The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Travis Foster just published an article titled   "White Supremacist Submission"   in   Transgender Studies Quarterly.  The article received the   American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize   honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.   Here's the abstract to the article: Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly...

Jean Lutes just published "Feminisms" in  The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics .   A brief summary of the chapter: "Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel   genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities w as, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single categor...

From our friends in Gender and Women's Studies: Back from our reluctant two-year hiatus, we cordially invite you to  Villanova's 32 nd  Annual Gender & Women's Studies Conference,  which will take place on  Friday, March 25th, 2022  f rom  8:45am-4:00pm  in  the  Connelly Center!  We have an exciting full day of panels and performances by Villanova undergraduates and graduate students from across the university. Additionally, complimentary breakfast, lunch and snacks will be available throughout the day. We very much hope you will join us!  We are so pleased to announce that this year's  Keynote Luncheon  will feature a lecture by  Dr. Erin Murphy  of Boston University, entitled  "Amazons and Zombies: Margaret Cavendish’s Soldiers, Gender, and the Paradoxes of War."  To quote from a description of Dr. Murphy's lecture: "As demonstrated by ongoing debates about who can be a 'comba...

We are so happy to announce that after a reluctant hiatus, this year's Gender and Women’s Studies Conference is ON! This year's Conference Chair is Dr. Lauren Shohet, Professor of English. The event will take place on Friday, March 25, 2022. The GWS conference is an exciting opportunity to showcase student work, discuss your interests in Gender and Women’s Studies with students and faculty from Villanova, and see the broad range of intellectual disciplines represented in the field. We are including in this announcement our annual Call for Papers. We are seeking essays and creative work written either for the conference or during Spring or Fall of 2020 or 2021 that engage gender, sexuality, or feminist theories. We encourage submission of alternative forms of expression, including but not limited to original scripts, poetry, or films that engage gender analysis. We hope that Villanova students across departments and programs will submit their work; these are the following catego...