Papers by Tegan Zimmerman
This thesis contributes to contemporary feminist philosophy by establishing a definition of postf... more This thesis contributes to contemporary feminist philosophy by establishing a definition of postfeminism and analyzing two of its central tenets: equality and sexuality. The work's central claim is that postfeminism is anti-feminist and functions as a façade that conceals the continuation of the structural subordination of women in our capitalist patriarchal society. This is evident in the latest instantiation of postfeminism, in which women sexually objectify men in the name of equality. The argument is that because women are objectified sexually in popular culture it is only fair men be as well. In refuting postfeminist claims, I draw from and expand upon Simone de Beauvoir's and Luce Irigaray's feminist philosophical theories of equality and sexual difference, and I focus on specific examples from popular culture (sports, movies, music videos, magazines, commercials/advertising, online writing, social media, and so on).
Fictionalizing the history of infanticide in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti, Évelyn Trouillot's Ros... more Fictionalizing the history of infanticide in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti, Évelyn Trouillot's Rosalie l' infâme (2003) [The Infamous Rosalie (2013)] centres on Lisette, a pregnant Creole slave, and her maternal kin. Attempting to voice the unspeakable, painful history of infanticide in Haiti, the novel, though understudied, makes a significant literary contribution in contemporary historical fiction. The purpose of this article is to bring critical awareness to this innovative, intersectional feminist novel. Closely analysing the role of infanticide in the novel, I argue that the slave mother who commits infanticide highlights the slave system's inability to both affirm and deny slaves the appellation 'mother'. Highlighting this contradiction, Trouillot portrays infanticide as a courageous maternal disruption and intervention of slavery that simultaneously exposes the fallacious logic of the slaver and the limits to his power.
Fictionalizing the history of infanticide in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti, Évelyn Trouillot's Ros... more Fictionalizing the history of infanticide in mid-eighteenth-century Haiti, Évelyn Trouillot's Rosalie l' infâme (2003) [The Infamous Rosalie (2013)] centres on Lisette, a pregnant Creole slave, and her maternal kin. Attempting to voice the unspeakable, painful history of infanticide in Haiti, the novel, though understudied, makes a significant literary contribution in contemporary historical fiction. The purpose of this article is to bring critical awareness to this innovative, intersectional feminist novel. Closely analysing the role of infanticide in the novel, I argue that the slave mother who commits infanticide highlights the slave system's inability to both affirm and deny slaves the appellation 'mother'. Highlighting this contradiction, Trouillot portrays infanticide as a courageous maternal disruption and intervention of slavery that simultaneously exposes the fallacious logic of the slaver and the limits to his power.
This paper suggests that Canadian women are rewriting the history and institution of slavery in t... more This paper suggests that Canadian women are rewriting the history and institution of slavery in the Caribbean. Even though scholarship highlighting and tracing the trajectory of the Caribbean historical novel is becoming more visible (Barker; Halloran; Kyiiripuo Kyoore; Rody), a focus on gender and women authors remains underrepresented. Women novelists are, however, largely taking on the burden of transmitting the slave past (e.g., Isabel Allende, Maryse Condé, Andrea Levy). Recognizing the contributions of women writers, this paper compares two innovative Canadian novels which re-vision slavery by putting women's lives at the forefront: Dionne Brand's <em>At the Full and Change of the Moon</em> (1999) and Jenny Jaeckel's <em>House of Rougeaux</em> (2018). Both novels provide portraits of nineteenth-century plantation life, Trinidad and Martinique respectively, as well as life in the contemporary Canadian diaspora. Emphasizing the need for decolo...
Feminist Theory, 2021
This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philos... more This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philosophical text In the Beginning She Was. By doing so, an important conceptual resonance emerges betwee...
Simone de Beauvoir Studies
This article examines the relatively unstudied field of the aesthetics of nature from a feminist ... more This article examines the relatively unstudied field of the aesthetics of nature from a feminist perspective. Currently a feminist aesthetics of nature does not exist in scholarship, though I argue in our age of eco-crisis this is necessary. I explore what this feminist approach might entail by discussing three essential elements to the current masculinist study of nature: 1) the role of the subject or observer, 2) method of appreciation, and 3) appropriate object for appreciation. By focusing on the recent impasse in feminism, between essentialism and non-essentialism, this paper looks at how each side of the debate would approach these above three topics, and what future paths feminism might take in creating an adequate study of the aesthetics of nature. [
This article analyzes the term “intersectionality” as defined by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in re... more This article analyzes the term “intersectionality” as defined by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in relation to the digital turn: it argues that intersectionality is the dominant framework being employed by fourth wave feminists and that is most apparent on social media, especially on Twitter. Resume Cet article analyse le terme « intersectionnalite » tel que defini par Kimberle Williams Crenshaw en liaison avec le virage numerique : il affirme que l’intersectionnalite est le cadre dominant employe par les feministes de la quatrieme vague et que cela est surtout evident sur les reseaux sociaux, en particulier sur Twitter.
