Scholarship

In this essay, we consider some of the meanings attached to women in the field at the current moment and rethink some of the central narratives and debates informing these understandings. Our intent is an expansive one, a perspective that eschews any policing of “proper” objects and subjects. We do not wish to draw boundaries around what “is” or “is not” WGS scholarship based on the presence or absence of “women,” and we do not believe there should be any singular or central subject of WGS. We do, though, want to ask questions about the stories and logics underlying conversations and decisions in the field. While the meanings of particular shifts inevitably emerge from local histories, specific contexts, and individual desires and goals—for example, the reasons why a department might decide to change its name, or why a professor might elect to use “women,” “gender,” or “feminism” in the title of a course—these choices are also tied to larger conversations, political commitments, and affiliations. This chapter asks: what are the stories that WGS tells about “women,” what do those suggest about the politics of the present, and how might the discipline construct different histories that open up alternative futures? How can we create more robust and diverse narratives about the field of WGS, and how might these stories open up possibilities for “women” both in the present moment and the future of our discipline?

Feminist literary scholars have analyzed texts about sexual violence and rape culture and theorized resistance to them since feminist interventions into literary studies. But since Tarana Burke’s 2006 “Me Too” movement went viral and global as #MeToo in 2017, these efforts have expanded and grown more complex. At the same time, literary studies has seen a broader and deeper reconsideration of many of the texts taught in English studies, while welcoming into its curricula diverse texts that are adept at addressing the topics of #MeToo. In this chapter, we trace some of the major ways in which #MeToo is reshaping curricula in English literary studies: re-readings of canonical texts, the development of embodied pedagogies, rethinking literary genres and canons, increasing efforts to place literature and media studies in conversation with each other, and a re-energized approach to activism in and through literary studies.

This book is a first attempt to collect individual literary scholars’ and teachers’ responses to #MeToo, to understand the currents of thought and practice that unite and power them, and to communicate those to the wider field of literary studies—to connect individual efforts into a collective endeavor. This introductory chapter includes a brief genealogy of sexual violence and literary studies before #MeToo; an examination of #MeToo and literary studies at the present moment; and work yet to be done.

This essay interrogates whether “toxic” masculinity is a proper diagnosis for Okonkwo and lays out strategies for teachers to situate Things Fall Apart in discussions about gendered violence and masculinity across the borders of time, nation, and culture. I draw from literary critical and pedagogical scholarship on gender in Chinua Achebe’s work, as well as interdisciplinary scholarship on African masculinities. Given how few critics have written about how to approach discussions about Okonkwo’s violent masculinity in the classroom, I hope this perspective will contribute to scholarly conversations about the “great African novel” (Franklin 2008).

This chapter examines English-language life narrative written by those who are positioned in the social location of “mother” and whose writing reflects their engagement with the work of mothering. Because the history of both motherhood memoirs and those who would write about their experience as mothers is marked by exclusion and oppression, many scholars define maternal autobiography broadly. Motherhood memoirs in their current form began to be published in the twentieth century, and the subgenre expanded significantly in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Feminist scholarship on the form has frequently explored topics related to the workings of narrative and the formation of maternal subjectivity. Debates center on whether the form remains complicit with, or critical of, heteronormative gender formation; why the majority of its authors reflect privileged identities, and to what extent this is changing; and how maternal autobiographical subjects are produced through the act of writing about mothering. Motherhood memoirs continue to change, providing a valuable window onto the shifting landscapes of contemporary parenting and family life and inviting us to imagine new possibilities and ways of forming family and raising the next generation.

This article interrogates the ways in which the ideas of diversity, experience, and inclusion became central to the introductory Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) course at one institution and the way that various stakeholders define and interpret these terms. After providing a short local history and analyzing current and former instructors’ understandings of these concepts as they function in the GWS introductory classroom, we further explore these themes with two case studies: transgender inclusion and Native American feminisms. Résumé Cet article s’interroge sur la manière dont les idées sur la diversité, l’expérience, et l’inclusion sont devenues centrales au cours d’introduction Études sur le genre et les femmes (EGF) dans un établissement d’enseignement et sur la manière dont les divers intervenants définissent et interprètent ces termes. Après avoir fourni un bref historique local et analysé la compréhension de ces concepts par les professeurs actuels et anciens lorsqu’ils exercent dans le cours d’introduction EGF, les auteurs explorent ces thèmes plus avant dans le cadre de deux études de cas : l’inclusion transgenre et les féminismes autochtones.

