Archive - Topic - Gender and Literature

[1] Providing the meaning to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, has become an initiation rite in theory and criticism culture. The meaning of Billy Budd usually comes in the form of the position which the critic takes on the novella’s presumably central moral question: the Case either For or Against...

[1] Genres of expression favored by female authors in Japan such as science fiction and manga (graphic novel) have long been classified as subcategories of so-called subculture with labels like girls’ manga and female sci-fi writing. From the sheer number and variety of works penned by female creators in these...

What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain, And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again — What is the matter with Mary Jane? A.A. Milne [1] Like the little girl in A. A. Milne’s poem, accused poisoner Madeleine Smith was the object...

(part of a series in Issue 35: Masculinity and Labor Under Capitalism – Edited by DONALD MORTON) [1] There are a myriad ways to understand the importance of masculinity for Marxism, including whether one is interested in the analysis of gender and sexuality in divisions of labor or mutations of...

[1] Debates about female fetishism have been going on for almost two decades now; but there appears to be as yet no consensus about the value of claiming this particular practice for feminist politics. Ever since Sarah Kofman’s suggestion that a Derridean reading of Freud’s 1927 essay could not preclude...

[1] One desires the archaic and the exotic insofar as it remains the other, but insofar as it retains its ontological difference the encounter with it is liable to be marked by frustration, failure, lack. Narratives with a colonial setting are often marked by such a structure; E.M. Forster’s A...

[1] This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism–black and white–in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the...

[1] JAGOSE: On the pink-jacketed cover of The Trouble with Normal are a rank of plastic male dolls, alternately dressed in a groom’s formal white dinner jacket and black bow tie or a leatherman’s motorcycle cap and bondage chest straps. No one could mistake them for a couple yet, as...

[1] Most critical treatments of Jazz take some account of jazz's role in the novel, yet pay only marginal attention to its running commentary on the blues. But Morrison's approach to what the blues and jazz mean in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American urban culture is...

Editor's Note: This essay received the Florence Howe Prize, a national award given annually for the best essay in feminist theory and criticism. [1] In a famous passage in her unfinished autobiography "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf described her revulsion at seeing herself in a looking glass, and...