Feminism, Adoption, and the Work of Imagination: An Interview with Margaret Homans

Transcript

Hello
and welcome to the third installment
of the University of Pittsburgh
Humanities podcast.
I'm Dan Kubis.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their intersections
with other disciplines, and their
value in the public world.
My guest today is Margaret Homans,
professor of English and Women's,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies at
Yale University.
That is the work that literature
should be doing.
That's the most fundamental work,
certainly, of fiction is to immerse
you in somebody else's point of
view, someone else's life world.
Starting with her first book,
published in 1979, Dr.
Homans has produced an important
body of feminist criticism.
She focuses on a wide range of
subjects, including Victorian
poetry, contemporary novels,
and literary theory.
Her most recent book is about
adoption. It's titled The Imprint
of Another Life: Adoption Narratives
and Human Possibility.
Professor Homans has described her
approach to critical writing as
productive fence-sitting.
In other words, she tries to show
how both sides in a debate have a
claim to truth and are
interdependent on each other.
At the same time, she reflects on
her own positions as a woman, a
mother, and a scholar, recognizing
that her attempts to find common
ground will inevitably be shaped by
details of her own life.
The result is a body of work that
uses complex thinking to produce a
sense of inclusion, advances
critical debates while remaining
self-aware, and shows literature's
enormous potential to contribute to
social issues.
Dr. Homans is quick to give credit
to her teachers and role models,
including one of her first
professors, Thomas Weiskel, who
taught her as an undergraduate in
the earliest days of coeducation at
Yale.
She was one of only a small number
of women on campus, and feminism did
not yet have an established place in
critical discourse.
I began by asking her about those
early days and what motivated her
to pursue a career in the
humanities, despite the obstacles
she faced.
Starting in high school, I knew that
I wanted to be an English professor,
and so
it was possible to take this class
that was a kind of high-powered
early concentration.
It was for people who wanted to be
English majors.
And back in 1970,
being an English major wasn't a joke
the way it is now.
A joke on A Prairie Home Companion,
you know?
And I love it when Garrison Keillor
gives his comical riffs about - what
is it? - the National Association of
English Majors and all the amazing
things that they can do.
But back then, it was really a
cool thing without irony.
So I had learned how to be a close
reader in high school, and
when I got to Yale,
I nearly dropped out because
the first assignment in this English
class was to read something like 60
pages of poetry.
And when you study close reading,
you read one sonnet.
And I thought, "I can't possibly do
this." But of course, it was a
wonderful class, and we used close
reading as a technique. But we
talked about other things as well.
And I guess what was formative about
it was actually going deeper
into the method of close reading and
discovering how richly you're
rewarded if you pay close
attention to the way the language is
working in a work of literature but
in anything. And literature is a
great laboratory for learning
and studying how language works,
but it extends
everywhere. And what I tell students
now is if you can learn how to close
read a sonnet or a short story,
you'll be a much better reader of
the newspaper, of a legal case,
of whatever documents you
need to read in your future,
even if they're not so-called
literary.
There was one day when
Thomas Weiskel came
into class really
excited about an insight that he had
had when we were talking about
Wordsworth's poem Tintern Abbey.
So this must have been in maybe
April of that year.
So we were all good friends by then,
and he said
he just kind of noticed this.
Wordsworth says not
"the picture in the mind revives
again" when he goes back to this
beautiful place that he was at five
years ago. And he's now revisiting
it, and he has all these fond
memories of it.
He doesn't say, "The picture in the
mind revives again," he
says, "The picture of the mind
revives again." And
if you think really carefully
about the difference in those two
pronouns, they're just
these tiny words, but they make such
a difference. In other words, what
he's excited about is not the place
but his own head.
And that, for me, was kind of a
magic moment of
showing what you get from
paying close attention.
So that was also a
class in which
I was just
barely beginning to understand
what feminist literary criticism
would look like.
Thomas Wieskel, at the very end of
the year, brought into class
a copy of the New York Review of
Books that included an article by
Ellen Moers, who
was the author of an early work of
feminist literary criticism called
Literary Women.
And he just wanted to say, "Look,
this exists." And there
were three women in the class, eight
men.
These were in the years, when there
were very few women at Yale;
coeducation had just begun.
