Incipit: Reflections on Gender Studies in Our Field

Recent studies of eighteenth-century women writers have focused on the role of women as developers and proponents of the secret history. The secret history, recently defined by scholars such as Rebecca Bullard, Melinda Alliker Rabb, Ros Ballaster, Marta Kvande, and Rachel Carnell, among others, occupies space within several genres, including political satire and historiography. The genre’s secretive nature and reliance on gossip and anecdotal evidence creates a new space for women writers that allows them to enter political discourse and offer a distinctly gendered social commentary. As public became private and private became secret, secret historians sought to expose the private lives of individuals in power. In this paper, I examine the role of women writers and secret historians, particularly Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, and what I read as their response to male counterparts as they established and developed a gendered response both to the political climate of the early to mid-eighteenth century and the divergence of male and female social roles within the domestic sphere. In examining the narratorial structure and narratological techniques of both male and female secret historians over a period stretching from 1674 to 1736, I trace the development of female gender roles and attitudes towards women within the genre of the secret history, revealing through these works a narration of male and female attitudes towards women in the public and private spheres.

2011

As Nancy Armstrong argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel , “domestic fiction” was a privileged site for exploring the emerging concepts of sexuality and identity, and because most eighteenth-century novels were by and/or about women, women novelists found a certain amount of authority in this particular and important new area of thought. Of course, many novels by women contain instances of explicit sexuality, including but not limited to works by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. But more interesting to me are those works which are often read as being devoid of sexual matters, but which, if read for submerged meanings and subtexts, offer at least a possibility for women’s sexuality. This method of reading, works on an analysis of the “silences, omissions, ironies, and textual subtleties” of the text, and can reveal the “encoding of female discourse” (822). I have chosen to analyze Frances Burney’s Evelina , Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian , and Jane Austen’...

2009

This dissertation relates the violence perpetuated by phallogocentric traditions of reading and writing to the violence of appropriating traditional categories of gender and asks whether or not and how texts that resist these traditions might help us change the way we think about identities, our own and others', opening up a space for new and as yet un-thought ways of exchanging texts and the identities they make possible. Focusing on the ways in which Jacques Derrida's Éperons, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Elena Garro's "La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas" and "El árbol" interminably reverse the roles of readers and writers, further disorienting them with the complex blend of genres in their texts and the networks of other texts that they juxtapose with their own, leads to the conclusion that the ultimate revolutionary function of these texts is to be found in the ways that they suspend the processes of appropriation and identification indefinitely, giving time, namely the time of waiting, but also time that is filled with the constant weaving of narratives, maintaining the possibility that a way out of historical cycles of violence, especially the violence of being forced to fit within current categories, might be found. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Cristina Dahl received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 1997, a Master of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. She currently teaches full time in the English Department at Butte Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. Her primary interests lie in comparing historical representations of gender in a variety of different genres and media in European and Mexican culture, including fiction, philosophy, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. She is also interested in the relationship between ethics, hermeneutics, and pedagogy. iv I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Michael and Groverlee Dahl. Without their constant support over the past two years, I could never have completed this project. I would also like to thank Aaron, who continues to inspire me and who patiently and unwaveringly supported me through many years of just reading, writing, and thinking, a gift and a debt that I can never fully return. I would like to thank Lisa Patti, Ana Rojas, and Angela Naimou for showing me what an ideal network of reading and writing can look like, another gift that defies response, and I will be forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Castillo for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback on my first draft, which I will continue to take into consideration as I proceed to other projects. I also want to thank them for exposing me to so many rich texts and asking so many provocative questions in the seminars they taught. Again, I hope I may continue to respond to these questions for many years to come. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the graduate school at Cornell University, for the Sage Fellowship that allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during my last year at Cornell and for the Provost's Diversity Fellowship, which also allowed me to take a semester off from teaching to complete that research.

European Journal of Womens Studies, 2006

This article charts the feminist perspectives that have come out of the author’s thinking on the dance performance text Human Sex and how this has informed her own feminism. In doing so, the author argues that a feminist agenda is shifting and dynamic but also reliant upon prior readings and interpretations that provide the point of reference for a departure to other readings and perspectives. Using autobiographical material, the author highlights the importance of considering the personal histories of subject-hood that influence a feminist consciousness and how these are the condition of possibility for making other readings. To demonstrate the shifting character of identity over time, she engages in different readings of Human Sex through the work of feminist theorists Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan.

This paper considers the historical literature on sex & sexuality under the Third Reich prior to the publication of Dagmar Herzog's monumentally definitive text, "Sex After Fascism". I attempt to outline the creation and eventual disintegration of the thesis that extolled how the National Socialist state's 'repressive' policy/ideology extended to matters of a sexual nature. CourseHI 729 Modern Germany (instructor: Dr. Pamela Swett)

Labour / Le Travail, 1997

WHAT ON EARTH WOULD ONE write about if one were to study the history of sexuality? This question used to be posed either perplexedly or cynically. The idea that sex could have a history mystified some historians while others dismissed it as a faddish fixation on the unmentionable. Even the appearance of landmark works, like Judith Walkowitz's Prostitution and Victorian Society or Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right, left many unconvinced of the subject's relevance to more than a small circle of feminists with axes to grind. Now, less than twenty years later, the history of sexuality is a force to be reckoned with, not only in North American historiography, but in 'world' history (as a steady stream of articles in journals such as Gender and History, Signs, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality confirms). "Everybody's doin' it" could be applied not only to our historical subjects, but to historians who have suddenly come to write about physical and emotional intimacy in all its ambiguity. Histories of sexuality can no longer afford to rely on raciness to draw readers' attention (or to raise reviewers' eyebrows). The minimum entry standard now goes

Critical Survey, 2003