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English Language and Literature Commons

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Pamela Caughie Oct 2023

The Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay asks, when does our effort to avoid offending students interfere with our ability to teach them? Rehearsing conflicts over language and terminology, over who can speak and what can be said, from my four-decade career as a literature professor, critical theorist, and gender scholar, I confront contemporary efforts to censor certain words, to prohibit certain kinds of inquiry, and to limit who can speak about certain subjects by placing recent incidents in relation to previous debates in academia and the public sphere. The university classroom and scholarly peer-reviewed journals have long served as spaces where established viewpoints can …


Storm Clouds On The Horizon: Feminist Ontologies And The Problem Of Gender, Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, Rebecca Parker Aug 2018

Storm Clouds On The Horizon: Feminist Ontologies And The Problem Of Gender, Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou, Rebecca Parker

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Feminist digital humanities is no longer focused primarily on recovering and preserving works by women authors. Feminist scholars are currently engaged in changing information design and data visualizations. However, as feminists seek to create new ontologies of gender, they face difficulties posed not only by current encoding standards, but by changing concepts of gender. Can ontologies ever capture the complex, multi-layered, dynamic nature of gender identities? This question is especially challenging when dealing with modernist works that represent gender and sexual identities at the very moment of their emergence as such. Our work on a digital edition and archive of …


Response: “Unsafe Politics And Risky Connections”, Suzanne Bost Jan 2014

Response: “Unsafe Politics And Risky Connections”, Suzanne Bost

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.


The Queer Debt Crisis: How Queer Is Now?, Pamela L. Caughie Jan 2014

The Queer Debt Crisis: How Queer Is Now?, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.


"Passing" And Identity: A Literary Perspective On Gender And Sexual Diversity, Pamela L. Caughie Jan 2010

"Passing" And Identity: A Literary Perspective On Gender And Sexual Diversity, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

For the literary scholar as for the gender theorist, truth is what makes sense in terms of a particular narrative. What is true is not simply that which corresponds to the real; rather, what is true is what is accepted as being true within a given discourse, institution, or discipline. Unlike biologists, literary scholars don’t ask “Is it true?” but “How is it true?” This question requires interrogating the normative standards by which claims of truth, authenticity, and legitimacy are established. And that means learning to read people the way many of us have learned to read literature, taking into …


Virginia Woolf's Double Discourse, Pamela L. Caughie Jan 1989

Virginia Woolf's Double Discourse, Pamela L. Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Written by a feminist (Virginia Woolf), for a bisexual (Vita Sackville-West), about an androgyne (Orlando), the novel Orlando would seem to be the quintessential feminist text. And that, indeed, is what it is in danger of becoming, just as Woolf is in danger of becoming the acclaimed Mother of Us All. In promoting Virginia Woolf's Orlando as a feminist work, feminist critics have picked the right text, but for the wrong reasons. Orlando works as a feminist text not because of what it says about sexual identity but because of what it manages not to say; not because of what …