And it really kind of sparked
something in my head that it was
a male professor,
who was not at all particularly
interested in women writers or any
of these issues, but he noticed
that this was significant. And he
noticed that it might be significant
to some of the women in the class,
and it was to me.
It seems to be a separate
subject from close
reading, but
it wasn't because it
was also about reading closely in
a different way.
I was interested to hear you say
that when you were in high school
you knew you wanted to be an English
professor.
And it reminded me of something I
read in an interview recently with
Sandra Gilbert, who was
reflecting on her early
years as a graduate
student and even as she was
a young professor. And
she said in her interview she was
almost amazed at her own courage.
And she said,
all of her professors at the time
had tweed coats and smoked pipes.
And she was looking back,
she had this amazement, like, she
even said, "What did I think I was
doing?" at the time.
Do you look back similarly when you
were in high school you knew you
wanted to be an English professor?
It's so interesting.
Generations in that period--
generations were just
a few years apart.
And she's not much older than me.
But in terms of these issues,
I was a generation ahead in the
sense that when I was finishing high
school, the big male
school-- all-male schools were
beginning to let women in.
And so it seemed
that the academy was
open to women.
And when she was at the same stage
in her educational career, that
was not the case.
And I also grew up in Boston,
which is such a center for
education.
I had had family who were college
and, actually, medical school
teachers.
So being in the education business
seemed like a normal thing.
I mean, there were all kinds of
things in my social background that
made it more or less ordinary
that I would have that aspiration.
But I think it really had to do with
the fact that Harvard had always
had Radcliffe, but I think the
Radcliffe students were getting
Harvard degrees. At that point, Yale
had opened its doors to women.
A lot of the exclusive all-male
liberal arts colleges in New England
were opening their doors.
And so it
felt like a normal thing to do.
You also had-- there's an
interesting kind of relationship
that your first book, Women Writers
and Poetic Identity, had with a
very landmark text
in feminist criticism, which is The
Madwoman in the Attic, which is that
you finished writing it before
the Madwoman in the Attic was
published. But then, by the time
your book was published, that book
was out. So you have an interesting
piece in the introduction to that
book-- your first book about that
kind of relationship.
And you mention that in your note
that you felt
like you were doing different but
complementary things in those two
words. Did you feel at that time
as though you were contributing to
a collective effort at all?
Or is that something that's clearer
in hindsight? Or how was it when you
were in those days, the
mid-seventies?
Yeah. I was writing my
dissertation in
basically the year 77-78,
and I wrote it that quickly
because it was basically a close
reading dissertation.
It was about my
encounter with those texts, and it
did not involve a whole lot of
social and historical research.
And nowadays, one could not
get away with that.
And I really thought I was coming
up with something that was
all my own because
the other feminist literary
criticism that had been published up
to that point, which included
Eleanor's Literary Women, Elaine
Showalter's A Literature of Their
Own, a few other pieces,
they were all focused
on fiction. And they were much
more focused on
the social world - what it was like
for women to be socialized
as women and the consequences
of that for their writing fiction.
And I had this, I think now,
looking back on it, kind of quixotic
belief that I
could make feminist claims about
women poets based
simply on the relation between their
texts and previous texts.
And because that was the closed
reading method.
And so I talked about textual
interrelationships between Dorothy
and William Wordsworth writing.
I wasn't at all interested in their
embeddedness in a social culture.
I talked about Emily Dickinson
textual relationship with Emerson,
and with Wordsworth, and so on.
And in hindsight, it's
kind of unfortunate that I wasn't
part of a more collective effort.
But I was at Yale, and
I was the only person doing this
kind of work.
My advisors had absolutely
nothing to contribute to what I was
doing. They had no idea.
And so I felt like
I was inventing something all by
myself. And then, when I read that
book, I discovered, "Oh, yes,
there is this large effort going
on." And it was very exciting
to discover that and to
recognize that I was,
as you say, doing something somewhat
different but also
connected.
And then after that, it was
tremendously exciting to go to the
Modern Language Association
convention, where that was
the place where feminist critics
were collecting.
And we would go
to these late-night sessions.
And I met people from
all across the country, who were
doing this work, and
we would stay up half the night
inventing new ideas.
