Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

From Aura To Awra: Toward A Tropical Queer Decolonial Performativity In The Philippines, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

If datíng is to literary texts, awra is to queer decolonial performances. From the works of Bienvenido Lumbera and Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses the queering of the term aura and how it operates in tropical performances and discourses, through beki (gay language), as awra. The sign “awra” is resuscitated from the imperial lexis and queered by the topical imagination in the Philippine media. Three media texts expound these claims: Awra Briguela’s song “Clap, Clap, Clap, Awra”; Maymay Entrata’s dance “Amakabogera”; and the noontime TV game show “Beklaban,” a portmanteau of Beki (gay) …

Ang Queer Literacy Framework: Isang Pagsusuri Sa Pagtuturo Ng Panitikang Pambata Gamit Ang “Ang Tatay Ni Klara At Nanay Ni Erwin” At “Ang Ikaklit Sa Aming Hardin” / The Queer Literacy Framework: An Analysis Of Teaching Children’S Literature Using “Ang Tatay Ni Klara At Nanay Ni Erwin” And “Ang Ikaklit Sa Aming Hardin”, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

Punlaan ng diskurso sa pagkatao at kasarian ang mga espasyong tulad ng tahanan at paaralan. Sa mga lugar na ito maaring paikutin ang mga materyal na nagtuturo ng mga kaisipan ukol sa pagkatao ng isang indibidwal tulad ng mga panitikang pambata. Ang mga magulang o gurong nagbabasa nito sa mga bata ay nakatutulong na maghulma ng sensibilidad sa usaping seks at kasarian. Gamit ang ilang teorya mula sa mga larangan ng Queer Theory, Childhood Studies, Critical Studies, at Critical Pedagogy, matalik na binasa ng papel ang katha sa tekstuwal at biswal na antas, at ipinagpatuloy ito sa kritikal na pagbabasa …

A Question Of Affect: A Queer Reading Of Institutional Nondiscrimination Statements At Texas Public Universities, Sarah Dwyer

English Faculty Publications

Grounded in my embodied experiences as an openly-queer faculty member at a Texas public university and drawing from Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and institutional diversity, I argue that nondiscrimination statements at Texas public universities are affective objects which serve as straightening devices on the queer bodies that they affect, even as they purport to and often do protect them. The goals of my critique are twofold: 1) to support the work of those tasked with writing revisions to these policies by offering a few practical suggestions to allow for greater enforcement of the nondiscrimination practices that these policies espouse; …

The Insidious Culture Of Fear In Indian Courts, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

On 20 March 2020, the four adult convicts of the 2012 Delhi rape case were executed after a long debate regarding the punishment for their crime. The Delhi rape case, unlike others, was also given to the fast track court because of the worldwide outrage India received in its aftermath. Otherwise, most rape survivors rarely speak out and if they do, their lives are often endangered and threatened, depending on the severity of the case itself and the perpetrator's rank in the society. Through the analysis of Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's, 2016 film Pink, and Ajay Bahl's film Section 375 …

Section Iii: Gender-Based Violence And Society, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava, Deepesh Nirmaldas Dayal

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the third section of the book, which focuses on cultural and normative attitudes toward the problem of gender violence. As with the previous introductory dialogues, the discussion takes place after preliminary drafts have been completed and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects that they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters. These include the culture of silence surrounding rape in India, the way masculine gender norms impact the treatment of women in …

Section I: Gender-Based Violence, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the first section of the book, which focuses on areas where serious ongoing problems of gender violence are receiving insufficient attention. The discussion took place after preliminary drafts had been completed and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters – including the cultural representation of historical gender violence in India, the treatment of women in Japan's sex industry and attitudes towards LGBTQ+ groups in South …

Section Ii: Gender-Based Violence And The Law, Gavin Patrick Gray, Nidhi Shrivastava, Deepesh Nirmaldas Dayal

English Faculty Publications

This chapter is a transcript of an open-ended discussion that occurred between the authors when they met to discuss the subject matter of the second section of the book, which focuses on the effectiveness of legal responses to gendered violence. As with the previous introductory dialogue, the discussion takes place after preliminary drafts had been completed, and the authors share their thoughts on the subjects they will each discuss in more detail in the following chapters. These include the impact of cultural and gender bias within the Indian legal system, the insufficient impact of long-overdue reforms in Japan's sexual violence …

