Location! Location! Location!

[click image for larger image]

[© Jorge Cham, PhD Comics]

I was unhappy with my paper proposal, so I asked Dr. Logan if I could meet with her to go over it (on October 25).  After a productive brainstorming session, she mentioned that my proposal would be a good fit for a conference presentation, specifically the Florida Consortium for Women’s and Gender Studies Conference at Florida Atlantic University.  


So, I’m excited to announce that I will, after revisions, submit my abstract/paper proposal for the conference in April 2011.  My previous conference experience is limited to Sigma Tau Delta’s International Convention in 2004 (“A Pleasant Walk, A Pleasant Talk”) – I did not submit a paper.  I attended with another officer of our chapter for the workshops and paper presentations, which were amazing, and I greatly enjoyed our guest speaker Sarah Vowell.  To be honest, at the time, I didn’t even know that undergraduates could do such a thing – submit papers for conferences.  I plan on rectifying that misunderstanding during my graduate study career.


Below is the call for papers for the conference, courtesy of Dr. Logan.  I hope that some of my classmates will submit their proposals too.


CALL FOR PAPERS


Florida Consortium for Women’s and Gender Studies Conference
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
April 1-2, 2011

Gendered and Racialized Technologies of Change: 

Moving Discredited Knowledge from the Margins to the Center

We understand “gendered and racialized technologies of change” to comprise the techniques and practices through which feminists and queer activists generate change in the organization of social, political, and economic relations. The purpose of this conference is to cross disciplinary boundaries and bring together feminist and queer discourses regarding these technologies. 


We welcome individual papers, panels and roundtables or workshops as well as innovative presentational formats from scholars, activists, and graduate students addressing, but not limited to, the following issues:

• Activist Strategies
• Civil and Human Rights
• Sexual Bodies, Sexualized Bodies, and Body Politics
• The Military Industrial Complex
• Corporate Culture
• The Feminization of Poverty
• Migration and Globalization
• The Changing (and Same Old) Faces of Oppression
• Intersections of the Local and the Global
• Environment
• Health and/or Women Healers
• New Media
• Popular Culture
• The Sacred and the Spiritual
• Visual and Performing Arts
• Science and Technology
• Pedagogy

Selected conference papers may be included in the Consortium anthology published by Cambridge Scholars Press. Past anthologies of conference papers include: Many Floridas: Women Envisioning Change (2007), Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global (2008), and Femininities and Masculinities in a Global Context (currently in press).


To apply, please submit a 250-500 words double-spaced abstract. Abstracts should include the presenter’s contact information and brief vita. Deadline for submissions is January 15th, 2011. 

• Graduate Student abstracts should be sent via e-mail to Megan Halena at mhalena@fau.edu . 
• All other abstracts should be sent via e-mail to Josephine Beoku-Betts at wsc@fau.edu. 
• Final decisions on submitted abstracts will be sent by February 28th, 2011

For more information on the FAU Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies M.A. degree program, please visit our website: http://www.fau.edu/WomensStudies/




Works Cited:
Cham, Jorge. "Call for Papers!" Comic strip. PhD: Piled Higher & Deeper. 25 June 2010. Web. 9 Nov. 2010. <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1335>.

Housekeeping

Despite not having enough free time to post, I have updated and fussed with the site these past two weeks.  Because some of these changes are small, or only noticeable to me, I’m going to list the “behind the scenes” work that has occupied my time.

Blog Blurb:
I met with Dr. Logan last week to talk about my paper proposal and I brought up my uneasiness of using Queer Theory when I still knew next to nothing about it other than the concepts of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum.  That’s when Dr. Logan reminded me that Adrienne Rich is not a Queer theorist but a feminist theorist, and she suggested that I use feminist theory informed by these two concepts.  I can’t tell you how relieved I felt and happy that I was indeed on the right track for my paper.  To reflect this refocus, I’ve updated my blog blurb.    


Old: 
This blog is part of my current research project for Dr. Lisa Logan's "Issues in Literary Study: Unruly Women in Early American Literature" course at the University of Central Florida, Fall 2010 semester. Research will focus on Milcah Martha Moore's Book, an unpublished commonplace book, through the lens of Queer Theory, specifically the ideas of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum.