It was really, really tremendous.
So you've been thinking
about the early years of your
work as a feminist literary scholar.
And now here
we are. That was mid-seventies, late
seventies when your book came out in
1980; it was your first book.
After
30 years, can you look and see
changes that are
there for young women as graduate
students and professors?
And how do you-- how do you talk
about-- how do you think about those
changes?
Well, first of all,
graduate students now can take
classes with people like me, which
makes a big difference.
And when I was in college,
the only woman professor that I had
was not a professor
on the latter track but a lecturer
who had been denied tenure and who
taught Chaucer.
And it was very typical
in those days that the medievalists
were women, because medieval was
considered a specialty
suitable for women because it
involved
doing sort of mindless
technical work.
So women could be medievalists, but
they weren't in the other fields.
And the scene for graduate students
now is so different.
Half the faculty are women,
not half the full professors, but
still, a lot of the faculty are
women. Many courses
integrate critical race studies,
feminist studies, queer studies, all
kinds of subjects that weren't even
subjects back then.
So I envy the graduate students.
I wish I could be a student now.
Work has also gotten
much more interdisciplinary, and
here, I think we turn to the subject
of the Year of the Humanities.
New historicism hit the
academy in the eighties,
and there was really no going back
from that. I mean, I don't think my
colleagues would describe themselves
anymore as new historicists.
But the idea
of putting
literature into its historical
situation, you can't
do scholarship now without doing
that. And we have
big quarrels with the historians
about what literature is and what
it's for. It's not as though we've
kind of signed on to becoming
historians, but I think we would
now see ourselves much more
as cultural historians
than we would have 30 or 40 years
ago.
And people are reaching into
ethnography,
all kinds of social science
disciplines,
as well as making
really interesting connections to
art and art history.
A strong interest in religion and
literature - people who are studying
world Anglophone or post-colonial
literatures have to think about
religion as well.
So there's just a huge
kind of broadening out of the field
that's really fantastic.
And when I think about my efforts
to study literature all by itself,
it seems like the field has
really grown in good ways.
You mentioned these kind of
creating conversations between
writers just based on being writers
at the time. And I notice that
as something that-- how you did that
in your first book, you talked about
the 19th-century writers and then
also ended with a chapter on
Sylvia Plath and Adrian Richards,
contemporary female poets.
But it seemed to me like looking
through-- so that book, and then
also looking at the range of things
you've published on throughout
your career, it
seemed to me that you had an
interest in writing about historical
writers, but then also writing about
contemporary writers.
And I wonder if that's something--
is that just where your interests
take you, or is that something
that you consciously do to try to
create that conversation between
contemporary writers and the past?
Well, yes.
I am interested in that.
But it's also the case that when I
started teaching at Yale, that was
when the Women's Studies Program
began.
And so my career and the
career of that program are
the same.
I quickly got swept up
into
inventing the first curriculum
for the program.
It was very exciting to be involved,
and it was then called Women's
Studies. Now it's Women's, Gender,
and Sexuality studies.
It was very exciting to be involved
in this cross-disciplinary and very
politically aware
group. And this, too, was
very different from my own
training as an English scholar,
which was a training that was
completely unaware of politics
of any kind.
I mean, when we studied Romanticism,
we were aware that the French
Revolution had happened, that
Wordsworth was very excited about
it, and then he was disappointed,
but it was more or less in the
background.
So since those days of working
with the beginnings of the Women's
Studies program, I've had a strong
interest in fiction
and poetry and drama that helps to
create political ideas.
So I've taught many
iterations of a course that started
out being called feminist fictions.
And this spring,
I'm going to teach a course called
Imagining Sexual Politics.
It's the same idea.
I'm really interested in novels,
whether starting with Mary
Wollstonecraft's fiction or starting
more recently with the second wave
of feminism. Novels primarily, but
also poetry and drama that
has actively helped to produce
political ideas around feminism
and sexuality.
So I got excited about Adrienne
Rich because she was using her
amazing skills as a poet to
put into the culture-- into
wide circulation ideas
that were also radical feminist
ideas. And so I guess,
at the beginning, that felt like a
separate interest.
But they've come closer and closer,
I suppose.