The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania

English Faculty Publications

The relation between commodities and consumers is directly related to the transactional relationship between kids and their interaction with the toys. The paper aims to critique how female representation through Barbie Dolls in popular culture shapes female identity. Production and consumption of Barbie dolls in India became a way of socializing mechanism to educate young Indian girls on the concept of beauty. A notion of beauty is attached to blue eyes, skinny waist, and fair skin giving rise to “American Exceptionalism” (Madsen, 2009, p. 14), where the model nation conceptualizes itself though national identity where perceiver compels to transform themselves …

The House And The Infected Body: The Metonomy Of Resident Evil 7, Alan Mcgreevy, Christina Fawcett, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Resident Evil 7, in articulating the threat of infectious mold, situates the illness with the feminine: Historical, cultural, and physiological connections between mold and women gives the game license to limit, objectify, and render the female characters monstrous. First-person immersion brings us into contact with the infection, as mold and Molded threaten the buildings of the Bakers, while mold growing in their brains threatens the Bakers themselves. Through the form of infection, the disease is invasively feminine, reflected in the Bakers and their homes.

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …

"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

A study of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which frames the period 1996-2006, reveals that the models’ poses and postures manipulate the formulaic gaze of objectification with seemingly empowering themes. Instead of the indeterminate, averted looks that Berger (1972) and Mulvey (1989) considered in their analyses, the more recent versions of Victoria’s Secret photographs confront viewers with pouts, glares, and stares of defiance. In this essay, I contribute to current conversations regarding mixed messages that concern post-feminism and third-wave feminism (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Glapka, 2017; McAllister & DeCarvalho, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In this regard, the Victoria’s Secret catalogues constitute …

Spectators, Sponsors, Or World Travelers? Engaging With Personal Narratives Of Others Through The Afghan Women's Writing Project, Bethany Mannon

English Faculty Publications

This article studies the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and proposes three conceptual tools for examining the ways readers and editors of digital storytelling projects interact with writers and texts. The author advances discussions of personal narrative and the role this form of writing plays in transnational feminism and forms of humanitarian activism that increasingly take place online. Digital storytelling projects effectively circulate these personal accounts, but they benefit from scholarship that advises self-critical approaches to representing their subjects.

He Scores Through A Screen: Mediating Masculinities Through Hockey Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

Hockey video games highlight the ways in which the video game medium shapes and conditions the experience of producing and/or performing the sport “in real life.” Indeed, the accumulation of advanced statistics in and through the constant evaluation, measurement, and surveillance which are inherent to video games—and increasingly seen as foundational for sport—reveals important contradictions not only in the way the embodied sport is played and understood, but also in terms of the proofs of masculinity upon which the sport is built. It then becomes clear that the building of masculinity and the empowerment of the character become one and …

Run Hugs, Squeeze Hugs, And Jump Hugs: Playfully Professing Parenthood And The Self-In-Relation, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sexual/Textual Politics In The Women Of Ophelia A. Dimalanta’S Poems, Ma. Socorro Q. Perez

English Faculty Publications

The study attempts to show that while Ophelia A. Dimalanta’s excellent New Critical training and education have rendered her a quintessential poet conscious of form, technique, and craftsmanship, which in turn, has been foregrounded by her equally New Critical-trained colleagues, this New Critical tradition has limited the study of her oeuvre to artistic structure and form, glossing over myriad concerns that the poems may have. The present study, in turn, has recuperated form, technique, and genre to encode the feminism that undergirds her poetic vision. Foregrounding Dimalanta’s vision enfleshed in art, the study recuperates the sexual/textual politics in Dimalanta’s Lady …

Caption This: Police In Pussyhats, White Ladies, And Carceral Psychology Under Trump, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Prototyping Mina Loy's Alphabet, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

