Tag: saidiya hartman

• the feminist subjunctive, 2.0

  Earlier in this blog, I provided a definition of the feminist subjunctive, the method I am employing in my senior honors thesis that critically analyzes three historical romance novels. But as I have worked on this project, my own understanding of the feminist subjunctive has evolved and solidified. So here, I present my updated definition…

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• coercive worlds

  How do we dream freedom from a world that orders our dreaming?  I’ve been really stuck on a concept from this summer, introduced to me by Johanna Kluger, one of the panelists at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance’s (IASPR) 2025 conference: the idea of coercive worldbuilding. Kluger, in her research, traces…

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• defining the feminist subjunctive

  So, what the heck is the feminist subjunctive, anyway? In writing my senior thesis, I am cobbling together a close reading methodology called the “feminist subjunctive,” inspired by a lovely friend of mine who introduced me to the term. My research aims to explore the ways in which contemporarily written historical romance fiction featuring non-normative…

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