Jane Gallop

Jane Gallop (born 4 May 1952) is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Much of her work centers on reading Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, particularly in the context of the American and French Feminist responses to it. She has also articulated a feminist theory of sexual harassment, produced largely through analyzing her own experiences (see Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, and Anecdotal Theory below.)

Her most recent book, Living with His Camera (Duke University Press, 2003) focuses on the relationship between photography as art and photography as family history. Gallop explores how the photography of her longtime partner, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee film professor Dick Blau, chronicles their relationship and also relationships between them and their two children, Max and Ruby. On the basis of black and white photographs of them that Blau regularly took, Gallop became interested in the implications of being the photograph's subject. Blau's talent for finding the perfect picture in the mundane moment is combined with Gallop's commentary as a subject and as a scholar. Each chapter involves analysis of an influential book concerning photography -- including Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography in relation to Blau's photographs. Gallops' analysis of what she finds in the photographs focuses on male/female relationships, childhood, sibling rivalry, intimate and erotic moments, and how the camera both captures and distorts these moments. Her conclusion is that the camera has become a "third person" in her relationship with Blau, creating the triangle of photographer, camera, and subject. Then too, the camera is able to show new angles, insights, flaws, and wonders that the individual people cannot themselves see without the camera's special quality for freezing and framing moments and experiences in time.

Major Influences

 * Jacques Lacan
 * Luce Irigaray
 * Sigmund Freud
 * Jacques Derrida
 * Roland Barthes

Bibliography of Book-length Works

 * Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.


 * The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan Press; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.


 * Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.


 * Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.


 * Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1991.


 * Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation. (ed.) Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1995.


 * Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. Duke University Press. 1997. (Discussion of this book by Gallop and others, including witty and pointed remarks by one of the "sad, angry students": PRETEXT, a Re/INter/VIEW with Jane Gallop)


 * Anecdotal Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.


 * Living with His Camera. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.