Dissertation: The Genre of Rape: Women’s Popular Literature and Contemporary Representations of Sexual Violence builds on contemporary (post)feminist criticism regarding representations of sexual violence in film, literature, and television to illuminate how women writers working within popular “women’s genres” often bring a critical self-consciousness to rape narratives that highlights the construction of rape scripts and complicates the politics of rewriting them. Through case studies of popular twenty-first century texts from four genres—rape memoirs, romance novels, fanfiction, and crime writing—I trace how these writers reflect and reject the conventions of their chosen genres in order to reimagine rape stories, genre boundaries, and the feminist possibilities of a women’s mass culture.
Conference presentations:
“Rape and the Rise of the Romance Novel: Rape and Reproduction in Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting - Apr. 2021
“‘To girls everywhere’: Viral Victimhood and Public Survival in a Digital World,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention - Jan. 2021
“Rape and Genre in the #MeToo Movement” - Critical Conversations Panel on Genre and Multi-Generic Texts, University of Michigan - Nov. 2018
“Fantasies of Victimhood and Survival in Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue” - Interdisciplinary Conference on Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON - May 2018
“The Raped Bodymind: Reading Disability and Sexual Trauma” - Breaking Silences, Demanding Crip Justice Conference, Wright State University, Dayton, OH - Sep. 2017
Areas of interest: Contemporary literature, American literature, popular literature, women’s literature, sexual violence studies, women and gender studies, genre theory, romance novels, science fiction and fantasy, YA literature, fan studies