Abstract: A woman is courted by a charming man, only to discover that all along he was engaged to another woman. Another woman loses her friend's diamond necklace and takes on ruinous debt to secretly replace it, only to discover that all along the necklace was cheap costume jewelry. A man tries to help a young boy haunted by ghosts, only to discover that he himself was a ghost all along. Whether or not you recognize these scenarios as Jane Austen's novel Emma, Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace" and M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Sixth Sense, twist narratives are so widespread that you no doubt recognize the device. The plot twist is a particularly artful surprise which retroactively transforms our understanding of what came before ("all along...!"). As such, the plot twist complicates standard scholarly ways of understanding reading, knowledge and time. For this LitShop I'd like to take you on a whirlwind tour of my work on the history and theory of plot twists. The project began life as my dissertation, and I'm now intending to transform it into a scholarly monograph, an accessible short book for non-academic readers and perhaps a podcast series. I'd value everyone's thoughts on […]

Presented by Eléonore Lépinard, Professor in Gender Studies Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne Date: Monday, October 7th  Location: Building 14, 14E-304 (map)   Abstract: Muslim women wearing simple headscarves (hijab) have been at the center of intense public scrutiny for several decades in many European countries, and they experience widespread ordinary forms of gendered and racialized discrimination. This study of veiled Muslim women’s reported experiences of stigmatization in France and Switzerland identifies types of interactions that are conceptualized as pedagogies of coloniality. These interactions follow similar scripts in which interlocutors, who are members of the majority group, ask hijabi women to unveil or to veil differently even though it is not legally required in the context of the interaction. This presentation will explore the intersection and articulation of sexism and Islamophobia, as well as class and age, as necessary components enabling the negotiations to submit and discipline veiled Muslim women. It will detail the various processes of otherization at play, and the hierarchies that these interactions attempt to enforce and maintain, including between women. Bio: Eléonore Lépinard is Professor in gender studies at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. Her main areas of research are in the […]