Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

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 …

The Quick And The Dead (And The Transported), Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In most nations that still execute prisoners—including the U.S.—it is illegal to execute a pregnant person. In English common law, women have been permitted to “plead the belly” in one form or another since the 14^th century, and this fact is sometimes misconstrued by anti-choice and forced-birth advocates as evidence of a long legal tradition of protection for the lives of fetuses. In fact, it is merely evidence of a long history of legal inconsistencies in the ways laws were applied and sentences carried out against women, for whom there were fewer options for clemency than for men. This …

Introduction: Conversations On Abortion Rights And Bodily Autonomy In The Eighteenth Century And Today, Vicki Barnett Woods, Manushag N. Powell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This piece serves as an introduction to the discussions of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights, revised from roundtable presentations held at ASECS 2023. This collection of essays contributes to the resounding responses of frustration and anger toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The collection was written and presented by eighteenth-century scholars who have a comprehensive knowledge of the eighteenth-century legal, social, and medical histories that center around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

Review Of Botanical Entanglements, By Anna K. Sagal, Millie Schurch

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Botanical Entanglements, by Anna K. Sagal

Review Of Reckoning With Slavery, By Jennifer L. Morgan, Brigitte Fielder

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Reckoning with Slavery, by Jennifer L. Morgan,

Review Of An Archive Of Taste, By Lauren Klein, Parama Roy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of An Archive of Taste, by Lauren Klein

Review Of Sister Novelists, By Devoney Looser, Katherine Binhammer Prof.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Review of Sister Novelists by Devoney Looser.

Teaching Anne Finch In "Partisanship In Restoration And Eighteenth-Century Britain", Jennifer Wilson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The works of Anne Finch, a writer doubly exiled as a female poet and Jacobite, stand out as eminently teachable examples of a compelling political outsider view that provokes us to consider how we can better attend to perspectives of principled opposition. Her poems in response to what has been called the "first modern revolution," together with her odes upon the deaths of King James II and Queen Mary Beatrice, showcase the subversive power of indirect articulation, expressing values through emotions and affects in veiled forms such as allegory and alternate history.

Fierce Allegories: Teaching Anne Finch’S Fables In A Course On Satire, Sharon Smith

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay outlines an approach to integrating Anne Finch’s work into an advanced undergraduate and/or graduate course on eighteenth-century satire, focusing particularly on her satirical verse fables. This approach encourages students to question common critical assumptions about women and satire, most particularly that women avoided satire due to its association with aggression and politics—assumptions Finch’s fables are well-suited to challenge. The essay focuses particularly on Finch’s verse fables "Upon an Impropable Undertaking," “The Eagle, the Sow, and the Cat,” and “The Owl Describing Her Young Ones.” In these poems, written in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, Finch employs violent …

Using The Anne Finch Digital Archive As A Teaching Text, Martha F. Bowden

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In the course of my teaching career, I have used the Anne Finch Digital Archive in two different classes in the English major at my university: the gateway and capstone courses. In the gateway course, it functions as one of several sites in a module on the Digital Humanities, and as a required text in the capstone course. The essay investigates the Digital Archive’s strengths both as an example of a high-quality digital humanities project and as a rich site for the investigation and analysis of Finch’s poetry. Assignment guidelines for the gateway module and the reading list for …

Teaching Anne Finch’S Satire In The British Literature Survey Classroom, Amanda Hiner

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article argues for the intentional inclusion of Anne Finch’s diverse and compelling satires in the undergraduate British literature survey course and for the recognition of Finch as an accomplished theorist and practitioner of satire. The article includes practical strategies for pairing Finch’s satires with other well-known and anthologized satires; examines her satires in the context of the Revolution of 1688; and provides an analysis of her innovative rhetorical strategies, including her efforts to dissociate herself from satire while simultaneously producing sharp and defiant satires. The article argues that cultivating a deeper understanding of Finch’s contributions to eighteenth-century satire enriches …

Feminine Interiority And Social Protest In The Poetry Of Mary Leapor, Joanna C. Yates

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Mary Leapor (1722-46) is one of the many under-studied women poets of the eighteenth-century. She is often described as a laboring-class poet which, while historically accurate, implies her immediate marginalization as an writer by her class and gender. Her focus of enquiry explores a new female authorial interiority, embracing her own volition, personality, and aesthetic sensibility through the act of writing itself. This nascent individualism, arising from the examination of feeling, lies at the heart of her work and heralds the social protest that will erupt later in the century. This paper hopes to offer a broader perspective on Leapor’s …

I Was Crazy Once: An Examination Of Elizabethan Insanity In Shakespeare’S Work, Hope L. Kobus

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

William Shakespeare wrote numerous works, diving into the common motifs of love, revenge, power, but most importantly, madness. While Elizabethan audiences were more accustomed to seeing madness as a ploy for comedy, Shakespeare changed the appeal through shows such as King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. He presents the power and ambition of women, as well as the failings of the upper-class, but he disguised them through the idea of insanity. At a time when the public had little understanding of mental health, it was easy to blame madness on gender, social status, and even the supernatural. Through …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

Henrietta Maria: Royalist Women’S Representations Of The French Catholic Queen, Kim Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