In this essay, I explore the presence and potential effects of parental blame on primary caregivers, often (though not always) mothers, of food-allergic children. How is this blame gendered, and how might it affect the way that mothers in particular think about food, family meals, and the work of feeding their children? I focus on a 2012 memoir by Susan Weissman, Feeding Eden: The Trials and Triumphs of a Food Allergy Family, which provides one mother’s reflections on the challenges of preparing food and eating together after her son is diagnosed. Drawing from feminist scholarship on motherhood, blame, food, and invisible disabilities, I explore how this memoir reveals the complex feelings, particularly anxiety and self-blame, experienced by Weissman. Ultimately, this author undertakes certain kinds of food work, both in and out of the kitchen, in order to redefine family meals and dismantle stigma and guilt. By bringing a feminist lens to the text, I hope to further the understanding of the particular challenges food allergies present to the larger project of “unbending gender” as well as to open up the gendered dimensions of food work and caregiving (Williams).

: In this essay, I suggest some ways to incorporate discussions about economic justice into the university classroom setting, using feminist theories and pedagogical approaches to literary texts. I focus in particular on the novel Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga, which provides a rich meditation on the interconnections of material conditions, women’s bodies, and the multilayered ways in which women experience oppression. Dangarembga’s novel asks readers to develop alternative perspectives on both liberal feminism and human rights. Situating discussions about women’s human rights in postcolonial and transnational contexts can create a framework for students to reexamine familiar ideas and reflect on their locations as readers.

Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues that fiction provides a way to combat “simple stories” about Africa and to present, instead, a complex picture that moves beyond stereotypes (45). In stories such as “The American Embassy,” and novels such as Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, the author critiques the “grand narratives of human rights” by complicating our preconceived notions ideas about who is a savior, a victim, or a perpetrator. These texts simultaneously claim and question human rights ideals as they have been defined and practiced in the twentieth century, performing a kind of ideological human rights work in the realm of the imaginary and the fictional. The resulting critique resonates with the political work of many African feminists, womanists, and women’s rights advocates who have sought to redefine and expand human rights ideals and practices to include and address the needs and concerns of all Africans, including women and girls.

The experience of living with and managing food allergies has implications not only for our understanding of families and food but also for our understanding of caregiving in the context of disability, chronic disease, and illness—experiences and conditions familiar to most if not all of us. At some point, all mothers provide care to children, parents, partners, or themselves in the context of one or more of these issues. Many scholars, writers, and activists have done tremendous work in the realm of articulating what it means to care in the context of disease and disability. I would like to add to this discussion by suggesting that food allergies provide a particular experience of disease and disability: as chronic conditions, they require medical management to prevent allergic reactions; and although some children grow out of their allergies, many do not. Thus my reflections in this paper may well apply to a larger group of conditions that also need to be medically managed such as asthma, epilepsy, and diabetes.

In this essay, I consider one film and one novel, both produced within the past fifteen years, that explore the experiences of transnational mothers in the United States. Although produced out of different cultural contexts and at different moments, both the film La Misma Luna (written by Ligiah Villalobos and directed by Patricia Riggen) and Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory suggest that cultural narratives of motherhood, in particular Catholic-inflected ideologies that lend themselves to the social control of female sexuality, remain a central issue for many transnational mothers—not only in their sending countries but also in the United States. At the same time, the comparison between the film and the novel reveals significant differences that may prove instructive for those who would use creative cultural productions in the interdisciplinary study of migration. The film, while powerful in its representation of the hardships facing an undocumented Mexican-born mother, offers relatively simplified portraits of its characters and, as a result, leaves dominant Euro-American and Latin American cultural scripts about what defines a “good” mother relatively untouched. By contrast, Danticat’s novel, written more than ten years earlier, presents a nuanced representation of the complexities of transnational motherhood in which the immigrant mother is neither all good nor all bad. Told from the perspective of the daughter (who later be-comes a mother herself), the novel explores how Haitian cultural scripts and images of womanhood can prove both oppressive and empowering.

Leila Aboulela’s novel The Translator provides an extended meditation on the embodied experiences of a Sudanese woman living in exile. In this article, I argue that the trope of translation provides explanatory power for not only the novel’s thematic concerns but also its poetics. By translating the sensory and affective experiences of her protagonist into words, Aboulela attempts to represent the full humanity of Muslim subjects whose lives have frequently been reduced and flattened to stereotypes or simplified narratives. Ultimately, The Translator suggests that all experience, including religious faith, is embodied. As a way of being that contains physical, affective, and spiritual dimensions, Aboulela suggests, religion provides an important grounding during the migratory journeys of her character. As such, the narrative critiques discourses about Arab and African women’s bodies and demonstrates the power of literature as a tool in the project of rewriting Orientalist and imperialist scripts.

This essay explores the process by which I came to be a mother and to understand the limitations of the feminism of my childhood, through a process of reading the work of women very different from me—women who did not necessarily define their feminism in the privileged spaces of university classrooms and libraries, but whose critiques of second-wave feminism left their mark on me, as well as on other members of my generation, thus expanding and changing how many of us think of feminism itself.

