Profile
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, she draws on Michele Foucault’s study of parrhesia in The Government of Self and Others. Foucault includes a recurring analysis of Euripides’s play Ionin which a woman brings a complaint against Apollo. In his analysis, Creusa is a parrhesiast, or one who speaks truth to power. Creusa’s complaint, “Where shall we go to demand justice when it is the iniquity of the powerful that destroys us?” (quoted in Foucault, 134–35), is the “type of discourse, which is not yet, but will later be called [parrhesia]” (135). This is, he argues, a “discourse, through which someone weak, and despite this weakness, takes the risk of reproaching someone powerful for his injustice” (133–34). Alfar’s new book traces female characters in the drama who 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. 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. Women characters become parrhesiasts, seeking justice and speaking truth to power as a right of all citizens. Thus, feminist ethics 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. Plays studied include, 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 being a reader and writer, she is an amateur gardener and a crazy (and proud) cat lady.
