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Item WOMEN, LANGUAGE, AND WOMEN AS LANGUAGE: THE PARADOXICAL DOMESTICITY AND SEXUALITY OF MUSLIM WOMEN AND URDU IN POST-1857 INDIAN LITERATURE AND NATIONAL DISCOURSE(2023) Taha, Fatima; Ray, Sangeeta; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although, since the late 1980s, much attention has been paid to the woman/mother as nation trope in multicultural colonial and post-colonial scholarship, what remains largely unexplored is the concept of woman as language functioning as scaffold for a gendered, cultural-linguistic nationalism deployed by Hindu Indians in colonial India. These “language woman,” a term political scientist Asha Sarangi coined in 2009, are diametrically opposed: the feminine anthropomorphic dutiful, mother Hindi, fit to represent India, and the unruly, courtesan Urdu who has no place in the incipient nation. In the last decade, scholarly engagement with Begum Urdu has been limited to structuring this characterization as demeaning, with Indian Muslims failing to subvert the marginalized linguistic representation in the fundamentally Hindi-speaking, Hindu project of the Indian nation state. Such a gender essentialist reading of anthropomorphic Urdu perpetuates the very androcentric society-approved gender roles it seeks to denounce, aligning with colonial Indian nationalists’ and British imperialists’ myopic ideology of one appropriate type of woman. Why must the courtesan lack agency or respectability and require reformation? This project offers an alternative view of Begum Urdu, recasting the language courtesan as empowered through the application of, among others, Foucault’s theory on authorized forms of sexuality eventually rupturing societal norms combined with sociolinguist Robin Lakoff’s interpretations of authoritative woman’s language viewed from both inside and outside the socio-political frame encompassing it. Drawing on feminist, linguistic, and colonial studies and bridging them with the concept of metonymy through contiguity in prose realism, this work offer a new metaphorical reading of Muslim female characters as representing both the Indian Muslim woman and Urdu in seven Urdu prose realist works: Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad; Abdul Halim Sharar’s Flora Florinda; Nazir Ahmed Dehlvi’s Mirat-ul Uroos, Banaat-ul Naash, Taubat-un Nasuh, and Fasana-e-Mubtala; and finally, Muhammad Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada and Junoon-e-Intezaar in which the metaphorical language woman is transformed into a real, round character and woman in the real world who functions with authority and agency as not only a character but an author. The Muslim and Urdu-language woman who emerges from these texts in the latter half of the 19th century gradually mesh the spheres of acceptable domestic sexuality and disreputable public sexuality to conceive a woman, who despite being untethered from societal norms, is a compelling representation of Muslim women and Urdu. In restructuring courtesan Urdu as reputable, this dissertation corrects scholarships’ sustainment of the linguistic hierarchy of Hindi over Urdu and the colonial symbolic Indian Hindu woman over her Muslim counterpart. Dismantling the British imperial and Indian colonial construction of a debased Urdu is imperative to redress the continued global devaluation of Urdu and even its speakers, including in Pakistan, where Urdu is the sole national and one of the two official languages. This dissertation answers Gyatri Spivak’s question of if the subaltern woman can speak with a resounding “yes, she can” and explores the various ways in which the marginalized and repressed can use language as a tool in an attempt to dismantle colonialism and subvert the authority of colonial oppressors while creating a singular identity, much in the way Aamir Mufti approaches the power of language.Item Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage(2023) Starr, Brittany Noelle Schoedel; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga. While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public discourse. Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins), cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically, and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists model through their digital rhetorics on social media is part of a genealogy of feminist rage that envisions and enacts a more inclusive, more livable world.Item From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item RACE, GENDER, AND CLOSURE IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION(2020) Butler, Virginia Lynn; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While the study of closure in Victorian fiction has been marked by astute interventions in gender theory, these insights often fail to take an intersectional approach, particularly when it comes to the racial dynamics of the expanding British Empire. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction studies how ethnicity, foreignness, and race complicate our preconceived notions of gendered closure that often posit the narrative options for women as a moralistic system that rewards with marriage or punishes with death. With the expansion of the Empire, the Victorian Novel expanded its ability to depict foreign space; however, our understanding of gendered closure has not taken a sufficient correlative leap to include women of color or ethnic bodies that exist outside of the purview of the British domestic sphere. By analyzing the closural ends for English characters in foreign space, the conclusions of hybrid characters and hybridized space, and the fates of characters and spaces subject to imperial control, this project aims to further develop our understanding of narrative closure for Victorian fiction, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of the marriage/death binary for female characters. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction shows the rhetorical violence of being forgotten within the text yet reveals the ways in which these lapses express how the line between Victorian and Modernist genre expectations blur, ultimately demonstrating the ideological instabilities of what we perceive as Victorian narrative mainstays of closure themselves.Item 'At all Times, and in all Places, Adored and Oppressed': Gender, Temporality, and Conjectural History in the Transatlantic World, 1600-1800.