Fetterley’s Feminist Blueprint for Resisting Scholars

abstract:This article highlights three ways in which Fetterley’s feminist methodology anticipated intersectional praxis and enabled my own critiques of how American writers disguised and reified violent erasures of gender, class, and race. First, it highlights the misogyny extant in the Italian-American literary tradition, epitomized by Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, in ways that recall Fetterley’s analysis of The Great Gatsby. Second, it argues that Fetterley’s attention to the violent erasure of gender paved the way for thinking about the effacement of race as examined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark. Third, it suggests that The Resisting Reader produced the conditions for a feminist methodology embracing interdisciplinary scholarship on race, class, and citizenship.