You Are Invited to a Masquerade! Academic Women in the Pandemic and Beyond

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Illuminating Truth of Gender and Race in the Current Era (Table 20)

Abstract

This collective biography explores our experiences as women writing, thinking, and surviving together during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Thinking with Efrat Tseelon’s (1995, 2001) work on masques and identity, and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842), we enter a world of story-truth to examine masks and (un)masking, as complex gendered reality. As O’Brien (1990) explains, we “want you to feel what I felt…[we] want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth” (p. 179). In so doing, we answer Tseelon’s call to “rethink masquerade as an analytical and critical category” (2001, p. xiv) that “enables the interrogation of identities, partial identities, potential identities and non-identities'' (2001, p. xv).

Authors

• Shelly Melchior, University of West Alabama

• Carlson Coogler, Baylor University

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Kelly W. Guyotte, University of Alabama