The first research seminar for the School of English and Journalism will be taking place on 7 February 2018. This event will run over the dinner period from 2-3.30pm in MC3207. Please see below for each speakers’ abstracts.

Anna Hoyles (Journalism), ‘‘The Voice of Moa Martinson – Literary Journalism in the 1920s’

This paper explores the early newspaper articles of the Swedish novelist Moa Martinson (1890-1964). As a working-class, non-anglophone woman Martinson is a rare voice within literary journalism. In her work in syndicalist, anarchist and feminist publications she provides a grassroots perspective that contrasts with that of many labour movement leaders of the time. She also has a distinct literary style that, this paper argues, is heavily influenced by the oral tradition and provides hitherto unexplored links between the latter and literary journalism.

Shelby Sutterby (English), ‘Slipping through your Fingers: Water as Art in Contemporary Women’s Fiction’

Renowned glassmaker, Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895), is best known for the intricate glass flowers produced by his company throughout the nineteenth century. While these glass flowers have retained popularity it is, however, the models of marine invertebrates, which remain the most striking of Blaschka’s creations. Born out of a fascination with the ocean and a practical need to create models of creatures which could not be preserved through the practice of taxidermy, these models represent the troubling nature of fluidity. Blaschka’s marine invertebrates reflect a trend still continuing in the 21st Century of refashioning the fluid into the solid, representing the ocean and ocean-life through different, often contradictory materials.
Through an analysis of Jeanette Winterson’s, The Passion (1987); Kate Atkinson’s, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) and Maggie O’Farrell’s, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006)], this paper will examine this method of dealing with fluidity and explore how it is used in contemporary women’s fiction. Drawing on Blaschka’s models, my argument will focus on the ways in which water is linked with glass, particularly mirrored glass, and explore what this relationship suggests about identity and female creativity. The shift from fluid to solid, the power and dangers inherent in the slippery, the liquid and what that change suggests about the multifaceted nature of fluidity itself, will also be addressed. To what extent is water a gendered space and how do contemporary women writers engage with or reject the idea of water being feminised?

Megan Walker (English), ‘“The debates over gender […] are necessarily entangled in the debate over how to govern sex, and therefore, in the precarious game of truth and life”: Intersex narratives and the origin of gender’

In 1955, Dr John Money and his colleagues were researching patients with ‘hermaphroditism’, now referred to as intersex or Disorders of Sex Development. From Money’s work stems the term ‘gender-role’. It was from this research that the term ‘gender’, as it has been used in copious academic works since, was coined. Money used intersex patients to prove that gender was a socially learned concept, separate from biological sex. Money investigated ‘matched pairs’ of intersex patients who were assigned opposing sexes to prove that gender was malleable. My paper will discuss some of Money’s experiments on patients, including the case of David Reimer. Having suffered injuries to his penis during surgery, Money’s team decided to reassign Reimer as female. It was not until 1997 (30 years later), that the failure of Reimer’s sex reassignment was exposed. Around the same time, many intersex patients were coming forward to share their experiences after receiving treatment stemming from Money’s work. Moving into the twenty-first century, many literary texts explore the effects that these medical protocols have had on intersex characters. I will consider the influence that Money’s experiments on intersex patients have had on the concepts of sex and gender, as well as the new phase of awareness that has emerged from the experiences of intersex individuals being explored in popular culture.

Find more information on our Research Seminars here.