changes that occur when students’ gender roles break down, troubling divisions between sex and gender and arguing for the social, spatial and material contingency of both. A textual ethnography, this dissertation toggles between analyses of late-Antique rabbinic texts and the women who study them today, exploring how an ancient male canon and its contemporary educational spaces shape new genders and biomaterial bodies. Elizabeth Tacke
ELIZABETH TACKE
JAMES A. WINN GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH AND EDUCATION “Rhetorics of Masking: Negotiating Disclosures of Disability and Trauma”
Sara McDougall
Daniel Y. Kim
Situated within disability studies and rhetoric, this qualitative dissertation explores the tensions inherent in disability and trauma disclosures, and it positions disclosure as context-specific, relational, and embodied. Tacke theorizes disclosures as potential tactics of sideways movement that can work to unmoor dominant readings of disability and trauma. Drawing from participants’ and my own negotiations of disclosure, she theorizes “masking” as a range of rhetorical moves through which actors negotiate disclosure. The primary rhetorics of masking include: 1) disguising the specifics of one’s story by speaking through culturally available narratives or disparate genres; 2) calling on metaphor and other figurative devices to elicit productive ambiguity and co-construct meaning with interlocutors; and 3) drawing upon affective veils, such as humor, to gain needed accessibility and/or soften difficult disclosures for oneself and one’s audience. Disclosure is laden with consequences, and through masking, individuals can more safely process experience, validate their experiences, and gain access to needed resources.
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visiting fellows SARA MCDOUGALL
WINTER 2020 NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING PROFESSOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK “Surviving Illicit Pregnancy in Medieval Christian France” Medieval France largely deserves its reputation as an intolerant and brutal patriarchy, governed by strict interpretations of Christian ideas of sin. In such a system, if a woman became pregnant as a result of extramarital sex, her swelling belly offered proof of her sexual sin and threatened the honor of her family. Yet even though we imagine the most terrible of consequences for a mother and her child in such circumstances, both literary sources and documents of legal practice tell a far more complex story. The fate of both mother and child was not necessarily tragic. The many responses to illicit pregnancy found in medieval sources indicate that we have misunderstood how this western Christian society understood and responded to sexual sin, misunderstanding as well the place of women in this intensely religious and patriarchal world.
DANIEL Y. KIM
FALL 2019 NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING PROFESSOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY “‘Dark Tales Strewn with Suffering’: Translations and Hauntings of History in the Novels of Han Kang” During his residency, Kim primarily focused on an article, “‘Dark Tales Strewn with Suffering’: Translations and Hauntings of History in the Novels of Han Kang,” for a forthcoming special
