Revisiting my essay, “(The Problem with) Embraces” (1997)
Laura Levitt
September 11, 2025
Author Photo, Kudzu, Auburn, Alabama, June 2025.
September 11, 2025
When I was first asked to participate in this forum, I had just had a conversation with a graduate student in English about citation. They had asked me to recommend some sources. The first texts that came to mind were works of critical feminist identity politics, more specifically essays by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde that suggest both the politics of citation, who gets cited and why and what it means to cite marginalized voices (Rich). Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly” considers what happens when one's words are misrepresented, taken out of context, or simply cherry picked. Audre Lorde’s fierce response to Daly haunts me to this day. I also thought about literary scholar Nancy K. Miller's experiment with citation in "Dreaming and Dancing, The Changing Location of Feminist Criticism” (1988), an essay I have written about extensively. It took me a few days to realize that I myself had written about the challenges around citation. And it is, I suppose, not a surprise that the essay I wrote, "(The Problem with) Embraces," returns to both Adrienne Rich and Nancy K. Miller.
Remembering
I began writing this essay with some of what I remember about "(The Problem with) Embraces" before I actually reread the text that I had written almost thirty years ago. My account of citation as a textual embrace has remained with me. At that time, I struggled to get at what it means to write in conversation, to write with the words of others about many different things. What I described was how an affectionate gesture, the opening up to the words of others, is a kind of embrace. And yet, this form of critical engagement can be dangerous. In deferring to the words of another and allowing them to speak for us, our own voices can get lost. Ultimately the passage I am citing is neither self-evident nor does it say exactly what I want it to say. And, as Lorde explained in her "Open Letter," once cited our words can be radically repurposed, gobbled up into the argument of the other writer, as in Mary Daly’s deployment of Audre Lorde’s words.
I wrote about these dynamics as a choking embrace, an enactment not unlike the way that kudzu overtakes the trees and brush it climbs and covers. One of the writers' voices gets lost. My essay was a response to a prompt from my friend Miriam Peskowitz who, at that time, was pushing me to write in my own voice with fewer citations. We were editing our collection, Judaism Since Gender (1997). Miriam actually shows up in the text to insist that at least one of the passages I was citing did not speak self-evidently to the point I was trying to make. She helped me appreciate the difference between that particular passage and the argument that I was actually making.
These are the pieces I remember most vividly about my essay. I know that I went on to show what a difference it makes to read more carefully for the context in which a cited passage is embedded, what I always tell my students to do when I ask them to closely read a key moment in a course reading. I want students to place such quotes in the larger argument of the work from which they emerge. Only then, do I have them perform a line-by-line reading. I cannot say how often I teach my students to do this. It is an abiding piece of my pedagogy. Nevertheless, I know that the rest of my essay was devoted to a close reading of a critical moment in Nancy K. Miller's essay where she cites Adrienne Rich. I followed the footnotes and challenged Miller’s account demonstrating why context matters.
Forgetting
Rereading my essay, I was struck by what I had forgotten. I did not remember the opening section that argued that the essay was a critical feminist intervention in Jewish studies, an enactment of how I engendered Jewish knowledge. I had also forgotten my critique of Miller's claim that it was impossible, at least for her, to speak as a Jewish feminist without doing violence to herself or others.
I had also forgotten that early on, I wrestled with Susan Suleiman's notion of "mediated autobiography," only to figure out, in the writing, that I was not simply interested in enacting a form of autobiography. I wanted to write about lots of things as my self. This was the passage that Miriam objected to. And, ultimately, through our exchange, I was able to explain that what I wanted to do was different from what Suleiman wrote about reading and writing about the texts of others as a form of autobiography. For me preforming a textual embrace allowed me to write about a range of topics as myself.
I am struck by how the idea of "textual embrace" — a reading and writing practice that is attentive to the ways different voices come together on a page, the delicacy of not losing one or the other of those voices — still resonates. It is in line with the kind of critical work I continue to do.
Being able to speak from somewhere about a lot of different things, not to collapse such readings from my location into autobiography, my young self set the stage for what has become a crucial part of my abiding writing practice, a lesson I hope to continue to share with my students even as I recognize some of the ways that new forms of media complicate these practices. Even as I find these basic principles of citation compelling, I am keenly aware of some of the new challenges many of my students, especially my gender, sexuality, and women’s studies graduate students, now face as they find themselves increasingly working with ephemeral digital materials that regularly disappear from the web. In response to these concerns, they are figuring out new forms of citation. In some instances, they are referring to their own screenshots of some of these materials. And in order to document these efforts, they are creating digital archives of their own, private scholarly collections of these screenshot images. In forming these novel archives, they are grappling with how to make their sources accessible to readers so that they too may be able to follow even these footnotes.