And that's probably why I
turned from teaching and writing
about poetry to teaching and writing
about fiction, because
fiction is much-- it's just
much easier to see it's social
embeddedness and it's political
claims.
So that's been a turn for
me.
But it was a great influence to work
with the Women's Studies Program
because there were historians
and social scientists.
And I had to make the case
for why literature was important,
and I had to understand why their
fields were.
This is something I have a personal
interest in. I wrote my dissertation
on politics and literary
criticism.
When I think about the Year of the
Humanities too, I think about
one of the goals being, within the
university, to talk about work
and how the work in the humanities
relates to other fields.
But then also this kind of broader
horizon of thinking about how that
work has an impact on the public.
When you mentioned novelists
creating political
ideas, I mean, can you talk a little
bit about, first
of all, what you mean by that phrase,
but also, how did that development
happen for you?
Well, one thing to think
about here is the subgenre
of feminist science fiction.
In the second wave, people
like Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna
Russ, and Marge Piercy
were writing utopian,
also dystopian novels
because if you want political
change, you have to imagine what
it's going to look like.
Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand
of Darkness imagined a world in
which biological sex difference
works differently and is much more
fluid than it is on Earth.
Marge Piercy in Woman On The
Edge of Time imagined a
utopia in which women
have given up-- do you know this
novel?
Yeah, I do.
They've given up their biological
specialty of being able to give
birth, and in
exchange, they have this amazing,
utopian, egalitarian society.
And it seemed just tremendously
exciting that these writers, who
were pretty popular,
were able to
change the way
a reader would think.
I mean, once you've read one of
those novels, you can't think about
gender the same way.
I guess it just seemed to me that
these works made the case for why
literature matters in a way that was
much more simple and straightforward
than the more circuitous,
indirect case that I might have made
for it when I was thinking just
about close reading as a
skill.
One of the other things I'm
interested in is thinking about
feminism, and in your work,
is thinking about feminism as a
movement that is obviously broader
than just something that's affected
higher education, literary
criticism. I mean, there's been all
sorts of changes all across American
culture.
But in your work as a literary
critic-- as a feminist literary
critic, do you feel
that you are contributing
something unique
as a teacher or as a scholar
to feminism more broadly?
As a literary scholar?
And then if you do, what is that?
Oh, yeah. That's a good question.
The role of literature has certainly
waned, I would say,
but it's still
very present.
And I would say that when
I teach these classes that are sort
of hybrid English
GWSS classes, I'm equipping
students to read the world
around them more thoughtfully
as feminist and
queer and
sexual minority identifying
students.
I want them to
also understand the history
of where new
ideas come from.
In the course I'm teaching now,
called Feminist and Queer Theory, we
start with Mary Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
which is commonly understood
to be one of the founding texts of
liberal feminism.
And in Women's Studies
academic circles, liberal feminism
doesn't have a very good name
because they all want to be much
further out on the left edge than
that.
And so when you read her
work, you see that
what she's asking for is really very
limited. She wants women to be
considered to be human beings.
She would like the world to
understand that women are capable of
reason and of virtue.
She wants women to be better wives
and mothers.
But partway through
the first-- it's around page 48,
actually, she interrupts
her train of thought, and she says,
"A wild wish has just flown from
my heart to my head
that the distinction of sex
would be confounded in society."
And then she just stops there and
goes back to her train of thought.
But that idea that
the distinction of sex would be
confounded in society,
in my course, I draw a line from
that to transgender phenomena
now. And I like to see
her as someone who-- she couldn't
deal with this insight.
It doesn't go anywhere in terms of
the argument that she's conducting,
but she had this wild wish.
And it's just a wild wish, but
it's a wild wish that's been made
true in more recent years.
So I want students to see that
ideas that seem completely new
and cutting edge to them now
actually have a history.
And that someone who is thinking
about making reasonable claims on
behalf of women was at the same
time thinking about just throwing
out the whole sex gender system at
the same time.
And that sort of
history of ideas, I think, is really
important for students.
And when feminist and queer
theory are taught most of the time
now, it's a much more present
focused class.
When my colleagues teach the course,
they start in around 1970,
but I think it's really important to
go back. And so that's something
that I can contribute.
As for my impact on a
wider world,
I feel at this point, it's going to
be more through my students than
through my own writing.
