Archive - Topic - Gender and Literature

“I cannot continue to use my body to be walked over to make a connection.” –Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, xv There is “[n]o sense talking tough unless you do it.” –Estrella, Under the Feet of Jesus , 45 [1] In her 1980 preface to This Bridge Called...

[1] KLEIN: In your book WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota you chronicle the history of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, a woman’s art collective and gallery based in Minneapolis. In the introduction, you write that “thirty years after the founding of the WARM collective no studies about...

[1] I can still remember the first time it happened. I was either thirteen or fourteen, I don’t know that, but I do know that I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen with my back to the folding doors leading down the long slate hallway. I was somewhere...

Indeed if one is to be a man almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. -Norman Mailer, The White...

Figure 1 MOORTI: Private Lives, Proper Relations offers a new lens through which one can understand some key late twentieth century African American women’s fiction. Your book primarily argues that the hidden arena of intimacy is thoroughly politicized for African Americans, that the black domestic sphere is shaped by interlocking...

[1] The prominence of the ‘ghostly’ in Affinity, Sarah Waters’s 1991 neo-Victorian gothic fiction of female same sex desire, might be read as a fantastic fictional evocation of a recurring trope in lesbian feminist literary history and historiography: the historical ‘invisibility’ of lesbian identity. However, I wish to explore the...

[1] Romance has, to put it mildly, a sketchy political history. On the one hand, its focus on interpersonal dramas within the feminized private sphere, from aristocratic liaisons in the chivalric epics of the Middle Ages to the novels of Jane Austen to the tawdry delights of Harlequin, Mills and...

[1] Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologising business” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus Carter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The winged aerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom she journeys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin...

[1] It has become a commonplace to describe growing Western engagement with Buddhism as a search for relief from spiritual vacuity and deep dissatisfaction produced by modernity. Buddhism in this narrative figures as either pre-modern or timeless, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in particular symbolizing an otherwise lost authenticity...

[1] The publication of Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (2001), co-edited by Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender, marks a shift in the attention of third wave feminists away from the role of rebellious daughters to the role of motherhood. This essay investigates the politics of motherhood...