3 research outputs found

    COVID as Glitch: (Re)Visioning and (Re)Crafting a Feminist Future

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    Many scholars and commentators argue that the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the ways in which feminism has failed women. While women, particularly in marginalized communities, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, I contend that we should approach it as an opportunity to reenvision, and even shape, what feminist futures can look like. The pandemic provoked an increased interest in crafting, both because of quarantine conditions and the need for many requiring masks to slow viral transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic, then, serves as the tipping point by which craft can and does function as resistive and transformative feminist work with the potential to “glitch” oppressive systems. Building on the research of Shira Chess, Tricia Hersey, and especially Legacy Russell’s vision of “Glitch Feminism,” I argue that craft is a vital way to reconfigure our theory and practice about what constitutes appropriate work, play, and rest. Reenvisioned, craft and other forms of making are embodied, resistive actions anchored in an ethic of care for self and others, thereby offering us practical examples of “glitch feminism” at a key point in time. The pandemic is not only a tipping point, but also a springboard for glitching the system in an effort to create more just and equitable futures for all

    The alternative tradition of womanhood in nineteenth-century African-American women\u27s writings

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    This thesis examines the ways in which three African-American women writers challenge the racist and sexist implications of the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood and create an alternative path of womanhood accessible to women of color. The alternate tradition they generate allows these three women writers to break the silences and challenge the roles imposed upon them by dominant cultural practices. The three authors and texts under examination include Harriet E. Wilson\u27s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859); Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); and Frances E. W. Harper\u27s Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). These texts challenge the ways that the cult of true womanhood operates as an ideal which deny black women access. At the same time, I consider how these writers locate conflicts within the ideal of true womanhood and generate a tradition of writing closely aligned with both the white and black feminist movements
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