I mean, that's what scholarly
writing is like.
I mean, I'm not a public
intellectual. I write scholarship
that's going to be read by other
scholars, and hopefully
they will be affected by it, and
that will affect their teaching, and
that will affect their students.
It's pretty indirect.
You said something before about
when you were talking about kind of
reading Mary Wollstonecraft and
thinking about this
crazy, at the time, thought that she
had. Hearing
you talk about
the science fiction writers and kind
of coming up with ideas
about if
you want things to change, you have
to have an idea of what you want
that to look like.
Is it fair to say that those writers
helped prepare the ground
for a thought that would have
been crazy to Mary Wollstonecraft to
not be as crazy now?
Is this the kind of preparation in the sense of what you're doing?
Yes, yes, yes.
Exactly.
One of the founding texts
of transgender
as an intellectual movement,
maybe also as a social
movement, is by Susan
Stryker. She's a transgender
professor and activist
who created two enormous anthologies
of transgender studies for
Rutledge and has founded
a journal called the Transgender
Studies Quarterly.
She now has a Transgender Studies.
I think it's an academic
concentration where she teaches at
the University of Arizona.
She was allowed to hire a bunch of
people to come and teach Transgender
Studies.
Her first article was
from 1994, and
it's called My Words to Victor
Frankenstein in the
Valley of Chamounix: Performing
Transgender Rage.
And she adopts the
persona of Frankenstein's monster
to speak as a transsexual.
And you can see immediately how
powerful that analogy would be.
She, like the monster, has been
taken apart and put back together,
and the stitching shows
she, like the monster, is considered
a social outcast, a monstrous
person. And she says, basically,
"I embrace my monstrosity, deal
with it." And it's a very powerful
piece of writing.
I always thought she was a
literature professor because she
wrote this great piece about
Frankenstein. It turns out she's a
historian, but
she made use of another,
in that case, dystopian work
of-- I would consider Frankenstein
to be a work of feminist fiction.
I've written about it as that.
She was able to use
that work of fiction as a very
powerful motor for her own claims.
So I do think that
fiction helps to push
the political envelope.
We've been talking with Margaret
Homans, professor of English and
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies at Yale University.
Homans visited Pitt as part of the
Year of the Humanities to take part
in a panel titled Adoption and
Narratives of the Human.
The panel featured a number of
different perspectives on
transnational adoption, including
that of SooJin Pate, whose book From
Orphan to Adoptee: U.S.
Empire and Genealogies of Korean
Adoption argues that the practice
of adopting Korean children was an
essential part of expanding American
empire during the Cold War.
Professor Homans first published on
adoption in 2002 in
a moving essay titled Adoption and
Essentialism.
In the essay, Professor Homans
reflects on her experiences adopting
a daughter from China in 1999
and on what these experiences
revealed about our cultures, beliefs
about race, family, and what
it means to be human.
I asked her about this essay and how
her experience with transnational
adoption influenced her work as a
scholar.
The reason that I got excited about
thinking about adoption-- well, of
course, I adopted a daughter from
China in the year 1999,
so I probably
would not have gotten interested in
the subject at all if it weren't for
that. But I
began to realize this was a really
interesting subject to think about
in connection with my own interest
as a feminist scholar and also
as a literary scholar.
Because adoption raises all kinds of
questions about what it is to be a
human being, which feminism
is also interested in.
It also raises really interesting
questions about representation.
What does it mean to say the word
family and mean something
other than a biologically connected
nuclear family?
And so, right away,
thinking about adoption
fit into things that I was already
interested in thinking about.
And it fed specifically
into a Gender Studies
feminist perspective, in part
because of the way
adoption impacts
gendered beings differently.
So I later wrote a piece
that then got incorporated in the
book about birth mothers
and how the requirement
that they disappear, whether
or not they actually have
disappeared,
is a requirement for adoption.
And how unjust
that is, but also
how difficult it makes it for birth
mothers actually to speak.
So that made a connection
between adoption as a
subject and my literary interest
as a feminist scholar because I
started out writing about how
difficult it was for women poets
to speak within
the genre of the romantic lyric -
how their voices were
silenced and excluded because they
were supposed to represent silent
nature rather than speaking
subjectely.
