Archive - Topic - Gender and Literature

[1] Eighteenth-century court records and periodicals provide glimpses of the bodies of women who cross-dressed and married other women, the so-called female husbands whose bodies challenged emergent categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. Mary East, a woman who identified herself as James How for most of her adult life, lived...

[1] This article addresses gender and popular music-making in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand, a moderately prosperous provincial city (population 130,000) which services a large rural sector (the Waikato). Starting from the observation that few women enroll in tertiary commercial music courses in Hamilton, I aim to examine both...

[1] Although a prolific professional writer and perennial breadwinner for a large household, Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) has not been easily claimed as a proto-feminist. Her tremendous industry and independence stand in contrast to the conservative critiques she sometimes published in her frequent contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine, such as “The Anti-Marriage...

[1] Feminist fiction emerged in both the United States and Great Britain during the height of the second wave feminist movement, marking its entrance with demands for female autonomy, sexual and reproductive freedom, and a cautionary perspective on institutionalized heterosexuality. While feminist activists were at the same time encouraging a...

[1] On 27 March 1995 Nigel Hawthorne did not win a Best Actor Oscar for his role as George III in Nicolas Hynter’s The Madness of King George (1994). In an interview with the American magazine The Advocate a week earlier, he had discussed his openness about his homosexuality and...

[1] The author of five novels (the first of which was published in 1978) and numerous stories, essays, and articles, Jane DeLynn has had a respectable, if not prolific, literary career. She has attracted little critical attention, however, even in the specialized field of queer literary scholarship—three of her novels,...

[1] Scholars have recently begun to create theoretical models that help us to register important differences within contemporary transgendered identifications. In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble denaturalized norms of gender and sexuality, performing a critique of prior feminist work on gender that not only influenced subsequent directions in feminist studies...

“Stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag” –Welsh, ‘A Smart Cunt’ (245) [1] ‘Drag’, the practice of cross-dressing and performing as the opposite gender, can be homophobic, suggests an against-the-grain reading of this quote from Irvine Welsh. Such a notion disturbs and complicates the stereotypical association of drag...

Setting the terms: after the Fire [1] While it would be problematic to fix a monolithic moment of change from invisibility to visibility in the context of queer citizenship in India, it could be argued that the events following the screening of Fire (1997) performed an important epistemic shift in...

[1] Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov’s delirium-filled wanderings about Saint Petersburg and his subsequent encounters with various abused and anonymous young women are necessary catalysts to his eventual self-discovery as well as paradigms for Crime and Punishment. The recurrence of nameless, poverty-stricken waifs throughout the novel creates an associative structure that forces...