1.
When I told one of my colleagues in Amsterdam that I’d been invited as a keynote speaker to the conference, Reading Coetzee’s Women, he said ‘Well, that’s just because you’re a woman, and conference organisers are under pressure to invite woman keynote speakers; they probably had a little tip-off from the Gendered Conference Campaign’.1 The Gendered Conference Campaign announces on its website that it ‘aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male* conferences’ and ‘of the harm that they do’. The term ‘all-male’ is tagged with an explanatory footnote: ‘By “all-male” we mean all-male lists of invited speakers’.2 I decided not to ask Sue Kossew whether she’d been under any pressure from the Gendered Conference Campaign to invite women speakers, and I gladly accepted the invitation.3 This anecdote, far from being a gratuitous aside, touches the central nerve of this paper; I begin by discussing my title, ‘Coetzee’s…