How can it look like studying gender in the past? This time we speak to Ula and Shelby who focus on two very different time periods and geographical places – but the questions regarding bodies, gender, history and identity are very much the same!
As you know by now, the two had to reply to our special surprise question and these are their answers:
Ula:
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, by Terry Castle
Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua
Shelby:
To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Live and Labors After the Civil War by Tera W. Hunter (Harvard University Press, 1998)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
And the book that was on Ula’s bookshelf was: The Essential Feminist Reader by Estelle B. Freedman
Dr. Ula Klein is Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her book Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (UVA, 2021) explores how eighteenth-century writers and thinkers framed sapphic desires through the motif of gender crossing and, in doing so, revealed the fluidity of the gendered body in discourse. She has also published on disability in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; race and gender in the stories of female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read; and on queer camp in the poetry of Jonathan Swift. She is currently starting a project on the idea of queer tourism and travel in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries.
Shelby Sinclair is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in History and African American Studies. Her research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century Black women’s history in the United States and Caribbean and her areas of specialization include Black women’s labor history, U.S. empire in the Caribbean, and Black feminist theory.
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