And it seemed as though I was seeing
the same thing all over again with
the birth mothers.
So that was a very powerful
connection for me.
You mentioned in some of
your writing on adoption that you
feel as though in
the process of-- in
the process, one needs to go through
in order to adopt.
And there's a kind of essentialism
that exists there,
even when in other parts of
the world and in American society,
is that we've kind of moved a bit
beyond that, but it remains there.
Yes. And it is apparently still
the case that children
who are available for adoption
through state and also
private agencies, the fees
associated with adopting them
are different depending on the race
of the child.
And this, to me, is just
astounding that people
are still
organizing their sense of family
around
racial identity.
And so
it was really eye-opening, to me,
to see the--
I would call it racism of the entire
adoption world, even
though it wears a very benign
face in many contexts.
People would say it's better
for Black children
to be raised by Black families.
It's better for Chinese children
not to be raised in White families
and so on.
But I would say that that's true
only because we still live in a
racist society.
It's not true because races
have some deep need to live
together. It's only because of the
racism surrounding all of that.
And I found it to be
shocking. And I still find it to be
shocking how racialist
the world of adoption exposes our
society to be.
But that's just to say that when you
say we've moved beyond this, we
actually haven't.
We've just pretended to.
And so the idea of
multiculturalism in the 1990s,
I'm very taken by Walter Benn
Michaels's argument in our America
that multiculturalism, which looks
so progressive and it seems to be
about kind of a new iteration
of the American melting pot.
He traces its social
history back to the progressive era
and the intense racisms around
closing down immigration and
creating immigration quotas
so that white people could get into
the country so much more easily than
people with brown skin.
So I'm very
suspicious of the idea that we've
gotten beyond racialism
and racism.
Some of the things that you talk
about in the beginning of The
Imprint of Another Life is you talk
a bit about how
about the impassioned
debates that have sprung
up on
scholarly conferences on adoption
and things like that.
I wonder if your work in the field
has-- what kind of reactions
it has faced with
negative or positive. Or have you
any experience being involved in
some of those debates?
It seems like a topic that can
create them quite easily.
Yes. Yes.
That's quite true.
And I'm also aware that as
an adoptive parent, I
occupy a position
of the least authority in the
adoption world.
And so I try to keep a lid on it
because I do think that adoptees
and birth parents have
more experiential authority for
talking about adoption than I do.
And adoptive parents'
views are always going to skew in
the direction of
believing that adoption is okay
because we were the ones who chose
to do it.
So I have to take that into account
when I find myself
merging into some kind of
controversy.
But I do tend to emphasize
the positive.
My paper was about
the positive work that that young
woman's work of fiction-making
could do for her.
But someone like SooJin Pate,
I think she and I would both see
ourselves as working
within a field called
Critical Adoption Studies.
But for her, that means something
very different.
She is really going for
the corrupt political
and historical origins in
the case of her scholarship adoption
from Korea.
She is
very sympathetic to
the argument that transnational
adoption should
never have happened,
should be stopped now.
And I would say I'm
much more neutral on that subject.
That is to say, from my own
personal life, I can't feel
as impassioned about it as she does,
and I don't see only the evils
of it.
But I have to tread carefully
because I have such
respect for
SooJin Pate in particular and
for the other scholars like her who
are trying to turn their very
difficult life experiences into
really rich and significant
intellectual work.
When you used to talk about your
work tending to emphasize the
positive, you end
The Imprint of Another Life
by writing about Jeanette
Winterson's Why Be Happy When You
Could Be Normal. And this, to me,
seems like a book--
you talk about it as a book
that embodies
kind of the positive that you see in
this. But I didn't see it.
It's not only a positive story.
There's more to it.
It's a horrendous-- it's a
horrendous story.
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit
about why that book-- maybe I think
talking about that book, you can
talk a little bit about how the
positive for you in adoption is
a difficult positive.
Yes. Well, at the beginning,
I mean, she gave me the phrase that
became the title of my book.
At the beginning, she talks about
the way adoption, and other people
talk about this too, the way
adoption causes you
to have to invent a life
for yourself.
And even Betty Jean Lifton,
a great adoption activist
who passed away a few years ago but
was one of the founders of the whole
idea of adoptee rights - the
idea that adoptees should be able to
find their original birth
certificates.
She was a very powerful writer who
wrote about
what it's like to search and why
it's important to search, why she
wanted to search for her birth
parents, what happens when you do
so.
She even says in one of her books,
"Adoption allowed me to invent
myself." And
she's not happy that she was
adopted.
But still, that's a very powerful
claim.
And Jeanette Winterson says the same
thing, even though
her story of being adopted into that
particular family
is so horrendous.
They were so cruel to her.
They were so cruel to her
because she was an intellectual
from a very early age.
She was obviously a bookworm
and a lover of words and creativity.
And because she was a lesbian, they
couldn't bear that as a
fundamentalist family.
So she had a terrible time growing
up. And she had a terrible
time also later in life when she
took the decision to search for her
birth mother.
Nonetheless, the net
gain that you get from reading
that book is that
her life created her.
And what an
impoverished place the world would
be if Jeanette Winterson hadn't
become who she is.
And I gather she's just written
a novel based on Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale for
a series of novels
based on Shakespeare plays.
And
in the article in The New York
Times, the writer wondered
why had she chosen The Winter's Tale
to rewrite when she could have
chosen Hamlet or King Lear.
But to people who know her as an
adoption memoirist,
the choice was perfectly obvious.
Her novel will be called The Lost
Child, and The Winter's Tale
is an adoption story.
So here she is
making another fictional version
of an adoption story that will
help to reveal the terrible
pains and losses, but also the gains
of an adoption story.
So I take
her as a kind of prime
example of the sorrow
and also the tremendous creativity
that can come from
an adoption story.
The last thing
to mention here about that book
is that it seems like you've talked
about-- just now
you're mentioning Jeanette Winterson
in this book kind of writing herself
and creating her own life.
You end The Imprint of Another Life
talking about the change
that writing the book had for you.
And you started out wanting to
counter some negative thoughts that
you had. Not that you had,
that you've been presented with about
adoption.
And then, in the process of writing
the book, you too changed.
I'm thinking about our broad project
here of the Year of the Humanities
and things like that. And I wonder
if it's fair to say that
your engagement with this scholarly
work is something that brought you
to a different point when you
finished it. And if that's something
we can say broadly about kind of
humanistic work.
Yeah, that's such a nice question.
Doing the research for the book
definitely made me take much more
seriously the perspectives of birth
parents and of adoptees,
and that is the work that literature
should be doing.
That's the most fundamental work,
certainly, of fiction is to immerse
you in somebody else's point of
view, someone else's life world.
And George Eliot made
the case for fiction that way 150
years ago.
Reading fiction extends your
sympathies and allows us to imagine
what the lives of people who
we might initially dismiss
feel like from the inside.
And that was certainly what writing
the book did for me.
And, of course, I hope it does that
for readers.
But writing the book was a great
pleasure for that reason.
And
that's it for this installment of
the University of Pittsburgh
Humanities podcast.
Our guest was Margaret Homans, whose
latest book is The Imprint of
Another Life: Adoption Narratives
and Human Possibility, published by
the University of Michigan Press.
We would like to thank the
University of Pittsburgh's Office of
the Provost for their support of the
Year of the Humanities.
Our next podcast will feature
Anthony Bogues, professor of
Humanities and Critical Theory and
director of the Center for the Study
of Slavery and Justice at Brown
University.
For more information on the Year of
the Humanities and to see our
upcoming events, visit our website
at www.humanities.pitt.edu.

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Being Human Podcast Recordings

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Title
Feminism, Adoption, and the Work of Imagination: An Interview with Margaret Homans
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Homans, Margaret, 1952- (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
January 7, 2016
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0003
Description
An interview with Margaret Homans, professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Homans has produced important scholarship in a variety of fields, including feminist criticism and adoption studies. She visited Pitt during the Year of Humanities to participate in a panel on transnational adoption. This interview focuses on her life and work, and the impact that her scholarship has had on her students and the world more broadly.
Extent
39 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Women's studies
Feminist literary criticism
Queer theory
Homans, Margaret, 1952-
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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Feminism, Adoption, and the Work of Imagination: An Interview with Margaret Homans

In collections