Bonus Episode 46b
June 22, 2021
Anna Wilson on Bear
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari with Anna Wilson
I see Bear as a story about a woman who gets the chance to do to someone else what has always been done to her.... She breaks out of her experience of heterosexual relationships by having this exploitative relationship with the bear.
Anna Wilson completed her PhD in medieval studies in 2015 at the University of Toronto. She is now an assistant professor of English at Harvard University . She works on medieval reading communities, fanfiction, critical theory, historiography, and the history of reading. Next year she’s heading to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, for a year to finish her first book, which is about fans, reading, immaturity, and medieval literature.
Anna joins Suzanne and Chris to talk about Bear and its relationship to other texts—in particular, feminist young adult fantasy novels.
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/art/s/spouter.png)
Show Notes.
Anna’s article “Full Body Reading”, on the connections between fanfiction and medieval mystic Margery Kempe, is well worth reading.
Anna is also one of the contributors (along with Chris and Suzanne) to the open-access collection How We Read.
Robin McKinley: Deerskin. Pegasus.
Suzy McKee Charnas: Motherlines.
Kathryn Bond Stockton: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in Twentieth Century.
Audre Lorde: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness.