English Language and Literature Commons^™

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Trauma And Stigma In Aids Literature: Tony Kushner’S Angels In America (1995) And Colm Tóibín’S The Blackwater Lightship (1999), J. Javier Torres-Fernández

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

This paper explores the representation of trauma and stigma tied to HIV/AIDS in The Blackwater Lightship (1999) by Colm Tóibín and Angels in America (1995) by Tony Kushner. Both works arguably respond to the socio-political and biomedical crisis that affected queer identities and international politics. These experiences of health and illness highlight the silenced and marginalized voices of those infected with HIV during the 80s and 90s. HIV/AIDS-related stigma and shame marked the LGBTQ+ community under the illness as punishment metaphor for their sexuality. The role of politics and religion remains fundamental in the historical silence around this illness and …

Jane Eyre, The Invisible Bisexual: Bisexual Erasure In Historical Literature, Christine L. Roland

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

The purpose of this article is to reveal Charlotte Brontë’s canonized heterosexual character Jane Eyre as bisexual and explain why critics unintentionally erase bisexuality in historical literature. Homosexuality emerged as a species in the 1800s, but the heterosexual-versus-homosexual binary scale overlooked bisexuality. Yet, bisexuality existed—and Victorian society encouraged it between women. Lesbianism and female “friendships” were promoted within female boarding schools and between women in heterosexual marriages; the precise relationships exemplified in Jane Eyre. Though Jane marries a man, her heterosexual “familial” marriage emerges only out of her bisexual nature, for she does not marry Rochester until he becomes effeminate. …

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

What Could A Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology, J D. Sargan

Criticism

This article draws on critical trans studies and queer archival practice to propose a book historical mode that extends what we know about the premodern trans experience beyond the recovery of individual biographies. Instead of turning to textual sources for the identification of transness, the author looks to Susan Stryker’s call for the “recuperat[ion of] embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of knowledge production.” Bibliography, he suggests, makes claims of objectivity that engender a particular reluctance to respond to such calls. But the lived reality of archival research is one of affective embodiment. Affect theory is an area that, …

The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

Queer Representation: Revitilizing F. Scott Fitzgerald’S Place In The American Literary Canon, Olivia Wallace

Honors Theses

F. Scott Fitzgerald is colloquially known as one of the great American writers. His acclaim is most commonly attributed to his depiction of heterosexual romances set during the Jazz Age. However, under the surface, many of the male characters that he represents display queer behaviors that subvert this idea. The texts analyzed here include “The Rich Boy” (1926), Tender is the Night (1934), and The Great Gatsby (1925). These men commonly avoid perpetuating heteronormative culture, projecting a general air of cynicism towards the institution of marriage, and a subtle inclination towards feminine characteristics and queer love. Overall, the inclusion of …

Woman, Queer, Jewish: The Sociopolitical Importance And Impact Of Identity Labels, Megan Polun

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

In this thesis, I trace and analyze the historical, social, and political uses of three identity labels: woman, queer, and Jewish. These three identity categories are personally important to me because I identify as a queer, Jewish woman. The questions motivating this analysis are as follows: How have these words been defined and who gets to define them? What has it meant historically to move through the world with one of these labels, and what does it look like today? What qualifies someone to identify with one of these labels, and what experiences or qualities do we share? What challenges …

Adapting The Classics: Making The Invisible Visible, Kate Isabel Foley

Theater Honors Papers

This project seeks to answer the question, “How can a writer use an old story to shine new light on modern issues and make the invisible visible?” My adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a genderbent retelling with queer themes while my adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is a dark reimagining of Mrs. Darling as an antihero protagonist who must become Captain Hook to try to save her children. Both my research and these two plays focus on bringing visibility to marginalized communities, specifically women and members of the queer community.

