What We Talk about When We Talk about Reading: Remembering Patsy Schweickart

Patsy Schweickart was always ahead of the curve. Her groundbreaking collection, Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts (1986), combined feminist theory with emergent perspectives on reading as a social practice. Within Gender and Reading, Patsy’s influential essay, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” specified multiple ways that reading is shaped by cultural positioning. Engaging the question of how feminist theory can illuminate both texts and reading practices, she linked the marginalization of gender in literary study to other kinds of erasure. In a tour-de-force, Patsy provides a rich close reading of an ellipsis—four dots—that made her wonder just what “had been deleted” from an MLA address in which Wayne Booth (then president of the organization) celebrates the transformative power of books and reading.1 Citing a passage from Malcolm X’s Autobiography, Booth draws an analogy between Malcolm X’s experience and his own. As Patsy shows, however, Booth’s deletion—a reference to “the leader of the notorious Black Muslims”—disrupts the benign “story of reading” Booth tries to tell via the passage he cites.2