Special Issue of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies
Guest Editors: Nicolas Boileau and Tanya Tromble-Giraud
This collection originates from the international conference “Specters of Feminism in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates,” held at Aix-Marseille Université in March 2024 as part of the broader project “Women and the F-Word: Thinking about Women’s Resistance to Feminism.” The introduction situates Oates’s vast and varied oeuvre within evolving feminist discourses, highlighting her ambivalent personal stance toward feminism and the critical consensus that her work engages deeply with feminist themes, especially sexual violence, trauma, and the complexities of gendered power. The essays gathered here explore how Oates’s stylistic experimentation, intertextuality, and representations of female agency and victimhood simultaneously reflect, resist, and redefine feminist heritage. By examining Oates’s engagement with canonical texts, her nuanced portrayals of gendered experience, and her recent public advocacy, this collection invites further investigation into the protean specters of feminism in her work, urging a reconsideration of how feminist discourses are transmitted, transformed, and sometimes haunted in contemporary literature.
- Introduction by Nicolas P. Boileau and Tanya Tromble
- Essay “Joyce Carol Oates and Feminism: Facts Found and Foundered” Gavin J. Cologne-Brookes
Articles
- “Is Love a ‘Pathological Condition of the Soul’? Joyce Carol Oates’s Beasts and Rape: A Love Story” Nicolas P. Boileau
- “The 11-Year Itch: Exploitation as Sublimation in Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates, 2002; Andrew Dominik, 2022)” Jocelyn Dupont
- “The Mudwoman in Academia: The Spectral Presence of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway in Joyce Carol Oates’s Mudwoman” Stéphanie Durrans
- “The Blinding Lights of (Post)Feminist Empowerment in Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Night, Neon'” Stéphanie Maerten
- “Beyond ‘Do Not Disturb’: Alternatives and Possibilities of Feminism in Joyce Carol Oates’s Babysitter” Emilie Heude
- “The Specter of Body Horror Haunting Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘The Chair of Tranquility’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper'” Tanya L. Tromble
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
lbenoit (April 21, 2025). Publication: Specters of Feminism in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates. Women & the F-Word. Retrieved March 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13t73