Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Gender And Space In British Literature, 1660-1820, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Pamela Benson

Pamela J Benson

Cavallo's provocative title suggests the essence of her argument: the Orlando Innamoratois a didactic poem in which the poet "presents a coherent moral vision of love as well as a program for a humanist use of literature" (10).

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Melanie E Osborn

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …

Cinema/History/Feminism, Joan C. Dagle

Joan C Dagle

Margarethe von Trotta's 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg offers a cinematic portrait of a historically significant female revolutionary, one of the central figures of 20th century socialism. The film attempts to reclaim this figure as historical subject, as feminist subject, and as a cinematic subject for contemporary audiences for whom socialist and feminist history has been lost or suppressed and for whom cinema is articulated within mainstream conventions.

Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai

Zubeda Jalalzai

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in articulating feminist and postcolonial politics, raises issues of importance for both first world and third world feminists as well as enacting some of the very dangers which accompany those tenuous relationships. Spivak's essays, "French Feminism in an International Frame" (1981) and "French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics" (1992), provide a rich arena in which she presents powerful cautions regarding international solidarities and explores the complicated dynamics of ethical relationships on multiple levels, including that between mother and daughter, bourgeois postcolonial feminist and the woman of the "ground," as well as between metropolitan and postcolonial feminists.

Aliens And Others, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

In the space of one week in the fall of 1994, Susan Smith went from small-town obscurity to national media icon, first as a suffering madonna pleading for the safe return of her two young children and then as a mad Medea who had admitted to their murders. At about the same time, a Rhode Island man, Richard Timothy Dunphy, was indicted for the murder of his two-year-old son, Eric. Dunphy-who allegedly beat Eric to death and then left the child's body in a closet for several days-did not make the national news.

The Tripled Plot And Center Of Sula, Maureen Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Critics of Sula frequently comment on the pervasive presence of death, the uses of a particular cultural and historical background, the split or doubled protagonist (Sula/Nel), and the attention to chronology in the novel. However, as far as I am aware, no one has presented a reading of Sula that explores the interrelatedness of these elements; yet it is the connections among them that most usefully reveal the novel's overall thematic patterns. Sula can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black female bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and an historical …

Women And Sisters, Maureen T. Reddy

Maureen T. Reddy

Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture, on the iconography of the women's abolitionist movement, is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary thought and study. Crossing the boundaries of history, feminist theory, African American studies, and literary analysis, Yellin illuminates the complex intersections of art and politics in American life. Women and Sisters traces the history of the "Woman and Sister" emblem that the antislavery feminists adopted, examining its permutations in texts both graphic and literary from the 1830s to the 1850s.

Promoting Dialogue On The Transgender Experience In College Courses Through Films And Literature, Elizabeth H. Rowell

Elizabeth H Rowell

Although transgender individuals have been part of every culture and society in recorded human history, many people today are unaware of gender variant individuals among them and discussions of rights and equality have usually excluded trans people. This lack of recognition and intolerance often makes being transgender today very difficult. Much work remains to be done to educate the public and improve the safety and well-being of trans people. College professors can help to promote understanding of and advocacy for gender variant individuals. This is an overview of one professor's experiences in weaving critical thinking and dialoguing about the transgender …

Viral Migrations: Fairy Tales Of Family And Nation, Death And Disease, Susan Knabe

Susan Knabe

No abstract provided.

Melba Boyd, Karen Gevirtz

Karen Bloom Gevirtz

This article has been reprinted in a revised edition of the Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford University Press, 1997). It describes the life and career of Melba Boyd.

Queer, Queer Vladimir, Steven Bruhm

Steven Bruhm

No abstract provided.