Yishi
- Email: enyp@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Representations of queer homes in mid-century U.S fiction
- Supervisors: Professor Bridget Bennett, Dr Nicholas Ray
Profile
I graduated from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies with a degree in British and American Literature in 2018. I then went on to study English Literature with a focus on literature and modernity at the University of Edinburgh and obtained my Master’s Degree. In October 2022 I started my full-time study for my PhD at University of Leeds. My doctoral study is fully funded by China Scholarship Council-University of Leeds joint scholarship.
My research focuses on the concept of home, home space as well as narratives centre around it, and domestic culture in association with gender and queer studies in American literature in the mid twentieth century. Given the previous debate on whether to see home as a safe, comfort zone for the sexual minorities, and academic attention that prioritises the public over the private when it comes to the problem of queer space, I propose that domestic space has long been overlooked in the discussion of queer studies and thus deserve further investigation. By reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Shirley Jackson’s domestic gothic classics and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, I try to answer the questions brought forward by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology: in what ways do the queer individuals “are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling?” How do the queered bodies, which do not, and refuse to follow the lines that “mark the edge” of home space, negotiate the boundaries that best align with the straight bodies? And above all, how does the representation of domestic space contribute to the re-imagination and re-invention of sexuality, gender and national identity?
Research interests
My research interests cover a broad range of fields, including the 20th century British and American literature, gender and queer theories, space theories, and mass consumer culture. In May 2019 I presented a paper on Jeanette Winterson’s cyber utopia in the international literature conference held by the University of Lodz, Poland, and my MSc dissertation explored the interplay between consumption, femininity and identities in the works by Jean Rhys and Nella Larsen.
Qualifications
- MSc Literature and Modernity: 1900 to the Present, University of Edinburgh
- BA British and American Literature, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China