The Whale, Ahab, And The Transgender Human Condition, Catherine Simpson

Masters Theses

What could possibly be the relationship between Moby-Dick and the transgender experience? Where lies Moby-Dick’s utility in the context of literary queer theory? Does Moby-Dick have something useful to say to a transgender person? A possible answer is that Moby-Dick may lay a foundation to a specific intellectual process that parallels the transgender human condition. Realizing oneself as transgender necessitates an understanding of gendered norms, applying those norms to oneself, recognizing a dissatisfaction toward that application, and then navigating these norms in a more suitable way. It requires an unavoidable drive to subvert gender constructs despite its consequences. While Ishmael …

Queer Ecologies: A Final Syllabus/Zine Product Of Our Independent Study, Yeh Seo Jung, Ray Craig

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This zine is the product of our independent study course Queer Ecologies, which is an exploration of bio-social systems using a queer and feminist theoretical lens. We aim to look critically at knowledge formation and construct alternative visions for more just and sustainable relationships between science, nature, and ourselves. While queer theory most directly interrogates the normative structure of heterosexuality both in humans and in biology more broadly, these studies include analyses of hierarchy, power, and value. Queer Ecology can be used to examine phenomena such as climate change, extinction, pollution, species hierarchies, agricultural practices, resource extraction, and human population …

"No, Not There": The Literary Precarity And Profundity Of Queer Spatiality, Samuel James Aftel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Love, broadly defined, needs space to grow. For love to materialize and sustain itself (in both literature and society), it must find hospitable geosocial, institutional, and psychic terrain. This is especially true for queer intimacies beyond heteronormative relationality, for the prospect of love’s radical––or reactionary––possibilities is contingent upon the more general sociality in which it develops. Yet love is often a worldmaking and, sometimes, historic mechanism unto itself. Love and its concomitant sexualities must therefore be understood within and without normative structures of hegemony; the workings of (neo)colonialism and capitalism––as well as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism––dictate to love, and …

What’S Long About Long John Silver: Anormative Masculinities And Histories In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, David V. Riser

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Historical queer and transgender experiences have been obscured by the dominant narrative of history. However, these experiences surface in works of fiction. This thesis analyzes affective responses to constructions of queer masculinity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Affects of disgust and desire in Treasure Island, and in the popular history of Treasure Island, reveal a proto-queer transgender experience found in 19th-century maritime fiction. These affects demonstrate a fear that there is no reproductive futurity in queer masculinity while producing narratives of queer masculinity. This production makes historical queer and transgender experiences legible, and allows contemporary queer readers to navigate …

The Black Ancestral Artist Path, Cerina Zuleica Shippey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The Black Ancestral Artist Path is a project dedicated to uncovering the migratory pattern between Black American Creatives from NY to Paris. Why has this trend continued today from those of the Lost Generation? What about France entices the American? And how does living there change their art and sense of self? This project also compared Black French artists and their understanding of the French colonial empire. When these two groups are brought together, how do they learn from one another? Black Americans are forced to reckon with the both the freedom and the privilege they experience being able to …

"Concealing The Excess Of Her Pleasure": A Queer Reading Of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Josie Anne Blubaugh

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This queer reading of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey uses critical frameworks from queer theory, feminist theory, trans theory, and Black Romanticism to analyze female-female relationships between the characters in the novel as a product of the social norms, conventions, and discourses of Romantic-era Britain. By using literary analysis and close reading, I study the many ways in which Northanger Abbey can be read queerly, specifically where gender and sexuality intersect with race and ethnicity.

Though queer readings of this novel have been done in the past, my own analysis focuses on female-female relationships and takes race into consideration when I …

Retelling Tales: Patience Agbabi's Queering Of Chaucer's "The Man Of Law's Tale", Caylin Wigger

Undergraduate Research Awards

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is recognized as a formative text within the canon of English literature. Because of his widely known status, Chaucer and his writings have become the central focus of many medievalists; this does not simply mean the increased presence of critical writings, but also creative works that are inspired by The Canterbury Tales. Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales is a contemporary poetic retelling of The Canterbury Tales in which she explores the origins of ideas such as diaspora, colonization, racialized thinking, social hierarchy, and binary thinking, only to question these ideas in her own writing. Author …