Name
Tracy Bealer, Associate Professor
Department
English
Type of Leave
Fellowship Award for Research
Full year starting Fall 2021
Project Description
My project tackles each of Abbott’s novels, as well as her forays into other genres of popular media (television and comic books), through the lenses of feminist epistemology, whiteness theory, and an alternative and progressive history of the true crime genre. By joining this conceptual framework to close readings, I argue that Abbott’s fiction offers a necessary and urgent exploration of and companion to contemporary accounts of how racist and sexist institutional structures organize and deploy pop culture texts (including film, popular music, and true crime narratives) as a way of bolstering white supremacy and patriarchal social organization in and through individual minds and bodies. In Abbott’s work, the construction of whiteness is shown to be “apocalyptic” in both the sense of destructive and revelatory. When her characters are (at times violently and cruelly) exposed to the fictionality of pop culture narratives about race and gender, one sense of self ends but the possibility for another is revealed. In fact, Abbott’s work can be read as part of an antiracist and feminist project to expose those narrative deployments in order to show how they might be dismantled through a different, more progressive, mode of knowing. One way of framing this move in Abbott is through feminist epistemological theory that centers knowing as a communal practice between groups of “knowers” that is impacted by shared social narratives. As Kathryn Pyne Addelson writes, “Making knowledge is a political act,” and Abbott’s work both delineates and participates in this action. This project will be the first book-length study on Abbott, inaugurating and shaping serious critical investigation into one of the most exciting young writers creating today.
Website
Tracy Bealer Faculty Page
