Gender and Sexuality

"Gender, Sexuality, and Freud:
The Governess’s Liminality in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James."

For decades, feminist scholars have illuminated the limitations of gender roles through Freudian theory. Specifically, Beth Newman utilizes Freud’s “The Uncanny” in conjunction with the concept of the “gaze” in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw to analyze the repression of the governess’s sexuality through her own looking as well as the looks of others; however, few scholars interpret this novella with additional concepts of “The Uncanny.” This article combines feminist and Freudian theories to explore The Turn of the Screw through the varying liminal positions of the governess as a middle-class woman in the Victorian era. I first employ Freudian repression to argue that the governess experiences liminality in both her subservient role as an employee and her authoritarian position as a caretaker. In addition, through the Freudian ideas of castration and the double, I argue that the governess undergoes the liminality of her psyche in her interactions with both the living and the dead. Finally, I argue that the governess, as a woman and member of the middle class, experiences liminality within Victorian society. Through such perspectives, James’s work casts light upon the limitations of patriarchal society while creating shadows around sexuality and gender roles.

Read Kendall Hall's essay below.

"Possession and Haunting:
An Analysis of Possession as Gendered, Colonized, and Textual Phenomena."

Possession is a concept that has existed throughout literary history rather than just existing as a literary element. In short, possession exists in several forms and is simply conceptualized through literary occurrence. Through the use of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse, I will explore possession in three different ways: using gender theory to explore the possession of the female body, using cultural and postcolonial theories to explore the possession of space and place, and using textual theory to explore possession of a text. Gender theory will be used to highlight the victimization and passive role of women in The Exorcist and in relation to the black woman’s body in Tell My Horse, cultural and postcolonial theories will be used to explore the movement of the demon from Iraq to the United States in The Exorcist and the colonial implications of the Haitian zombie in Tell My Horse, and textual theory will explore the possession of both texts by their predecessors and the legacy they created.

Read Veronica Paniccia's essay below.

“'Floating Sideways':
An Examination of Corrosive Power Structures, Gendered Labor, and Weariness in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake."

This essay engages with the concept of aversion to negative experience in the form of weariness that affects Offred and Oryx in Maragret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Offred and Oryx, the respective female protagonists of the novels, struggle to locate any remaining agency in the patriarchal societies that oppress them. They navigate societies that define them by their ability to “work” as sexual slaves. As their sexual occupations weigh on their minds and bodies, Offred and Oryx must navigate their exhaustion in dystopic societies that have arguably succumbed to fatigue themselves. Lauren Berlant’s theory of “slow death,” or “a condition of being worn out by the act of reproducing life,” illuminates the affective repercussions of sex work that leads to the chronic fatigue that both Offred and Oryx experience (759). Corrosive power structures coupled with sexually oppressive ideology eventually leads to a weariness that resembles slow death. While Berlant’s theory of slow death emphasizes one’s scene of living, weariness involves one’s loss of agency, resulting from an aversion to negative experience to one’s environment. By positioning the concept of weariness as inevitable, this essay tackles the potential finality of extreme fatigue in dystopic society and the consequences of falling victim to it.

Read Taylor Pryor's essay below.

“'The Dark Magic of the Change':
Queer Deviance in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.”

I investigate the official 1986 Scribner edition of the text through the lens of contemporary queer theorists Gayle Robin and Judith Halberstam. Little scholarship has been published regarding the text since its publication, possibly due to the dozens of conflicting endings Hemingway drafted and the controversial version subsequently edited and published by editor Carl Eby more than two decades after Hemingway’s death in 1961. Most analyses of the text focus on its biographical relationship to Hemingway, and I am concerned less with a biographical investigation and more with interpreting how sexuality and gender are presented in the edited work. I provide a nuanced analysis of its expressions of gender and sexual identity and specifically engage with the gender fluidity of main character Catherine.

Read Colette Smith's essay below.