by Maggie Evans, PhD candidate, Department of English

The final lines of Marge Piercy’s “The Woman in the Ordinary” exemplify a familiar strain of contemporary American women’s poetry:

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,

a yam of a woman of butter and brass,

compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,

like a handgrenade set to explode,

like goldenrod ready to bloom. 

by Miriam Abelson, PhD candidate, UO Department of Sociology

by Easther Chigumira, PhD candidate, UO Department of Geography

by Maggie Evans, PhD graduate, , UO Department of English

Tasked with composing a short riff on the future of feminist research in American poetics, I set out, naturally, for the library, determined to explore a few beginning questions that sprang to mind. Among them: How do contemporary women poets enact or represent feminism(s) in their poetry? How have the changing political and social goals of feminism affected the thematic and formal choices of feminist writers? How do feminist writers depict or imagine the future? Library, here I come!

by Jenée Wilde, PhD candidate, UO Department of English (Folklore)

As a PhD candidate, my research has resulted in part from frustrations I have felt with the lack of serious treatment given to bisexuality as a position from which to theorize sexual knowledge within humanistic scholarship. While studies of gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and cultural production have dramatically increased over the past two decades, research on bisexuality remains highly undervalued in much of the humanities and social sciences.

by Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology

by Jenée Wilde, PhD, Department of English (Folklore)

My graduate work was shaped in part by a noticeable absence. In my gender and queer studies courses, I read theoretical and sociological studies of lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer people, often shorthanded as LGBTQ. Wait a minute . . . something is missing. What happened to the “B” in all this theory and research?

By Yi Yu, PhD candidate, Department of Geography

By Laura Strait, Doctoral Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

by Celeste Reeb, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English

[gentle harpsichord jingle] [music reminiscent of the Jaws theme playing] [exotic percussive music]