Striking the Posture of a Whore: The Bawdy House Riots and the “Antitheatrical Prejudice”

Sept. 1, 2009

[1] In his oft-cited defense of metaphysical poetry T.S. Eliot provocatively comments on what he terms a seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility,” an aesthetic sea change “from which we have never recovered” (288). For Eliot, the English Restoration saw the emergence of a new aesthetic economy that divorced idea from sensation,...

Out of Wedlock: The Consummation and Consumption of Marriage in Contemporary Romance Fiction

Aug. 1, 2009

[1] To the marriage of true minds, romance fiction has not admitted many impediments. The genre has long relied on the marriage closure in the tradition of the fairytale happily-ever-after, and because love and marriage continue to “go together” in popular culture discourses, many critics of the genre have taken...

Misfortune and Men’s Eyes: Voyeurism, Sorrow, and the Homosocial in Three Early Brian De Palma Films

May 1, 2009

[1] In her groundbreaking essay “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams argues that “Brian De Palma’s film Dressed to Kill extends Psycho ‘s premise by holding the woman [Kate Miller, played by Angie Dickinson] responsible for the horror that destroys her” (94). De Palma extends much more than Psycho’s premise...

The Cinematic Shrews of Teen Comedy: Gendering Shakespeare in Twentieth-Century Film

March 1, 2009

[1] The discourse of feminism since at least the last two decades of the twentieth century has had to combat repeatedly questions of “conformity” and “happiness”: if feminism must work against patriarchy, must women reject, in full, every aspect of traditional femininity and domesticity, even heterosexual intimacy? if the feminist...

The Lack of Chinese Lesbians: Double Crossing in Blue Gate Crossing

Feb. 1, 2009

[1] Although no critic has noted this, it still appears trite and painfully embarrassing to proclaim: “There are no lesbians in Chinese societies.” After all, it is almost a cliché to argue that sexuality is a construct. Thirty years ago, Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality examined how power...

On Mothers Without Citizenship: An Interview with Lynn Fujiwara

Jan. 2, 2009

[1] THOMA: In your book, Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform , you analyze how a new nativism and foreigner racialization intensified in an anti-immigrant movement in the mid 1990s, a period of heightened white anxiety about an emerging non-white majority. The political debates...

Mother of the Year: Kathy Hilton, Lynne Spears, Dina Lohan and Bad Celebrity Motherhood

Nov. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) In the lives of many young people, that person [responsible for curbing bad behaviour] is a parent. But what if it’s not? What...

From Croft to Campus: Extra-Marital Pregnancy and the Scottish Literary Renaissance

June 1, 2008

[1] Teaching in rural Ohio, I have been surprised by the number of students who become pregnant, defying the current trend towards delaying motherhood. It is easy for those of us educating these students to shake our heads sadly, reflecting on the premature responsibilities and lost opportunities we imagine they...

M/Othering the Children: Pregnancy and Motherhood as Obstacle to Self-Actualization in Jane Eyre

May 1, 2008

“Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings.” –Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (24). “Neither Charlotte nor Emily Bronte was, at the time of writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, in a position to experience or even anticipate actual motherhood.” –Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in...

On the Semiotic Basis of Knowledge and Ethics: An Interview with Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio about their new book, Semiotics Unbound

April 1, 2008

[1] DP: Let me start by thanking you for agreeing to talk about your book with me. I found Semiotics Unbounded a really fascinating attempt to synthesize a lot of material in the field of semiotics that will be unfamiliar to many of us (especially in the U.S.) who were...

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