(2020) Durand, Emilee; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines scenes which imagine the collision between primordial time and the time of history to demonstrate that conjectural history is a productive term for understanding how temporality is embedded in constructions of race and gender in transatlantic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collision of temporalities in the texts of this dissertation is a product of an Enlightenment project. This project depended upon the temporalization of difference as a mechanism for narrating the progress of human societies. The following readings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts consider the transatlantic encounter as one inextricably involved with the process of the temporalization of difference. While this dissertation examines texts often included in the category of transatlantic literature, it also reads conjectural histories as joint participants in creating fictions about the Americas. Viewed in this way, conjectural history identifies both a mode of creating knowledge and certain kind of narrative which can emerge from a variety of texts irrespective of genre. Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, prints and maps, plays and poems, travel narratives and novels can all mobilize conjectural histories of their own. Drawing out the imaginative work required by conjectural histories, this dissertation shows how they are conceptually linked to more recognizable transatlantic encounter narratives. Because of its immediate and continual association with “early,” “young” or “backwards” humanity, the Americas as setting for encounter, both fictionalized and historical, necessarily activates the temporality of pre-history. Such a textual and visual collision theorizes difference through a temporal architecture. Scenes in which contact, social contract, and sexual contract are collapsed mobilize their own conjectural histories, using temporal frameworks to construct the genres of race and gender. By embedding these scenes in remote times and spaces, texts authorize and naturalize sets of relations between nascent human categories. The texts examined in this dissertation demonstrate how the reenactment of contact works to create narratives of human progress racialized and gendered by/within a temporal architecture made possible by contact’s collision of temporalities.Item Context Matters: Intertextuality and Voice in the Early Modern English Controversy about Women(2014) Ray, Maggie Ellen; Coletti, Theresa; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines three clusters of works from the early modern English controversy about women--the debate about the merits and flaws of womankind--in order to argue that authors in the controversy took advantage of the malleability of women's voices to address issues beyond the worth of women. I depart from standard treatments of the controversy by giving priority to the intertextual contexts among works that engage with one another. Attending to the intertextual elements of this genre reveals the metapoetic concerns of the authors and the way such authors fashion their feminine apologists as discursive agents in order to express those concerns. Chapter 1 examines Edward Gosynhyll's sixteenth-century works in tandem with Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women and "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," arguing that Gosynhyll's revisions of Chaucer--revisions embodied by the feminine apologists in the texts--are integral to his project of establishing the controversy genre as multivalent and dialectical. The resulting metacommentary examines in a new light the age-old rhetorical tradition of exemplarity, a persuasive tool used in diverse literary genres. Chapter 2 considers the way the anonymous play Swetnam the Woman-Hater uses cross-voicing and cross-dressing to establish the performative nature of controversy conventions. In doing so, the play argues for the social benefits of abandoning essentialist logic in favor of gender performance, as such performance makes the role of apologist available to men and women alike. This cluster reconsiders the very processes by which a person--male or female--can be known to others. Finally, I trace John Taylor's use of the marginal woman in his controversy works in order to demonstrate the extent to which Taylor makes these women instrumental in establishing his own poetic and social identity. This project contributes to studies on the English controversy as well as to the field of early modern women and women's writing by arguing that authors found the genre generally and the woman's voice specifically to be fit vehicles for articulating poetic agendas beyond the immediate task of debating the nature of womankind.Item "We Have Come of Age": Growing Bodies in the Twentieth-Century Irish Novel(2012) McGovern, Kelly Jayne Steenholdt; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Twentieth-century Irish culture -- shaped by, for instance, the Catholic Church, nationalist narratives of blood sacrifice for "Mother Ireland," and the experience of emergence from colonialism--put special pressure on the meanings attached to bodies in narratives of both individual and national maturation. This dissertation examines the human body's role in Irish novels of development, tracing specifically how Irish authors deploy the growing body in relation to the self-cultivating subject of a Bildungsroman (or "coming of age" novel). This project shows that Irish social conditions provoked urgent reworkings of generic conventions, and impelled Irish authors to develop sophisticated strategies for representing growing bodies in narrative. Through close examinations of four novels, this project identifies four facets of the role the growing body can take in fictions of development. The introduction provides an overview of the absent body, the body that grows in passing, the body growing sideways, and the unnarratable body. Individual chapters examine these respective facets as they manifest in James Joyce's highly influential Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), John McGahern's The Dark (1965), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Dancers Dancing (1999), and Anne Enright's The Wig My Father Wore (1995). Chapter one describes how Joyce largely reserves Stephen Dedalus's body from representation so that other developmental aspects feature more prominently. Chapter two examines McGahern's representations of the real, material growing body's volatility and entanglement with forces beyond the subject's autonomous control as a strategic response to the post-Independence Irish social environment. Chapter three asserts that Ní Dhuibhne depicts a female protagonist filling out and experiencing lateral, or "sideways" modes of growth to expand the possibilities for narrating Irish female identity and to denaturalize nationalist representational strategies, while chapter four identifies the protagonist's growing body as an unsayable and indeterminate thing at the center of Enright's experimental text. The coda considers the contemporary moment of instability and recession against claims that Ireland "came of age" in the 1990s, taking stock of the growing body in the "Celtic Tiger" literary moment and grounding this stock-taking in earlier representations of development that mobilized bodily growth to tell stories.