Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing:  Alternatives to Seduction in Early America

CFP for a Legacy-sponsored panel at the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) Conference in Chicago, June 18-21, 2015

Seduction has provided a powerful lens for thinking about gender and early American women’s writing.  This is particularly true for early American novels, but models of sexual predation, transgressive desire, and titillated-moralistic readership have proven to wield considerable explanatory power for a range of genres.  To what degree this is due to the power of an age-old story form rooted in sexual mores and social hierarchies and to what degree it is a projection of post-Freudian reading habits and critical assumptions about earlier periods is open to debate.  For this panel we seek papers that investigate the limits of or consider alternatives to seduction as a paradigm for thinking about gender, sexuality, and the works of women writers in early America.  Please send a one-page proposal and one-page c.v. to Tamara Harvey at tharvey2@gmu.edu by September 1.