Academic Writing
Edited Volume
Samantha Langsdale & Elizabeth Rae Coody (eds.), Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).
Monsters seem to be everywhere these days, in popular shows on television, in award-winning novels, and again and again in Hollywood blockbusters. They are figures that lurk in the margins and so, by contrast, help to illuminate the center—the embodiment of abnormality that summons the definition of normalcy by virtue of everything they are not.
This edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women’s real material experiences.
Monstrous Women in Comics was featured on the New Books in Popular Culture podcast.
Monograph
Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics. Under contract with University of Texas Press.
My book begins with the recognition that female-led superhero comics with diverse casts of characters that cultivate inclusive, feminist storytelling and art exist on the margins of the US mainstream superhero genre. However, the purpose of this book is not to focus primarily on why these comics are marginalized, but rather, on how the margins as a site of innovation and productivity have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts. By using feminist philosophies as a lens with which to perform close readings of particular texts, I demonstrate to what extent and how each one might be read as a feminist superhero comic.
Journal Articles
“Breaking Glass: Reclaiming Harley Quinn’s Past to Determine her Feminist Future,” MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, vol. 10 (2023).
“Moon Girls and Mythical Beasts: Analyzing Race, Gender, and Monstrosity,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 45, no. 2 (2020), pp. 395–420. Catherine Stimpson Writing Prize Finalist.
“Disney Classics and ‘Poisonous Pedagogy’: The Fairytale Roots of Frozen (2013),” Animation Practice, Process and Production, vol. 4 (2016), pp. 27–43.
Book Chapters
“‘As much of the monstrous as the pretty’: Analyzing Jack Kirby’s Hela and Silver Age Gender Norms,” in The Comics of Jack Kirby, eds. Craig Fischer, Charles Hatfield, and Susan Kirtley (University Press of Mississippi, accepted).
“‘My Other Life’: Queering Genres in Search of Bisexual Female Superheroes,” in Secret Identities, eds. Peter Nagy and Michael Kobre, (University Press of Mississippi, accepted).
“The (Female) Manichaean Body: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Eastern Manichaean Texts,” with Adam Benkato, in Women in Western and Eastern Manichaeism, ed. Madeleine Scopello, pp. 117–134 (Brill, 2022).
“Higher, Further, Faster Baby! The Feminist Evolution of Carol Danvers from Comics to Film,” in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, ed. Frederick Aldama (Routledge, 2020), pp. 297–309.
“Over the Rainbow Bridge: Female/Queer Sexualities in Marvel's Thor Film Trilogy,” in Supersex: Essays on Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero, ed. Anna Peppard (University of Texas Press, 2020), pp. 199–220.
“The Dark Phoenix as ‘Promising Monster’: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Teaching Marvel’s X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga,” in Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives, Eds. A. Gamzou and K. Koltun-Fromm (University of Mississippi Press, 2018), pp. 153–171.
(with Sarah Myers) “The Evolution of Reproductive Fantasies: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Analysis of Disney’s Tangled (2010),” in Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres, ed. C. Holliday and A. Sergeant (Routledge, 2018), pp. 243–260.
“Art, Soteriology, and Embodiment: Women’s Agency and the Imitatio Christi,” in Gender and God, ed. Sîan Hawthorne (Macmillan, 2017), pp. 229–243.
Conference Proceedings
“‘We're not marauders, we’re allies’: An Interdisciplinary History of US Feminism & Star Wars,” Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship, vol. 1, no. 1 (2019).
Book Reviews
Review of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell (Verso, 2020), Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship, accepted.
Review of Gender and the Superhero Narrative, edited by Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott & Philip Smith (University Press of Missisppi, 2018), Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 3, no. 2 (2019), pp. 219–221.
Review of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body by Luna Dolezal (Lexington Books, 2015), Somatechnics, vol. 9.1 (2019), pp. 151—154.
Review Essay on Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2014), Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, vol. 13 (2015), pp. 239-245.
In-Progress
“‘The little girl’ Disrupting Norms of US Politics: Examining Misogynist Reactions to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” (article, draft)