In the EN 120 course “Masked Women and Handsome Sailors: Gender and Sexuality in 19th Century America,” we read a range of literary texts that illuminate the complexities of gender and sexual identities. As we investigated how nineteenth-century Americans understood gender and sexuality alongside race, class, and other facets of identity, we also considered how the intersections among these categories shape contemporary individuals’ self-conceptions. For their third paper, students were asked to develop an argument about how particular characters from our course readings perform their gender and sexuality – and what these performances reveal about the fluidity and peculiarity of these seemingly stable and familiar categories.
Although several students in the course produced strong papers in response to this challenging prompt, Ai Hue’s paper on Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask” and Zitkala-Sa’s “A Warrior’s Daughter” stood out as truly outstanding. I was so impressed by her incredibly precise and nuanced analysis of the texts’ main characters as well as her ability to use these two different tales to support a compelling argument about femininity as a powerful tool that can be used to outsmart and overpower men. I am always particularly delighted when students write papers that teach me new things about texts I have taught many times before; in that respect, Ai Hue’s paper was a true pleasure for me to read!
— HEATHER BARRETT
EN 120: Freshman Seminar in Literature