Gendered moves: Mobile subjects in Atlantic Rim literature and film

Gendered Moves examines figures of mobility and gendered subjectivity in women's writing and film from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Iceland and the Anglophone-Caribbean. Focusing on literary productions of women who relocate themselves and situate their work in multiple national sites throughout the Atlantic Rim, this study begins with the observation that the crisis of representation affecting nation-oriented literatures and models of identity is a product of a proliferation of differences that becomes an aesthetic strategy in mobile women's fiction and theory. This project draws on an equally wide-range of critical discourses---including Postcolonial, Irish, and Sex/Gender Studies---to account for the various ways Atlantic Rim women artists use mobility to challenge narrative conventions and socio-political orders. Alongside the rise of transnational and transatlantic studies, analyses of travel figures have gained critical currency. Feminist scholars interested in mobility and transnationalism have generally attended to the socio-historical conditions informing notions of migrancy and exile as well as to the gendering of transnational experience in literature. My project, rather than charting a subject's movement across historical and material landscapes, investigates the gendered and politicized landscapes of narrative. Broadly, this study incorporates theories of narrativity, psychoanalytic feminism, and postcolonialism to examine the figuration and enactment of mobility as it redefines what it means to write and locate the self simultaneously. Expanding upon (post)modernist experimentations with form to enact new kinds of subjectivities and narratives of self, mobile women writers and filmmakers utilize formal experimentation to perform feminine subjectivity as mobile and elsewhere to a masculine social imaginary.