This presentation surveys contemporary women's historical novels which revisit and rewrite the hi... more This presentation surveys contemporary women's historical novels which revisit and rewrite the history and institution of slavery in the Caribbean. While scholarship (Barker; Halloran; Kyiiripuo Kyoore) highlighting and tracing the trajectory of the Caribbean historical novel is becoming more visible, a focus on both gender and women's novels is underrepresented. As primarily it is women writers who are taking on the burden of offering alternative accounts of the past, these novels deserve more visibility and recognition in the genre. I argue that women's novels rewrite hegemonic nationalist history/masculinist master narratives by centralizing a maternal genealogy, and today I am going to focus on the family tree, included as paratext in each novel. Envisioning a distinct maternal genealogy, disclosed through African-Caribbean voices and figures in the Caribbean historical novel, has the potential to challenge historical erasures, silences, violence, and political exclusion both in the past and in the present. The novels surveyed in this presentation trace the lives of several women within a matriarchal family; beginning with portraits of nineteenth-century plantation life they trace the legacy of slavery well into the twentieth century. Each novel offers an inventive revision of slavery by putting women's lives at the forefront: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle written in 1972 in French [translated into English as The Bridge of Beyond] is set in the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe while Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon written in 1999 in English is set in the English West Indian island of Trinidad. To reiterate, women's historical Historical Fiction by Contemporary Women Writers: CCWW Cross-Cultural Seminar, Zimmerman 2 novels, like these, speak from the margins and spaces of silence within history and the genre and, thus, offer a powerful counter narrative to official history and canonical literature. Maternal genealogies, a distinct characteristic of contemporary Caribbean women's historical fiction, suggest gender and a link to one's maternal past, not the national contextthe defining feature of traditional historical fictionis more important in shaping the female protagonist's identity and in empowering her challenges to patriarchal authority. Both novels corroborate Luce Irigaray's definition of a maternal genealogy: There is a genealogy of women within our family: on our mother's side we have mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and daughters. Given our exile in the family of the father-husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity. Nor let us forget that we already have a history, that certain women have, even if it was culturally difficult, left their mark on history and that all too often we do not know them. (44) A leading authority on the woman's historical novel, Diana Wallace likewise contends that the genre is a most suitable medium for women writers because "women have been violently excluded both from 'history' (the events of the past) and from 'History' (written accounts of the past) ("Letters" 25). Traditionally, women's history has been considered an oxymoron, with women's lives and voices being characterized as romantic, private, unhistorical or ahistorical, Historical Fiction by Contemporary Women Writers: CCWW Cross-Cultural Seminar, Zimmerman 3 misrepresentative, inaccurate, fantastical, anti-nationalist, even escapist (Wallace, Woman's 15). 1 Focusing on female protagonists, comprised of daughters, mothers and grandmothers, subjects patriarchal values to a gender analysis and creates a sense of gendered consciousness, outside of and within these texts. Acknowledging and studying this contemporary corpus, which rewrites and reimagines the history and legacy of slavery via a maternal genealogy, is, therefore, imperative for resisting and remedying current masculinist norms and scholarship. A native of Guadeloupe, Schwarz-Bart wrote her novel during a time in which a distinct Caribbean writing was emerging, but the genre of historical fiction remained unpopular. Critics, too did not seem to know what to make of this rich and complex work of art, because it "cannot be contained in a strict linear narrative" as Jamaica Kinkaid notes in her introduction to the English translation of The Bridge of Beyond (12). Her experimental take on the traditional historical novel, defined by "political events and the deeds of 'great men'" (Von Dirke 417), combines French and Creole, and concentrates on her island's customs, history, landscape, and spirituality from the perspective of females. 2 Schwarz-Bart's literary contribution and feminist intervention, by showcasing a domestic novel as heroic, however, paved the way for now, other, canonical Caribbean women historical novelists such as Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kinkaid,
1Literary criticism on women's historical novels not only in Canada but also globally is not ... more 1Literary criticism on women's historical novels not only in Canada but also globally is not as prevalent as one might imagine. This is curious given the international profile of award-winning authors like Margaret Atwood, the sheer number of historical novels written by women, and the popularity of women's novels with critics and readers despite these facts, a sustained analysis of Canadian women's historical fiction does not exist.[1] In this article, I remedy this neglect by bringing attention to a specific trend in many contemporary Canadian women's historical novels written in English: the establishment of a transnational maternal genealogy. [2] The purpose of a transnational maternal genealogy, in the corpus of this distinct sub-genre of Canadian women's historical fiction, I argue, is to achieve three important goals. First, it asserts a critical contemporary feminist narrative style as an intervention against the two preceding dominant trends in the genre...
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This article revisits A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's foundational 1929 text on wom... more This article revisits A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's foundational 1929 text on women's writing. I examine from a feminist materialist perspective the relevance of Woolf's notion of a "room" in our globalized and technological twenty-first century. I first review Woolf's position on the material conditions necessary for women writers in her own time and then the applicability of her thinking for contemporary women writers on a global scale. I emphasize that the politics of writing, and in particular writing by women, that Woolf puts forth gives feminists the necessary tools to reevaluate and rethink women's writing both online and offline. I therefore argue that Woolf's traditional work on materiality can be updated and developed to further inform what is now, in the twenty-first century, an urgent need for women writers, a feminist philosophy of sexual difference in relation to technology, and an e-feminism of online spaces and women'...
MELUS
This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Bu... more This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela’s presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela’s voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti’s contribution to the Dominican Republic’s history—makes visible the unacknowl...
Journal of Romance Studies
Journal of Romance Studies
Women's Studies, 2016
in her outline of the reception of Irigaray's work, makes no mention of postfeminism, nor do any ... more in her outline of the reception of Irigaray's work, makes no mention of postfeminism, nor do any of the other chapters/authors included in the book. 2 I am acutely aware of the Anglo-European focus of this article and the dangers of using a term such as postfeminism, which marginalizes the goals of transnational feminism presently active across the globe. This idea
Screening Motherhood in Contemporary Cinema, 2016
But she wants them to know the living breathing women their mothers were. They get enough of the ... more But she wants them to know the living breathing women their mothers were. They get enough of the heroines from everyone else -Dedé Mirabal in Julia Alvarez's novel, In the Time of the Butterflies.
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Papers by Tegan Zimmerman