About

Victoria Hesford is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Emory University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, queer and feminist theory, U.S. queer and feminist history, and popular and mass culture in the postwar era. Her work focuses on critical theory, exploring intersections of gender and sexuality within cultural and historical contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Art
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Law
• History
• Chemistry
• Philosophy
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• The Cambridge World History of Sexualities

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-26

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  Volume II focuses on systems of thought and belief in the history of world sexualities, ranging from early humans to contemporary approaches. Comprising eighteen chapters, this volume opens with a chapter on the evolutionary legacy and then delves into the sexualities of ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome, continuing with pre-modern South Asia, China, and Japan, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Chapters include an examination of sexuality in the religious traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and also look at more recent approaches, including scientific sex, sexuality in socialism and Marxism, and the intersections between sexuality, feminism, and post-colonialism.

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• On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after StonewallDenneny, Michael. <b>On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall</b> . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 360 pp., $99.00, ISBN 9780226824611. Publication Date: March 2023.

  History Reviews of New Books · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Gerontology
  • Medicine
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• Feminism and Modern Sexuality

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-26

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• Tom Ripley, Queer Exceptionalism, and the Anxiety of being Close to Normal

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Psychoanalysis
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• Feeling Women's Liberation

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  The term women's liberation remains charged and divisive decades after it first entered political and cultural discourse around 1970. In Feeling Women's Liberation, Victoria Hesford mines the archive of that highly contested era to reassess how it has been represented and remembered. Hesford refocuses debates about the movement's history and influence. Rather than interpreting women's liberation in terms of success or failure, she approaches the movement as a range of rhetorical strategies that were used to persuade and enact a new political constituency and, ultimately, to bring a new world into being. Hesford focuses on rhetoric, tracking the production and deployment of particular phrases and figures in both the mainstream press and movement writings, including the work of Kate Millett. She charts the emergence of the feminist-as-lesbian as a persistent "image-memory" of women's liberation, and she demonstrates how the trope has obscured the complexity of the women's movement and its lasting impact on feminism

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• MUSIC AND IMPOSSIBILITY

  GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · 2019-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Review Article| April 01 2019 MUSIC AND IMPOSSIBILITY: The Queerness of Melodrama Melodrama: An Aesthetics of ImpossibilityGoldberg, JonathanDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. xvi + 205 pp. Victoria Hesford Victoria Hesford Victoria Hesford is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2019) 25 (2): 369–371. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7367878 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Victoria Hesford; MUSIC AND IMPOSSIBILITY: The Queerness of Melodrama. GLQ 1 April 2019; 25 (2): 369–371. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7367878 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Books in Brief You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Gesture, Revolt, and 1970s Feminism in John Cassavetes’s <i>A Woman under the Influence</i>

  Signs · 2019-08-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay turns to John Cassavetes’s 1974 film, A Woman under the Influence, in order to explore what remains unrepresentable about the complex eventfulness of 1970s US feminism. By reading the film through its emphasis on performance and gesture, I look to A Woman under the Influence both as an artifact of the shifting political and cultural logics of “women” as a category of collective experience in the 1970s and also as a generator of affect that tells us something about the historical complexity of 1970s feminism beyond its material, ideological, or directly political manifestations. The focus of the essay is on how we might historicize the production of 1970s US feminism as a mass-mediated event that exceeds our ability to fully represent it. That is, the essay looks to cinema as a means for making the polytemporal multiplicity of 1970s US feminism available as a historiographical question for feminist studies in the present.

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• TOM RIPLEY, QUEER EXCEPTIONALISM, AND THE ANXIETY OF BEING CLOSE TO NORMAL

  Angelaki · 2018-01-02 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this essay, I engage with the work of the mid-twentieth-century US suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith in order to open up the question of queerness as a historically locatable theory and practice of antinormativity in the post-identitarian, post-new-social-movement United States. I argue that Highsmith's Ripley novels offer a discomfitingly intimate counter-fantasy to the politically radical ambitions of both gay liberation and queer studies, one that reminds us of the constitutive power of commodification in the making of social fantasies of gendered and sexual subversion in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In offering her readers scenes that become situations in their reliance on repetition in order to create and then alleviate tension, Highsmith's Ripley novels enact a relation of attachment (to excitement, distraction, danger, the illicit, etc.) indicative of the momentary and addictive pleasures of consumer capitalism. Through this formal signature, I argue, Highsmith's work offers us access to a different affective history of queerness in the United States, one that illuminates the power and appeal of norms and their constitutive presence in the production of queer subjects and worlds.

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• Kate Millett (1934–)

  2016-07-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses life history of Kate Millett, a feminist thinker. Life magazine called it the Das Kapital of women's liberation and Time, as part of its extensive analysis of the women's liberation movement in the summer of that year, called Millett the Mao Tse-tung of feminism and put her on the front cover. Kate Millett's notoriety in 1970 as both media-anointed leader and lesbian betrayer of a movement meant she became both a controversial and somewhat eccentric figure within women's liberation. An unconventional approach characterizes Millett's method in Sexual Politics. Much of the feminist criticism of Sexual Politics since its publication has centered on Millett's reactionary critique of Freud and her tendency towards literal readings of sexual violence in literature. Sexual Politics made heterosexuality a point of historical contention and investigation for feminism, not its raison d'etre, and for that reason it helped create the conditions of possibility for feminist and queer theory in the decades to come.

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• On Not Being Women: The 1970s, Mass Culture, and Feminism

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2015-10-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay offers a reassessment of the historiography of 1970s US feminism by situating its emergence as a culturally legible phenomenon through the mediating capacities of mass culture. Rather than understand 1970s feminism as shaped by a break between politics and culture, I argue that postwar feminism's manifestation as a multiplicity of political movements was made possible through the visual technologies of the mass media. The essay begins by situating the terms women and masses in historical relation, charting their mutual invocation in the mapping of collectivities that both mark the technologically defined era of modernity and signal forms of actual or possible political response to its effects. The second section of the article offers a reading of two mass-cultural texts from the 1970s, the CBS sitcom Maude (1972–78) and the 1975 gothic horror film The Stepford Wives, in order to chart a shift in the categorical appeal of “women” in the postwar era and to argue that these kinds of generic shifts offer us a way to historicize the meaning of 1970s US feminism in a transnational context.

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Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Diedrich

  3 shared

• Merry E. Wiesner‐Hanks

  1 shared

• Hitomi Tonomura

  1 shared

• Ilan Peled

  1 shared

• Anne Hardgrove

  1 shared

• Rosemary A. Joyce

  1 shared

• Kali Nyima Cape

  1 shared

• Uroš Matić

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2000

• M.A., American Studies

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1996

• B.A., American Studies

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1994

Awards & honors

• Finalist, 2014 Lambda Literary Awards for Nonfiction