Exploring Specters of Feminism in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates

This collection originates from the international conference “Specters of Feminism in the Work of Joyce Carol Oates,” held at Aix-Marseille Université in March 2024 as part of the broader project “Women and the F-Word: Thinking about Women’s Resistance to Feminism.” The introduction situates Oates’s vast and varied oeuvre within evolving feminist discourses, highlighting her ambivalent personal stance toward feminism and the critical consensus that her work engages deeply with feminist themes, especially sexual violence, trauma, and the complexities of gendered power. The essays gathered here explore how Oates’s stylistic experimentation, intertextuality, and representations of female agency and victimhood simultaneously reflect, resist, and redefine feminist heritage. By examining Oates’s engagement with canonical texts, her nuanced portrayals of gendered experience, and her recent public advocacy, this collection invites further investigation into the protean specters of feminism in her work, urging a reconsideration of how feminist discourses are transmitted, transformed, and sometimes haunted in contemporary literature.