Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. – Samantha Pinto, assistant professor in the English department at Georgetown University, will present her paper, “Repetitive Objects: Methodology as (Queer) Feminist Destiny,” at the Modern Language Association annual convention, held this year in San Francisco.

Her paper examines how queer and feminist studies might find a relationship in the way scholars conduct their work, analyzing differences, rather than in the overlaps between “women” or “LBGT” subjects as objects of study.

Pinto evaluates the organization and structure of commentary on the states of both fields, tracing repetitive relations of critique, malady, death and failure between feminism and queer studies in two interdisciplinary critiques, South Atlantic Quarterly’s “After Sex?” and Robyn Wiegman’s anthology Women’s Studies on Its Own. In her paper, Pinto argues that feminism has set up a methodology of constant self-critique as its field-defining feature and that queer studies has also adopted that model of thinking about itself and its potential scholarly subjects.

She suggests that scholars should take that flexibility further, forging new relationships between other interdisciplinary programs and fields, such as African American, American, or ethnic studies and writing programs or historically defined programs -- such as medieval studies -- to encourage discussion on what seem like non-traditional topics of inquiry for feminism.

“I think it’s imperative for feminist and queer studies to intellectually and pedagogically engage with difference as their central organizing frameworks, rather than re-entrench itself in a coherent definition of ‘women’ in order to remain a vibrant field,” says Pinto.

About the Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s journal of literary scholarship, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

About Georgetown University

Georgetown University is the oldest and largest Catholic and Jesuit university in America, founded in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll. Georgetown today is a major student-centered, international, research university offering respected undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar and around the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit www.georgetown.edu.