Professor Mary Evans

Mary Evans is an Emeritus Leverhulme Professor, the author of various studies of feminism and feminist writers. Her most recent work ( with Sarah Moore and Hazel Johnstone ) is a study of detective fiction ( Detecting the Modern ) and the theme of that book, of how detective fiction locates the central dynamics of the contemporary world, arises from her continuing interest in the ways in which we learn and acquire our social identities. She is currently working on a study of the ways in which the definition of 'respectable' has been constructed, and changed, for women in the past one hundred years. This project comes out of longstanding interests in the various forms of coincidence between feminism and changing expectations of the 'citizen'. However, the narrative of 'progress' in gendered identity which has been made so explicit , and so often taken-for-granted , has emerged alongside the continuation of other forms of social inequality. These forms of social marginality and exclusion may act to exclude women in new ways from that definition of 'respectable', whilst at the same time challenging the part that gender has been assumed to play in political/Political contexts. The work is largely situated in the UK, although the issues raised have a wider relevance. The work draws on work by contemporary sociologists and cultural historians but is also informed by those writers who seldom explicitly discussed gender; the implications of their work may remain as relevant as more recent discussions of women which assume categorical cohesion. Overall, the project is concerned with the multiple - and changing - origins of the making of the gendered person.

Expertise

feminism, citizenship, inequality, narratives, feminist theory, body, gender