An important branch of digital humanities involves prototyping the past. This entails approaching material forms of knowledge as sites within which epistemological and ontological problems may be evaluated as physical embodied practices. This essay discusses the interpretive and methodological implications of using 3D printing technologies to prototype the archival diagrams of a proposed but never constructed plastic segmental alphabet letter kit – a game designed by Mina Loy for F.A.O. Schwarz. Although it is intended as a toy for young children, “The Alphabet that Builds Itself,” is also a work of object typography which articulates a theory of language as …

I Need A Prince To Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning "Happily Ever After" In Gloria Naylor's Women Of Brewster Place, Anita August

English Faculty Publications

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23

I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

"That Irate Pornographist": Gender And Nature In Mina Loy's "Songs To Joannes", Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

‘How Little I Cared For Fame’: T. Sparrow And Women’S Investigative Journalism At The Fin De Siècle, Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the work of an overlooked female journalist, T. Sparrow, arguing that her career reveals the difficulties female journalists faced when negotiating between the expectations of middle-class gentility and the demands of investigative journalism.

Sparrow asserted her gentility rhetorically, in part because female reporters who took up investigative reporting were vulnerable to criticism for assaying beyond domestic subjects. Moreover, incognito investigative reporting often brought celebrity to its practitioners, which challenged the convention of middle-class female modesty.

Sparrow, therefore, strove for a delicate balance in her career—assuming the stance of a middle-class woman who lived among the poor, someone …

Powerlessness Repurposed: The Feminist Ethos Of Judy Bonds, Mary Beth Pennington

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“The Finest Production Of The Finest Country Upon Earth”: Gender And Nationality In The Writings Of Nineteenth-Century British Women Travelers To Portugal, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

First paragraph:

Critical attention to the writings of nineteenth-century British women travelers has repeatedly stressed their value as evidence of the writers’ attempts at overcoming the constraints of nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity that constructed women as inferior or ancillary (Frawley; Robinson; Foster; Dolan; Middleton); it has also often emphasized the importance of reading them within contemporary discourses such as imperialism, colonialism, or nationalism (Blunt; Frawley; Foster; Mills; Siegel). This essay focuses on three accounts by nineteenth- century British women travelers to Portugal— Marianne Baillie’s Lisbon in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823 (1824); Julia Pardoe’s Traits and Traditions of Portugal …

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …

Overcoming Gender: The Impact Of The Persian Language On Iranian Women’S Confessional Literature, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

[From the Introduction] The idea that language embodies patriarchal thought processes, severing women writers from the written language and from their own words, was first elaborated by the French feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray argues, for example, that language generally denies women a distinct subjectivity, with the result that the voice of women has largely been excluded from mainstream cultural discourse (Donovan). In this chapter, I juxtapose this theory to the obstacles faced by Iranian women writers of life narratives. Is it possible that Persian could have impeded Iranian women’s literary aspirations, especially in the genre of …

Queer Provisionality: Mapping The Generative Failures Of The Transborder Immigrant Tool, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.

Oakes Smith Returns To Maine, Timothy Scherman

English Faculty Publications

In June 2014, I was invited to deliver a lecture on Elizabeth Oakes Smith as part of the Gorman Lecture Series at the Yarmouth History Center, a short distance from Oakes Smith's birthplace. I took the occasion to caution those who base their readings of Oakes Smith's works (and those of other women) on their written autobiographies--as if the life of the woman writer stood as the "origin" the woman-as-author could only "copy." Calling attention to the context of Oakes Smith's writing of her autobiography (at which point her popularity was fading, her family disgraced and most of her friends …

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

Book Review: Mediating Moms: Mothers In Popular Culture, Kristi Branham

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Speculation And The Emotional Economy Of 'Mansfield Park', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

At the midpoint of Mansfield Park (1814), the Bertram family dines at the Parsonage, and card games make up the after dinner entertainment. The characters form two groups, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Mr. and Mrs. Grant playing Whist, while Lady Bertram, Fanny, William, Edmund, and Henry and Mary Crawford play Speculation, This scene is central not only because Speculation reveals certain characters' personalities, but also because another type of “speculation” occurs during the game as the players contemplate or conjecture about one another. Moreover, “speculation” in the sense of gambling functions as a metaphor for the vicissitudes of …