By the mid-15^th century, the royal marriage of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria incited enough conflict to spark civil war, as the English struggled to reconcile between the long-established image of female English domesticity and a pervasive cultural expectation for equality between marriage partners. Any form of equality in the royal marriage called the absolute power of the king into question, as it would imply that his actions had included her direct involvement, and even at times were more representative of her, not his, views. Letters captured at the Battle of Naseby confirmed fears that the queen …

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Vs. The Hours (2002): How Does The Patriarchy Infringe On The Autonomy Of Marginalized Characters?, Mary E. Belton

2023 Symposium

Fans of Virginia Woolf know that her literature, such as A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway, cover feminist themes. In adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s work, the same feminist themes are present. For example, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, based on three women whose lives are connected through Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, carries similar feminist themes. In the 2002 adaptation of The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, the relationships between men and women in the film illustrate how the patriarchy operates socially.

To those who don’t know Virginia Woolf’s work well or are unaware of how …

Review Of Figurations Of The Feminine, By Siobhán Mcilvanney, Tonya J. Moutray

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Siobhán McIlvanney's Figurations of the Feminine, by Tonya J. Moutray

Review Of Sapphic Crossings, By Ula Lukszo Klein, Ziona K. Kocher

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ziona Kocher.

Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a …

Along And Against The Grain: Close Reading The History Of Mary Prince, Kristina Huang

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince …

Mary Prince’S Undisciplining Lessons: Counter-Narrative And Testimonio In The History, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay discusses teaching The History of Mary Prince at a Hispanic Serving Institution via Ethnic Studies praxis. It develops Nicole Aljoe’s definition of Prince’s narrative as counter-story and testimonio and explores the undisciplining effects of reading Prince’s history as relevant to the lives of Borderlands students. To understand the multiple meanings of “undisciplining’ this essay draws on the theory of Sylvia Wynter and shows how Prince’s testimonio offers an alternative to Western epistemologies via communal resistance and resurgence. Several pedagogic tools are explored for teaching Prince in this way.

The Black Wanderer: Reading The Black Diaspora, Resistance, And Becoming In The History Of Mary Prince In The Classroom, Nicole Carr

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of …

Introduction: Teaching The History Of Mary Prince (1831), Guest Edited By Kerry Sinanan, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Chawton House And Its Library: Legacies And Futures, Kim Simpson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In a review of Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures, Paula Backscheider draws attention to “the miracle that is Chawton House, whose conferences nurtured these essays” in the collection. This essay will examine the legacy of this unique institution and explore the futures for the organization both as heritage site and as home to a substantial collection of women’s writing of the long eighteenth century. The community encouraged and nurtured by Chawton House since it opened to the public in 2003, as is so often the case with all things related to Jane Austen, complicates divisions between the academic …

Why Austen, Not Burney? Tracing The Mechanisms Of Reputation And Legacy, Marilyn Francus

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

During the 200^th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017, the narrative of Austen’s rise to fame and her ongoing celebrity circulated throughout modern culture. But how did this happen? When Austen died in 1817, it was not obvious that Austen would become the archetypal British woman writer. Frances Burney was far more famous in her lifetime than Austen was in hers, and Burney’s novels (particularly Evelina and Cecilia) achieved as much, if not more, critical acclaim than Austen’s works. By comparing the afterlives of Jane Austen and Frances Burney, the factors that shape legacy come into focus—and scholars …

“Before I Am Quite Forgot": Women’S Critical Literary Biography And The Future, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

“‘Before I am Quite Forgot’: Women’s Critical Literary Biography and the Future” extends the conversation about literary “worth” in the twenty-first century as it still judges and ignores women authors of the past. Specifically, this essay explores the role of women’s literary historical biography as a primary marker of worth and as a means of shaping legacy. I also discuss my (perhaps more non-traditional) experience—both my personal circumstances and particular material conditions—writing the critical biography Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind. Without a substantial biography that shows the scope of Lennox’s mind, her significant corpus, and her interventions in literary history …

Forgotten Encounters: The Legacy Of Sculptresses And Female Muses, Laura Engel

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Sculpture as a medium is inherently connected to legacy making. In producing three- dimensional monuments designed to withstand the test of time, women artists provided evidence of the lasting quality and permanence of their creative acts. This article examines the actress, sculptress and novelist Anne Damer’s sculpture of the famous actress turned Countess Eliza Farren (c. 1788), paying particular attention to the relationship between sculpture as a static art form that captures tactile embodied presence and the ephemerality of performance. Farren’s involvement in Damer’s staging of the private theatricals at Richmond House (Farren directed and Damer starred) suggests that their …

Women, Slavery, And The Archive: Innovations In Slavery Studies And Contemporary Connections, Srividhya Swaminathan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

“Women, Slavery, and the Archive: Innovations in Slavery Studies and Contemporary Connections”

Early scholarship on slavery, abolition, and the British empire largely ignored the contribution of women of any race to the African Institution. British women who participated in boycotts, produced literary texts against African enslavement, and did the legwork of circulating petitions were relegated to footnotes until well into the twentieth century when women scholars began to create space in the canon for the unrecognized or under-recognized women writers. These new avenues of research evolved through decades to become more inclusive, more critical, and more ground-breaking in bringing the …