as recompense for their generosity and example.
Finally, I must thank the editors of and readers for differences, and their readers and editorial assistants; the editors of Theory between the Disciplines, Mark Cheetham and Martin Kreiswirth and their assistants, and Diana Fuss and her assistants for Inside/Out, since they helped ready for publication versions or sections of some chapters that have benefited from their editorial comments. Work on the project was in part enabled by research money or by oneor two-quarter research leaves funded by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for Recent Recipients of the Ph.D., UCRs Center for Ideas and Society, and UC pretenure faculty development awards, for which support I am also grateful.
