Abstract:

    "What does it mean to have, as Susan Fraiman frames it, “a disciplinary ‘home base’ in literary studies and a political ‘home base’ in feminism” as one does literary criticism of the feminist and queer kind? Dr. Sri Craven's paper uses Fraiman’s postulation to talk about doing literary criticism in the new century from the vantage point of feminist/queer studies, and located in a WGSS department at a U.S. American university. Her Ph.D. is considered a “joint” degree awarded in English Language and Literature, and Women’s Studies. What this meant during her degree days was a decided challenge in understanding what exactly interdisciplinarity meant. She was told to think about diaspora, transnationalism, and the global South (India) as instances that (preemptively) mean interdisciplinarity. She was told that one could be an interdisciplinary literary studies scholar if/because one works with feminist and queer theories and methods relating to reading practices, and analysis of gender/sexual subjectivity. But, at the time, and since, intuitively such characterizations rang as capturing only a hazy picture of what interdisciplinary method looked like. In her paper, She raise these broader questions of academic interdisciplinarity, and the particular ones of feminist and queer interdisciplinarity as a background to investigating what exactly the term means in doing research and teaching within WGS. Bearing in mind the political import of method in its capacity to enhance how we come to know and learn, She ask, not what is feminist/queer method in literary criticism, but, rather how can one be a literary critic within feminist and queer studies, or its purveyor, WGS departments? How can one be interdisciplinary while doing the work of (merely) reading a text? It is my particular interest to investigate what hazily formed conceptions of interdisciplinarity might do to feminist and queer critical work. In engaging with these questions, She argue that feminist and queer studies did not invent interdisciplinarity, but that their attention to gender’s constitution opens up literary critical readings to greater attention to *disciplinary* social codings—that is, reading a text’s representation of the unconscious, the linguistic, the historical as integral parts by which we come to understand/know narrative itself. Literary criticism can be interdisciplinary after feminism to slightly mis-quote Rita Felski, and what we do with that after interpretation is the wider project of feminism and queerness as social justice enterprises.

Bio-note:

      Sri Craven teaches at Portland State University in Oregon, USA. Her areas of research are in postcoloniality and transnationalism, with emphasis on literary cultures. Critical pedagogies and U.S. race theories are her subsidiary interests. She received her Ph.D. in English and Women's Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees are in English from the University of Hyderabad in India.