Protected: Cristina León Alfar

Cristina León Alfar’s current scholarship extends her work in Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (2003) and Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal (2017). Tentatively titled Feminist Ethics in Early Modern English Drama, this new work is influenced by The Government of Self and Others by Michel Foucault who studies a form of rhetoric called parrhesia, a term that the OED defines as “free-spokenness, . . . Chiefly [in] Rhetoric. Frankness or boldness of speech.” He argues that “[parrhesia] founds democracy and democracy is the site of [parrhesia]” (Government of Self 300), so that freedom of speech is linked to questions of sovereignty that Alfar reads in light of women’s discursive practices in early modern drama. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed and Judith Butler, as well, she argues that women characters become parrhesiasts, speaking truth to power as a right of all citizens. The justice they seek comes out of an ethical center that points to corruptions, tyrannies, and systems of inequity at work in particular plays. Feminist ethics in this sense may, as Sara Ahmed argues, offer “a feminist critique of a universalist ethical paradigm [aligned] with the values associated with the ‘feminine’, not as that which women simply are, but as that which is made invisible by the universalist criteria implicit in the ideal observer. A feminist ethics may help here to expose how ethics involves fluid and contingent relationships between subjects and bodies (rather than an abstract self). Such an ethics may employ values such as ‘care’ and ‘connection’ precisely to dislodge the universalist language of past ethical paradigms in order that women can become visible as subjects of and in ethics” (Differences that Matter 53). Ethics in this sense is feminist when it rejects masculinist forms of competition, domination, and supremacy. Concerned about the power of men over women, feminist forms of parrhesia call attention to structural inequities to which women are subject and by which they become vulnerable. Such inequities are not limited merely to gender, but also emerge from inequities of nation and sexuality. Focused on women’s points of view and acts that are troubling and ethically questionable (such as the bed trick or murder), Alfar traces how these female characters also work from a rhetorical and substantive space of integrity that challenges the ethical standards deployed by a dominant social structure in place not only in a text, but also in the early modern period. Thus, feminist ethics as she defines it does not require its speakers to be pure and uncorrupted; these are loaded cultural terms in any case. Rather, practitioners of feminist ethics speak from positions of authority that are deeply implicated in the ethical dilemmas of their plays. This study focuses on plays such as, Titus Andronicus, All’s Well that Ends Well, Richard III, Measure for Measure, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The Roaring Girl.

Professor Alfar teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and the Survey of British Literature. She also teaches special topics, honors, and MA courses on Feminism and Shakespeare. She is often an undergraduate advisor. Research and teaching interests include, Shakespeare, Early Modern English drama, gender studies, sexuality, political history, history of women, marriage law, parrhesia, and feminist ethics.

Along with bring a reader and writer, she is an amateur gardener and a crazy (and proud) cat lady.

My research interests include Early Modern English drama, particularly Shakespeare, and the intersections between literature, culture, gender, law, and politics. I teach Shakespeare, late 16th and early 17th century English drama, early modern English women writers, and feminist theory.

My first book, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (U of Delaware P, 2003) offers a reading of a dynamics of gender and power staged in Shakespearean tragedy that does not shrink at the violence with which women characters take power and rejects the notion that their subsequent acts of violence are transgressions of proper femininity.  In fact, the notion of both proper and improper forms of femininity are held fundamentally in question throughout this study. Thus, the tragedies reject a phantasmatics of feminine identity, exorcise binaries of good and evil, and instead focus on the cultural dynamics of gender and power which both narrowed and expanded women’s roles.

My second book, Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal (Routledge, 2017), focuses on the dramatic and rhetorical work of women’s defenses against men’s accusations of adultery.  Women reject men’s stories by occupying a position of simultaneous action and honor, so that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives.  Women’s active and voluble counter narratives of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of masculine privileges in marriage, so that the rhetoric of defense turns into a site of agency while simultaneously remaining bound to the rhetoric of the accusation. Men’s and women’s competing narratives of marital betrayal uncover the ethical and political stakes for women in men’s stories of feminine duplicity.  The necessity of a response, the need to defend themselves, opens opportunities for women to alter the dramatic direction, energy, and matter of the plays. A preview of the introduction is available from Taylor and Francis. Chapter one, “Early Modern Women’s Narratives of Marital Betrayal,” is available in Routledge’s Shakespeare Studies Chapter Sampler.

In 2021, Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne: Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies, which I co-edited with Emily G. Sherwood (a former student in our department and now Director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries), was published by Routledge.  The collection of documents tells a story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and the ongoing dispute between Mistress Bourne and her husband about their marriage and separation, and subsequently between Mistress Bourne and Sir John Conway both for custody of her daughters and her financial security. The letters capture the contradiction between married women’s official legal limitations and the often messy and complicated avenues of redress available to them. Elizabeth’s narratives and desire for divorce challenge literary representations of patient endurance where appropriate feminine behavior restores a husband’s devotion. The Bourne case offers a unique set of documents heretofore unavailable except through the British Library, National Archives’ State Papers, and Hatfield House. Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne is tremendously important to early modern scholars and our knowledge about and view of women’s negotiations for legal autonomy in the sixteenth century.

Currently, I am working on two projects.  First, I have been asked to write an article on “Feminist Authorship Studies,” to be included in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Authorship, edited by Rory Loughnane and Will Sharpe.  I plan to approach this work through Michel Foucault’s notion of the “author function” to think about a feminist ethics of authorship.  Sara Ahmed’s Differences that Matter, in which she traces a path through feminism, into ethics and authorship will be crucial to my work.  Second, I am planning a project on women parrhesiasts in early modern English drama. As my article, “Speaking Truth to Power as Feminist Ethics in Richard III” shows, I am interested in ethical stands taken by female characters whose acts and points of view are in some sense repulsive but also compelling in light of certain moral questions posed by their plays. Specifically, I want to think about how such stands retain an ethical force that is contradicted by other acts committed by the same characters that pose problems of interpretation or reception.  I argue that early modern drama stages a parrhesiastic form of citizenship, in Foucault’s terms, that is performed by women. Speaking truth to power, women resist domestic and governmental tyranny, emerge as active citizens, and speak from a dramatic and political ethical center which, I argue, is feminist. I am developing this argument through plays such as Richard III, Measure for Measure, Titus Andronicus, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The White Devil. In large part, both projects point toward my growing desire to think about what a feminist ethics of scholarship and practice looks like.

For more details, see my website and MLA Commons page.

• PhD with Honors in English Literature, University of Washington, 1997.