Explores the problematic gender politics of Edward Said’s commentary on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Contra Said, argues that neither Fanny Price nor Austen herself can be assumed to share the values of Mansfield’s slaveholding patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram. Said’s general critique of culture’s role in validating imperialism is invaluable, but…[Read more]

Theorizes the category of “shelter writing”: blow-by-blow accounts of efforts to keep house, centered on figures whose domestic endeavors have become urgent and precious in the wake of dislocation–whether as the result of migration, divorce, poverty, or a stigmatized sexuality. Exemplary texts range from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Leslie…[Read more]

Pioneering ecofeminist work in animal studies dates back to the 1970s. Yet animal studies remained an idiosyncratic backwater until its 21st-century reinvention as a high-profile area of humanities research. Key to its new cachet is a revamped origin story beginning in 2002 with Jacques Derrida as founding father. In readings of Derrida and…[Read more]

This article explores the complex appeal of home-buying and renovation shows on the cable channel HGTV. While their popularity is clear, their political implications are murkier. Some media studies scholars accuse the genre of fostering consumerism, conformity, and neo-liberal nationhood. Others admire its inclusion and “non-special treatment” of…[Read more]

Who gets The Real in realism? Taking as case studies three women-centered cable TV shows, this essay aims to renegotiate the terms of realism along feminist lines. In their focus on the ordinary and domestic, on proximate bodies and intimate conversations, Broad City, Insecure, and Girls echo the quotidian concerns of the nineteenth-century…[Read more]

Who gets “The Real” in realism, and what difference does gender make? Countering monolithic (and dismissive) notions of realism, I explore the competition between realisms coded as “feminine” and “masculine”—between what Frank Norris belittled as “the drama of a broken teacup” and the drama of a man struggling to survive in the wilderness. Juxta…[Read more]