This Thus

Here it is . . .

I was going to wait until I got a copy of the book to mention this, but since I can’t seem to find another topic to write about tonight and I want to get back into my regular Monday, Thursday, Saturday routine, I’m going to share this with you: my essay, “Redressing Ripley: Disrupting the Female Hero,” just came out in this book:

Meanings of Ripley: The Alien Quadrilogy and Gender (Elizabeth Graham)

The seeds of this essay were sown in a film class way back in’98 or ’99 when I was getting my undergraduate degree at RIC and then grew into a little shoot of a conference paper back in 2005 for the ACA/PCA conference. Since then, the paper grew and shifted about, getting pruned and sprouting new branches here and there until finally . . . finally, the book reached a stage where I could do no more and had to accept the essay as is, the good and the bad of it.

And, as tired as I grew of the paper itself, there is some good in it (though I know at least one of my current professor’s would vehemently disagree because of the theory I depend on for my argument). I wouldn’t write the same paper now, even if I fundamentally agree with my own conclusions about how Aliens undercuts Ripley’s heroism by placing her firmly back into the confines of a patriarchal, hetero-normative narrative which, at the very least, complicates her place as a feminist hero.

(That I feel vaguely shy about sharing this instead of being simply proud of my achievement is something for another post.)