Jeffry Iovannone, visiting assistant professor of English and coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies program, has had his essay, “The Madwoman in the Garden: Decolonizing Domesticity in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” selected for publication in the forthcoming anthology Disabling Domesticity.
The collection, edited by Michael Rembis, is the first work within the field of Disability Studies to offer a sustained critique of the connection between disabled identities and domestic spaces. In his contribution, Dr. Iovannone analyzes the ways in which domestic spaces are transformed into sites of resistance against colonial violence for queer, disabled, and racialized subjects within queer Trinidadian writer Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night. Disabling Domesticity will be published in 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Iovannone has also been selected as a contributing writer for the feminism and social justice website The Radical Notion. To date, the site has published four of his articles: “5 Reasons Why Colleges Need Preferred Name Policies for the Safety of Transgender Students,” “Caitlyn Jenner and the ‘Freak Show’ of Transgender Representation,” “The Stonewall Movie Boycott and QTPOC Erasure” and “Is Prison Ideology the Best Way to End Campus Sexual Violence?” A follow-up to his article on the controversy surrounding the feature film “Stonewall,” in which he examines the film’s erasure of the contributions of transgender women of color to gay rights struggles in the U.S., is forthcoming in October 2016.
Iovannone is enjoying writing about Gender Studies topics and concepts for a popular audience, which has given him valuable insight into current discussions on social media activism and internet feminism. He will bring this knowledge to bear upon the Women’s and Gender Studies program when helping students use academic work in the pursuit of social change through the pedagogical method of scholar-activism.
