victoria.hesford@stonybrook.edu 

2058 Humanities Building

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Research Interests

Gender, sexuality, queer   and feminist theory,  U.S. queer and feminist   history, popular and mass culture in the postwar era, and critical theory. 

Biography

My research can be situated at the intersection of the interdisciplinary fields of American studies, feminist cultural history and theory, and media studies. My training at the graduate and undergraduate level was in American studies, which provided me with an interdisciplinary emphasis on the intersection of multiple fields of inquiry, most notably in my own work, twentieth century American literature and history. This training also gave
me the tools to encounter what most fascinated me: post 1945 American popular culture and politics—especially 1970s US feminisms and their emergence in and through mass culture.

In my first book, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) I turned to the archive of the U.S. women’s liberation movement to reassess the way in which it has been represented and remembered. Rather than locate the historical meaning of women’s liberation in developmental narratives of success or failure, I approached its position papers, manifestoes, and theoretical essays as an array of rhetorical materials that sought to persuade and enact a new political constituency and world into being.

My second book project, Artificial Women: the 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism (forthcoming, Duke University Press) also returns to the feminist 1970s. It starts from the premise that women are made not born and investigates the making—and unmaking—of women in the mass ultural response to 1970s feminism. Drawing on Black and women of color feminism, postcolonial and postructuralist feminist theory, and queer, trans, and feminist film and media studies, the book approaches mainstream films and television shows from the early to mid 1970s as historicizing modes of cultural expression that mediate a feminist present and reveal what was emergent to it. More broadly, the aim of Artificial Women is to demonstrate how the complex interaction between mass culture and feminism in the 1970s contributed to a generative reordering
and re-making of women while also highlighting the complex imbrication of gender and race in technology, capital, social codes, and cultural forms.

Other research interests include the work of the American suspense writer, Patricia Highsmith. There has been a relative resurgence of interest in Highsmith’s work over the past twenty years which can be attributed, in part, to the way her work anticipates the moral ambivalence and political disorientation of our historical present. I am also interested in historiographical questions about the practice and form of feminist theory more generally. I am currently working on two projects related to these interests. The first, is a book on Patricia Highsmith’s America, and the second is an essay that confronts today’s strange alignments of the feminist and the fascist, the transphobe and the socialist, not as betrayals of feminism, but as an ongoing effect of its monstrous
becoming.

I teach classes on feminist theory, feminist histories, and feminist media cultures at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and I am in the process of designing a new class on Monstrous feminisms from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. My teaching foregrounds intersectional analyses of power in different contexts—artistic, political, and historical—and emphasizes an openness to new ideas, marginalized voices, and respectful debate.

Publications

“Kate Millett” for Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers, edited by Lori Marso for the Routledge Key Guides Series (forthcoming August, 2016).

“On Not Being Women: the 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism,” Special Issue on “1970s Feminisms,” edited by Lisa Jane Disch, South Atlantic Quarterly, 114.4, October 2015, pp 713-734.

“Experience, Echo, Event: Theorizing Feminist Histories, Historicizing Feminist Theory," Introduction to the Special Issue on “Experience, Echo, Event: Theorizing Feminist Histories,” Feminist Theory, 15.2, August 2014, pp 103-117, co-edited with Lisa Diedrich.

“On the ‘Evidence of Experience’: an Interview with Joan W. Scott.” Special Issue on “Experience, Echo, Event: Theorizing Feminist Histories,” Feminist Theory, 15.2, August 2014, pp 197-207.

Feeling Women’s Liberation. Durham NC: Duke University Press, June 2013, 368pp. (Finalist, 2014 Lambda Literary Awards for Nonfiction; Reviewed in Choice, Contemporary Political Theory, Gender and Society, QED, Signs, Subjectivity, The Journal of the History of Sexuality)