Events Archive

Feminist Reading Group

Roderick A. Ferguson

Please read Intro, Chapters 3 & 4 prior to January 31

Abstract: In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus.

 

In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.

Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

 

Contact Amanda Webb, WGSS Coordinator, amw313@lehigh.edu to obtain a copy of the book. 

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WGSS Fall 2013

In The Arte of English Poesie (1569), one of the foundational texts of early modern poetic theory, George Puttenham crafts an image of himself as courtier, poet, and literary historian. By situating poetry in relationship to the Tudor court and its politics, Puttenham helped to shape both the formation of the early modern literary canon and the still widespread perception of canonical English literature as the product of a distinctly Elizabethan—and therefore Protestant—culture. Recent work on Puttenham has revealed the distortions and hyperbole at the heart of his self-representation and argued for stripping his text of “its bogus connections with the court” in order to reassess “its actual, and still significant, place in literary history.” But I will suggest that the fabrications and exaggerations at the heart of Puttenham’s project are in fact essential to The Arte’s place in literary history and to the omission of Catholic women from that history. In my talk, I will outline a tantalizing connection between recent revelations about Puttenham’s sexual history and the manuscript Life of a post-Reformation English nun in order to propose a new way of reading Puttenham’s Arte, its sexual politics, and the literary history that it manifested.

 

This paper explores the iconography of transatlantic Anti-Catholicism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  During this era, anti-Catholicism was it was virtually an economy unto itself, a staple crop, widely produced for export and profit to meet a steady demand.  This paper (which is part of a chapter on the material culture of anti-Catholicism) examines the iconography that was on and in newspapers, books (fiction and nonfiction), and other material items. It argues that men’s and women’s bodies served distinct functions in the iconography, with women representing the sexual danger in the social imaginary of Anti-Catholicism.

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