New:
This blog is part of my current research project for Dr. Lisa Logan's "Issues in Literary Study: Unruly Women in Early American Literature" course at the University of Central Florida, Fall 2010 semester.  Research will focus on Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, an unpublished commonplace book, through the lens of Feminist Theory informed by the female homosocial and lesbian continuum. 

Paper Proposal

The assignment from Dr. Logan:


Call for Papers!  LIT 6216:  Unruly Women in Early American Literature.

The organizers of the LIT 6216 Scholars Group announce a call for papers to be presented at its final graduate student conference on Tuesday, December 7, 2010 from 7-9:50 p.m.  The conference will explore representations of women as transgressive or unruly; “unruly” is understood in a broad sense in the context of early American gender norms.  Topics might include women whose experiences were out of the ordinary (captivity, travel, etc.), women who broke laws or defied dominant cultural mores and/or values, cross-dressing women, etc.  Exploration of different textual forms  is welcome, including sentimental or historical novels, speeches, conversion narratives, crime and execution narratives,  short fiction, autobiography (including diaries memoirs, journals), biography, letters, poetry, etc.  Papers should engage with the scholarly conversation in early American literary studies, including a knowledge of the historical and cultural context in which the text was produced.   Please send questions and/or submit your abstract to Dr. Lisa M. Logan by 10/22/10.

Conference format:  Papers for this conference will be circulated beforehand and discussed (rather than read) at the conference meeting. 

See Research Project Components for more details.

[Submitted 24 October 2010]

Jay Jay Stroup
Graduate Student, UCF
jayjaystroup@knights.ucf.edu

Bonds of Intimacy: 
Locating the Female Homosocial & Lesbian Continuum in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book

The modern critical edition of Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, published in 1997, exposes previously ignored women’s writing in early American literature.  Moore’s commonplace book, an unpublished, non-traditional format, is now accessible to all scholars.  While Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf provide invaluable scholarship regarding the culture of the Philadelphia, as well as manuscript and print culture during the Revolutionary era, there is no mention of Queer or Feminist theory.  The possibility of locating the female homosocial and lesbian continuum in MMMB is hinted at through Blecki’s and Wulf’s multiple references to female friendship, but not made explicit.  It is my intent to strengthen these references through the use of Queer and Feminist theories, and explore the physical object of Moore’s commonplace book as a site of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum in early American literature.     

Moore’s commonplace book simultaneously preserves the work of Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson and establishes a female homosocial presence through the dominance of female authorship within the text.  Out of the one hundred and twenty six entries, sixty three of them are authored by Griffitts (exactly fifty percent of the entries), twenty five are authored by Wright, and three by Graeme Fergusson.  Though other themes are represented, the text opens with “An Essay on Friendship” by Griffitts, thereby signaling the tone and theme of the work as a whole.  Through the use of Susan Stabile’s scholarship on the relationship between memory and the archive, and commonplacing as a distinctly feminized art I argue that not only does the text operate on the lesbian continuum, it also transgresses normative female behavior for colonial America in terms of reading and authorship.  I am relying on the scholarship of Kevin J. Hayes (A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf) to provide evidence of normative and transgressive reading experiences of women during colonial America.   

Adrienne Rich’s "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" highlights the way in which behavior not ascribing to strict hetero-normative standards is punished, the concept of which is transferable to MMMB: Griffitts and Wright refuse to marry, Moore is thrown out of the Society of Friends for marriage to a cousin, and Graeme Fergusson’s secret marriage to a Tory ruins her economically, socially, and politically.  While Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America" deals with literature and behavior of the 1800s, there are markers of the female homosocial and lesbian continuum that are also applicable to MMMB, specifically in the entries dealing with female friendship.  

By focusing the lens of Queer theory on a commonplace book from early American literature, strategies of defiance and non-compliance by women in regards to their sexuality, readership and authorship are brought to light.  It is the strategies of defiance contained within that classify MMMB as an unruly text, authored and edited by unruly women.  Re-identifying the commonplace book as a site of the female homosocial expands, rather than contracts, the possibilities for future scholarship.  This identification invites and encourages the co-mingling of other schools of theory – feminist, racial, cultural, historical, economical and more.