Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Autoimmunities After Covid: An Interview With Cindy Patton, Cindy Patton, Travis Alexander, Nishant Shahani

English Faculty Publications

Taken collectively, Patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly AIDS studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. Patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. Among Patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “African AIDS” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated HIV pandemics split by the …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Gay For Play: Theorizing Lgbtq Characters In Game Studies, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Despite, and perhaps because of, popular press reactions to stereotypical depictions of beefy boys and busty babes in video games, the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality remains a lacuna in the emerging field of game studies. Of particular interest is the notion of performance and the ways this impacts both on gender and on game play. The combination might be expected to offer a very interesting way of approaching LGBTQ characters in digital games, especially given the recent inclusion of such characters in some popular and well-studied game franchises, including Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar 1997-present), Jade Empire (BioWare 2005-08) …

Women's Gun Culture In America, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

A recent article in the New York Times focused on the possible increase in female gun ownership in the United States. This “new” phenomenon of women and guns is of course far from new: as early as the 1870s, trapshooting for women was publicized by gun manufacturers as yet another feminine activity, not far removed from shopping or club work. The ultra-feminine Annie Oakley, who in the 1880s became an international star in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, personally taught fifteen thousand women to shoot. By the turn of the twentieth century, gun manufacturers were promoting hunting as a healthful activity …

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’S Rewriting Of 'Lady Audley’S Secret' In 'Bedelia', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Considering Vera Caspary's Bedelia as a reimagining of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret allows for a new critical interpretation that refutes the typical view of Bedelia as reinforcing traditional gender roles. Instead, Caspary critiques World War II America by bringing Victorian concerns with female roles into the twentieth century.

Women Home From War, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

The first time I heard a woman describe her deployment in glowing terms, I was taken aback. Marine Colonel Jenny Holbert told me that being in charge of public affairs for the second battle of Fallujah was "probably one of the biggest events of my life, other than birthing two children." I thought, cynically, that this enthusiasm was all part of her role as a public-affairs officer. It took me a while to understand how compelling the experiences of being in a combat zone could be for the women I talked with. Colonel Holbert's enthusiasm for deployment was only one …

Faulkner's Sexualized City: Modernism, Commerce, And The (Textual) Body, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Such classicism is the aesthetic opposite of what Faulkner demonstrates at moments in Mosquitoes and that would go on to become his famously baroque style. In the discussion that follows, I will be asking a number of questions about that development, among them the following: What is the role in Faulkner of a baroque, highly refined language, especially when Faulkner uses it to convey sexuality? And what connections (or disconnections) might that style have to Faulkner’s use of the setting of the city, as in Mosquitoes, or elsewhere of the rural countryside? As we will see, changes in these …

The Aridity Of Grace: Community And Ecofeminism In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams And Prodigal Summer, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

In both Animal Dreams and her later novel Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver constructs narratives of community inhabited by characters with a vivid awareness of the natural world and the threats to that world; furthermore, both novels feature strong female characters who long for a more harmonious life within nature. The novels develop and present forthright ecofeminist themes, with the women in the texts representing ideals of ecologically sensitive living who seek to educate their communities about threats to the environment and the defenses against those threats.

Kingsolver's ecofeminist vision, however, is frequently complicated and contradictory; just as the desert landscape …

"Everybody Else Ain't Your Father": Reproducing Masculinity In Cinematic Sports, 1975-2000, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This essay stems from two cultural strands, which intersect in one cultural form, the sports film. The first of these is the figure of the "star," as opposed to hero, who is interested only in self promotion. The second strand, masculine nurturing, provides a direct counterpoint to the first. Sociologist Robert Connell explains that "In historically recent times, sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture" (54). In North America, sport plays an important and increasing role in our culture. Each of the four major sports leagues added teams in the last decade of the …

Liberated Jokes: Sexual Humor In All-Female Groups, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

Females have formerly been under-represented in jokes. Many scholars have claimed that joke making is primarily a male activity, particularly in the domain of sexual jokes. In this paper, I discuss sexual jokes that women share with each other both in all-female groups and by e-mail. After reviewing some widely held assumptions about women and jokes, I explore liberated women's jokes, including their structure, use of stereotypes, and subversive ideas. Finally, I discuss why humor theory is incomplete without the inclusion of a female perspective and suggest that women should tell more jokes.

"Two Guns, A Girl And A Playstation™": Gender In The Tomb Raider Series, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the combination of game play and narrative which combine to produce cross-gender identifications in video games, a previously underexamined potential for the production of alternate genders, one which calls into question the stability of gender, particularly masculinity, as a construct.

Lesbian Jokes: A Reply To Christie Davies, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How Many Lesbians Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb?", Janet M. Bing, Dana Heller

English Faculty Publications

This paper explores how humor reveals shared aspects of a culture of lesbian communities in the US. For lesbians, jokes and other forms of humor are an active, narrative means of self-construction and community imagining that help lesbians negotiate their positions both inside and outside mainstream culture. Whether consciously or unconsciously, much of lesbian humor challenges the dominant culture by rejecting its definitions of and presuppositions about lesbians, and by making lesbian experience central to its understanding of normalcy. Whereas the term "lesbian joke" usually activates a sex frame for the dominant culture, much humor created by and for lesbians …

Feathers And Hair, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Plucking chickens the kosher way is quite an art. According to the laws of kashrut) a chicken should not be cooked or even brought close to a source of heat until it is kashered-bled, salted, and rinsed. The use of fire to sear feathers or hot water to loosen quills is absolutely forbidden. Poultry processors today use the force of air to pluck feathers for kosher markets; but when I lived in Iran, during the '60s and '70s, this job had to be done manually.

"See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me": (Im) Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the "new man," which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements for the …

Only Friendship, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) My Jewish daughter befriended a Muslim woman in her Islam class last Fall. She asked me where she could buy rosewater, saffron, and cardamom to make halwa. My kosher daughter was celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eide-fetr, with her first Iranian, her first Muslim friend.

White Women, Black Revolutionaries: Sex And Politics In Four Novels By Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

As early as 1959, the white South African novelist, essayist, and short story writer Nadine Gordimer wrote an essay, "Where Do Whites Fit In?" As the black struggle for power intensified and finally achieved its primary goal of black majority rule in 1994, Gordimer continued to reflect upon this question. Her eighth novel, July's People (1981), is a psychological and political fable. It celebrates a white woman's readiness to reject the relationships and privileges that bind her to the white world and her readiness to embrace the new South Africa of an emancipated black majority. The novels written before July's …

Born And Made: Sisters, Brothers, And The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

We are--almost all--born into families, born into relationship. Like Mary Ann Evans, I was born a little sister--but had I encountered her "Brother and Sister" sonnets at twelve, I might have thrown the book across the room. George Eliot's fantasy of a perfected brother-sister relationship in these sonnets rings hollow and yet resonates profoundly with me. As a little sister myself, I wonder what could make the relationship--so often fraught with competition, envy, and neglect, yet potentially so richly rewarding--seem so powerfully right, so important to and adult woman's self-identification? For the narrator of the sonnets is certainly an adult …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …