My Research Philosophy
Who do we desire and why? How do desires transgress social norms? What identities subvert received notions of the self? What can LGBTQ and women's issues in the past tell us about struggles for equality and individual subjectivity today?
These are the questions at the heart of my scholarly research. Whether I am working on eighteenth-century cross-dressing women or lesbian representation in contemporary film, I want to understand why and how women and minorities are represented, what work these representations do in the cultural imaginary, and how those representations reveal or highlight desires, both material and discursive. Below is an overview of my research interests as well as an in-depth look at some of my major recent and upcoming projects. For complete citations, please see my CV (in the menu). |
Research Interests in Brief
Past projects:
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Current & Upcoming projects:
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Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in 18th-Century British Literature
This project is now out with the University of Virginia Press. Sapphic Crossings is a book-length study of eighteenth-century British representations of cross-dressing women. The female cross-dresser was a prominent figure in the eighteenth-century imaginary, whose representation was crucial, I argue, to the formation of the modern lesbian identity and to debates about gender and sexuality at the time. By looking at how the body parts of the cross-dresser contribute to her cross-dressing, tantalizing the reader while also teasing us with corporeal illegibilty, these texts flesh out a literary history of butch lesbian identifications as well as sapphic possibilities.
While I focus on the same-sex desires between women, this project acknowledges and situates these conversations within larger discussions in the history of sexuality on the connections between and formative differences of queer desires and trans/gendered representations. Further, this project, in looking at beards, breasts, genitalia, and legs in textual representation also discusses how the gender and sexual fluidity of the female cross-dresser were often at odds with increasingly rigid notions of masculinity, heterosexuality, whiteness, and able-bodiedness. |
Queer Tourism in the Eighteenth Century
My second book-length project, like my first, puts queer representations front and center in order to re-consider the central role that queer people and desires played in the creation of new categories of being and thinking. In this project, I consider the rise of modern-day tourism over the course of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, focusing on how tourism was structured by queer people both as tourists and as tourist attractions. From homosocial male bonding at Mt. Vesuvius in Italy, to the pilgrimages of queers today to Anne Lister's home, Shibden Hall (see image), in Halifax, England, tourism as a practice brings together hypernormative expressions of the self with extremely queer practices and people. This projects aims to examine how, when, and why queer people contributed to the growth of tourism as a practice critical to modern society.
Fanny Price as Disabled Heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
This article appears in the Summer 2020 issues of SEL (vol. 60, no. 3). It is my first foray into Austen studies, and it enters into discussions about Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, her dubious title as the "most unpopular" of Austen's heroines, and issues of able-bodiedness and disability. In looking at the contributions of queer theory and disability studies to eighteenth-century literature in general, and Austen studies in specific, I argue that we find new ways of speaking and thinking about disabled characters like Fanny Price. Austen deliberately creates a heroine who demands that readers confront the disabled body in order to question our biases in favor of healthy, high-spirited female protagonists. Further, this reading of health and the body in Mansfield Park dovetails with critical readings of the novel as Austen's criticism of gender and class hierarchies as well as imperial vectors of power.
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Eighteenth-Century Camp
Along with Dr. Emily Kugler of Howard University, I co-edited a special issue of the online, open-access journal, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. We also co-wrote the introduction to the issue, giving an overview of how the concept of camp functions as a critical lens for reading the intersection of gender, sexuality, and aesthetics in eighteenth-century literature and art.
The essays in the issue cover a variety of topics, including camp sensibility and sentimentality in Lawrence Sterne's novel A Sentimental Journey; Neoclassical aesthetics as camp and the campy performances of actress Emma Hamilton; the ways in which macaroni prints propagated images of camp masculinity in the eighteenth century; as well as the workings of "vanilla camp" in Jane Austen's oeuvre. Our authors, Julie Beaulieu, Ersy Contogouris, Frey Gowrley, and Devoney Looser discuss these fascinating connections between literature, aesthetics, art, and camp sensibilities in ways that both fascinate us and challenge current readings of these authors, works, and images. |