[Vwoolf] #MeToo modernisms at MSA 2019 with Anne Fernald and Megan Quigley

[Megan Quigley]

HI, Woolfians,

The link for the Modernist Studies Association conference in November is
now live.  Anne and I are running a seminar on #MeToo modernisms
(description below) and would love for you to join us.

*https://msa.press.jhu.edu/membership/conference
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ft.e2ma.net%2Fclick%2Fmbb8nb%2Fmjpc7b%2Fig0rie&data=02%7C01%7Cmegan.m.quigley%40villanova.edu%7Cf02a26460a8842ec7e9308d70b80a2b2%7C765a8de5cf9444f09cafae5bf8cfa366%7C0%7C0%7C636990519443852955&sdata=fwZKiVqhhwOKdrj8RFqkaveoGqt6TVfo%2BFpU2mfqS7A%3D&reserved=0>*

all the best,
Megan

Megan Quigley
Associate Professor of English
Villanova University


#MeToo Modernisms

Organizers:
Megan Quigley - Villanova University
Anne Fernald - Fordham University

How have reading and teaching early 20th-century texts changed in light of
the #MeToo movement? How might our scholarship need to think more carefully
about sex, gender, and power? Feminist scholarship has a rich history in
literary modernism building on influential works such as Hazel Carby’s
Reconstructing
Womanhood (1989), Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990), Rita
Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (1995), Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005),
and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010). In the #MeToo Era,
feminism has been revitalized, even as it interrogates its own historical
shortcomings and theoretical limitations. Post-structuralism, complicity in
the neo-liberal ravaging of global economies and the environment, racism,
classism, and homo / transphobia, have all challenged feminism’s
reputation, and, often rightly, complicated its effectiveness while
divorcing feminist scholarship from pragmatic applications. “But,” as
Jessica Bennett declares in The New York Times, “the #MeToo moment has
become something larger: a lens through which we view the world, a sense of
blinders being taken off.” In what ways does our modernist scholarship
still have on blinders that the energies of Tarana Burke’s intersectional
and empathetic feminism may remove? We ask for papers that consider: Whose
voices do we believe in texts and why? How has our scholarship silently
condoned scenes of assault (such as Rachel Vinrace’s kiss in The Voyage Out,
Leda’s rape in “Leda and the Swan,” Fern’s “easy” sex in Cane) by focusing
on modernism’s celebrated difficulty, experimentalism, and desire to make
it new? How are our professional and academic institutions (in everything
from mentoring through peer review and promotion) similarly imbricated in
gendered power relations? From the recent scandal in James Joyce circles to
the article in chronical of higher education which asks, “Should we still
cite the scholarship of serial sexual harassers?” the #MeToo movement makes
us question our research and our profession—our seminar seeks papers
examining its ramifications. We are particularly interested in papers that
examine the complex and confounding ways in which institutional structures
and deep-seated patriarchal patterns of thought collide with our
scholarship.
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