Victoria Livingstone (Johns Hopkins University)
In keeping with the theme of Empowering Communities, this panel looks at the ways in which scholarship can make visible the previously obscured agency of women and other historically marginalized groups. Invisible labor is a concept frequently applied to the domestic sphere to describe the work women do to maintain households. In the literary world, too, women have shaped the canon in ways that have been overlooked.
The work of female writers has, at times, not received the critical attention their work merits. Literary genres viewed as stereotypically female have been derided. In publishing, women account for the majority of literary agents, publicists, editors, and translators. According to the 2023 Lee & Low Diversity Survey of publishing, over 70% of publishing jobs are held by women. Many of these jobs are underpaid and the labor often invisible.
Further, women have historically performed much of the quiet labor that keeps university departments and publishers afloat. They may have served as research assistants, often unnamed and uncompensated, often assisting male professors. In the early days of publishing, women typed manuscripts, bound journals and books, and did other work that did not result with their names on book covers or journal mastheads.
Scholarship plays an important role in bringing recognition to the women that shaped the canon. This panel invites papers that reflect on the literary work of female-identifying people. Literary work includes writing, editing, translating, publicizing work, or doing any other labor that produces or promotes literature. While the panel focuses on the work of women, the session invites papers that reflect on work by any historically marginalized group.
This session seeks to make visible the previously obscured labor of women and other historically marginalized groups in the literary world. Papers may looks at the role of women and other groups in writing, editing, translating, publicizing work, or doing any other labor that produces or promotes literature.