Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

Women’s history is, mostly, forgotten history. Especially when it comes to stories of everyday women, there is very little evidence in our archives written by or even about women. As a gender and performance studies scholar presently focused on the cultural meaning and significance of lighthouses, I find myself continually inhabiting tensions between past and present, truth and fiction, and within and between various strands of feminist politics. When it comes to telling women’s history or examining public memory about, by, or even “for” women, there are far more questions than answers.
These questions are at the heart of much of my work as I attempt to understand and retell stories of women lighthouse keepers. Most people don’t even know that women—especially, but not only in the U.S.—served as lighthouse keepers throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. While it is tempting to claim this fact as a signal of feminist progression or success in an unlikely time, such a read would be too simple. Women became lighthouse keepers for myriad reasons, but not as a conscious way of uplifting our gender. Their husbands or fathers fell ill or died, leaving them no choice. Or they petitioned the government for the job, or were even appointed after war left them widowed and responsible for raising children. In this presentation, I examine the complicated gender politics of lighthouse keeping in the past, and propose ways to live in the feminist tensions of the present.   

Biography

Shauna M. MacDonald, Associate Professor, is an international scholar with a PhD from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (Speech Communication), and has worked at Villanova University (U.S.A.) as well as Cape Breton University (Canada). She is Associate Director of the Centre for Sound Communities at CBU, and incoming Editor-in-Chief of Women & Language, a feminist journal based in the U.S.A. She has published papers in peer-reviewed journals in North America, produced creative scholarship in several genres, and been featured in various media outlets for her expertise. Currently, she is finishing a book manuscript about the cultural meaning of lighthouses.