The latest incarnation of “mommy lit,” which dates to the early 1990s and continues through the present moment, differs from what came before in several respects. Although much of it continues to be written by white, middle-class women, this has begun to change, as the voices of working-class mothers and mothers of color—plus single, queer, and teenage mothers—have claimed a space, found publishers, and stormed the Internet. As opposed to the poetry and fiction of previous generations, autobiographical writing and the “momoir” are increasingly popular genres. The stories told by these writers often feel familiar, though today’s writers have more latitude to take on taboo subjects. In their unmasking of the still-powerful myths of motherhood, this wave of writers frequently challenges the dictates of parenting manuals and the sentimental images in mainstream mothering magazines; and like their foremothers, they make use of anger and rage as well as humor, irony, and satire in their commentaries on contemporary childrearing culture. Yet in spite of decades of feminism, many of them find themselves writing about similar issues as their predecessors: the pain of living in a world that pits mothering against work and self-fulfillment, and the joy of finding connections between mothering and the outside world.

Rereading Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones with an integrated notion of disability and trauma helps to explain the powerful “sympathetic response” among many of its readers (Fulani 77); for while massacre is most likely not familiar to much of the novel’s North American audience, the experiences of loss and disability most likely are. At the same time, however, our theory of disability needs to be grounded in Caribbean history and culture in order to fully account for the experiences of Danticat’s Haitian characters and the author’s invocation of Haitian literary and cultural narratives of disability. Drawing from notions of disability grounded in AfroCaribbean myth and ritual, The Farming of Bones explores the symbolic crossroads that mark all transitional journeys in the African diasporic world—a crossroads that, I suggest, points to new directions for disability studies scholarship.

As a scholar of literary and cultural narratives, I’m interested in how activists, advocacy groups, and writers are positioning the mothers’ movement vis-à-vis feminism. Building on Tucker’s cogent examination of the political frameworks underlying the rhetoric of four of the major mothers’ organizations, I explore the negotiations and self-naming strategies of various mothers’ advocacy groups and how they reveal both ambivalence and allegiance toward feminism. Although I fully support their attempts to develop agendas that place caregiving at the center of a vision for social and political change, I argue that we should understand the mothers’ movement within the broader frame of feminism, and specifically within the context of the third wave and the ongoing project of redefining and expanding feminism. Moreover, I argue that it may benefit mothers’ advocates to engage more fully with feminist theories and practice. Feminist frameworks can help to suggest possibilities for increased interchange and alliance-building across the boundaries that separate mothers and other caregivers—work that, I believe, remains fundamental to the formation of a truly inclusive mothers’ and caregivers’ movement.

In this article, I attempt to expand current understandings of contemporary Anglophone Nigerian literature by focusing on the work of an emerging writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who until now has not been included in discussions about the third generation. As one of the youngest members of this generation and as a writer whose career first began to unfold in the U.S., Adichie has thus far followed a trajectory slightly different from many of her peers, particularly those whose careers have developed primarily in Nigeria. While her career is still developing, but her work warrants attention for several reasons. She is a talented writer who has already gained a measure of success that eludes many writers, both in Africa and the U.S. Furthermore, her work to date expands our understanding and characterizations of third-generation Nigerian writing. While her fiction reveals various influences on Nigerian writers, particularly from the first generation, it also resounds with a wide range of texts, from Nigeria, other African nations, and throughout the black Atlantic. This transnational intertextuality suggests the presence of a heterogeneous, diasporic dimension within contemporary Nigerian literature—a dimension present within many national literatures of the postmodern, globalized world.

This essay draws from the years I have spent observing my parents and the members of our extended family striving to create a rich and meaningful life for my sister. While noting some of the important work authored by disability studies and feminist scholars, this essay focuses on my family’s experience in its exploration of the thorny issues that families with disabilities face. My hope is that our story will join the collective cry for a more inclusive vision of family and for social policies that support all families, including those who fall outside of what, in this country, is deemed “normal.”

This essay tells the story of how I “found” this voice that I call my own. I try to honor both my impulse to weave narrative and to theorize, in the hopes of getting at some broader questions. What is voice, and how is it connected to genre? What role might gender play, and how is it connected to power? Most of all, I’m interested in the relationship between self-knowledge and voice in the essay, in how the essay form can invite us to tap into often-overlooked sources of information and knowledge about ourselves and the world, even though we carry them around with us every day. This relationship is relevant, I think, for all writers, not just personal essayists or those who write creative nonfiction, but novelists, poets, dramatists, and academic writers. For anyone, really, who wrestles with words in the presence of a blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen.