Sandra Tausel, BA BA MA

Zur Person

Promotionsprojekt

In the United States, reproductive health care is a highly contested issue with intersecting judicial, political, societal, cultural, and religious dimensions. Within these highly complicated debates about reproductive justice, motherhood is a unique site of institutionalized patriarchal control. The idealization of patriarchal motherhood in fiction and life is problematically tied to several normative parameters, including whiteness, cisgender identification, middle-class status, able-bodiedness, (frequently) marital status, and, interestingly, “appropriate” age. In my dissertation, I argue that age crucially controls women’s, trans, and nonbinary people’s reproductive choices. Consequently, my dissertation project proposes that the intersection between gendered agism and reproductive justice produces what I call “reproductive agism.” This coinage delineates a unique form of agist reproductive oppression and differently affects persons capable of childbirth during young adulthood, adulthood, and later adulthood. My study will draw upon contemporary US-American novels, among them Brit Bennet’s The Mothers (2016), Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2019), Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss (2020), and Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021) to propose a fourfold approach to analyzing reproductive agism and delineating age and gender-specific reproductive controlling mechanisms. Ultimately, I aim to highlight reproductive agism as an underexplored aspect in fictional motherhood narratives and within the field of gendered agism that articulates itself in the societal condemnation and stigmatization of non-normative reproductive ages and choices, thereby obstructing the advancement of reproductive justice and subjecting persons capable of childbirth to unique forms of social control.

Forschungsinteressen

• US-Amerikanische (feministische) Gegenwartsliteratur
• Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
• Critical Race Theory
• Kinder-und Jugendliteratur

Publikationen

• Tausel, Sandra. “Confronting the Center: Exposing Systemic Racism and Whiteness through The Hate You Give.” Libri Liberorum: Fachzeit für Kinder-und Jugendliteraturforschung, vol. 22, no. 56–57, 2021, pp. 103–17.
• Tausel, Sandra. “Writing against the Stigma: Facial Disfigurement in R.J. Palacio’s Wonder.” The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, edited by Cornelia Klecker and Gudrun Grabher, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022, pp. 92–111.
• Tausel, Sandra. “‘Shedding White Tears:’ A Critical Examination of White Womanhood and Emotional Entitlement.” WiN: The EAAS Women’s Network Journal, no. 3, 2022, pp. 1–26.
• Tausel, Sandra. "Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't: Ageist Narratives of Reproductive Control." Journal of the Austrian Association of American Studies (JAAAS) (in review)
• Tausel, Sandra. "Destination Flyover State: Examining the Transnational Perspective in Joachim Meyerhoff's All the Dead Fly Up: America.” (in review)

Mitgliedschaften

• Austrian Association of American Studies (AAAS)
• Austria’s Young Americanists (AYA)
• Popular Culture Association (PCA)

Lehre

• WiSe 2022/24 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Cultural Studies: ‘My Body, My Choice?’ – The Politics of Reproduction in the United States
• WiSe 2023/24 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: Representations of (M)Otherhood in (Contemporary) US-American Literature
• SoSe 2023 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | VU Gender Studies
• WiSe 2022/23 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Cultural Studies: 'Liberty, Equality, and Justice for Whom?' An Introduction to Japanese American Incarceration
• WiSe 2022/23 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: Reading Beyond the Binary in Queer Young Adult Literature
• SoSe 2022 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | VU Gender Studies
• WiSe 2021/22 (Online) | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: ‘I Feel, Therefore I Am (?)’: A Critical Exploration of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Culture
• WiSe 2021/22 (Online) | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: The Queer Young Adult Novel
• WiSe 2020/21 (Online) | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: A Survey of U.S. American Women’s Writing
• SoSe 2020 (Online) | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies: A Survey of Young Adult Literature
• WiSe 2019/20 | Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Amerikastudien | Proseminar Literary Studies:: Gender, Feminism and Identity: Character Construction in American Fiction and Culture

Kontakt

Mail: sandra.tausel@uibk.ac.at