Arizona State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Institute for Humanities Research

Dr. Sally L. Kitch's research specializations include:

  • Gender, sexuality, and race as intertwined components of historical and contemporary social and cultural structures, including the gender structures of nineteenth-century American utopian communities and  the gendered foundations of racial categories in the U.S.;
  • Historical and contemporary strategies of resistance by differently situated women to prescribe roles and conventional social status (U.S., Afghanistan, transnational);
  • Transnational and comparative feminist theory, including European, African American, Latina, Asian American, and Muslim feminist theory.
  • Utopianism and feminist theory (recognized as a field I have developed);
  • The epistemology, methodology, and institutional organization of the field of women’s/gender studies, particularly interdisciplinarity as a hallmark of gender research and graduate education in women’s studies. 

Books (which have won national prizes) include Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status (University of Illinois Press, 1989), This Strange Society of Women: Reading the Letters and Lives of the Woman’s Commonwealth (Ohio State University Press, 1993) and Women and Careers: Issues and Challenges (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

 

Her most recent book is Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

 

Her research has been published widely including several book chapters and essays in anthologies. A selected list of those include “Chapter 7: Interdisciplinarity” The Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis” (Edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber Sage Publications, in press), “Gender and Utopia: From Promise to Paradox” Critical Terms for Gender Studies (Edited Gilbert Herdt and Catharine Stimpson, University of Chicago Press, in press), “Feminist  Future Thought: The Dangers of Utopia” Feminist Utopias: Redefining Our Projects (Edited by Margrit Eichler, June Larkin and Sheila Neysmith, Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2002), "Of Motherlands and Foremothers: African American Women’s Texts and the Concept of Relationship” Analyzing the Different Voice: Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary Texts ( Edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen Silber, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), "The Hom(m)osexual Economy and the Opaque Female Persona in the Fiction of Marguerite Yourcenar" Continental, Latin American, and Francophone Women Writers 1988-1989 Volume 3 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), "'What is the Matter that You Don't Write': Letters as Interdisciplinary Texts" Doing Feminism Teaching and Research in the Academy (Edited by Lisa Fine et al. Michigan State University Press, 2002), "Straight but Not Narrow: A Gynetic Approach to the Teaching of Lesbian Literature" Tilting the Tower: Lesbians/ Teaching/Queer Subjects (Edited by Linda Garber, NY: Routledge, 1994), "Does War Have Gender?"  On Peace, War, and Gender: A Challenge to Genetic Explanations.  Genes and Gender Series 6 (Edited by Anne Hunter, NY: The Feminist Press, 1991), "Brother and Sister in Eden: The Shaker View of Genesis" Intrigue in the Garden: Essays on the History of Exegesis of Genesis 1‑3 ( Edited by Gregory A. Robbins, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), "French Feminist Theory and the Gender of the Text"  Selected Proceedings of the Wichita State University National Con­ference on Foreign Litera­ture, 1984‑1985 Volume 1 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), "Gender and Language: Dialect, Silence and the Disrup­tion of Discourse in Two Novels by Women"  Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (14:1987), "Three Novels of Female Autonomy"  Turn‑of‑the‑Century Woman 2.1 (Summer 1985), "The Woman or the System: Who Changes Whom?"  Chapter in Design for Equity (Newton, MA: U.S. Dept. of Education 1980).

   
   

Her current book,Specter of Sex:Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States, forthcoming in 2009 from SUNY Press, addresses theories of race and gender intersectionality by tracing the historical development of racial ideology in terms of gender ideology in U.S. narrative history.  Her interest in the gendered foundations of race extends globally to the various ways in which gender roles, expectations, and prescribed behaviors, particularly women’s, symbolize ethnic, religious, and national identities.

The Specter of Sex:Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States
(forthcoming in 2009 from SUNY Press!)