Empowering Self-Care: Caring Things in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 1890s "New Woman" Short Fiction.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson is mostly remembered as a poet, activist, and ex-wife of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her volume The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899) has been largely overshadowed as a result. Yet, the collection contains a portfolio of heroines analogous and contemporaneous to the famed New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. In this article, I consider Dunbar-Nelson's heroines in light of their New Woman-esque agency and autonomy as they find remedies and power in objects and materials steeped in New Orleans's cultural heritage. Ceded neither social nor political self-governance nor domestic comfort, this article reads these transcendental, metaphysical objects as sources of self-care. With close analysis of "The Goodness of St. Rocque," "Tony's Wife," and "Little Miss Sophie," I argue that Dunbar-Nelson's protagonists exert influence over their lives, specifically in the negotiation of romantic relationships, through voodoo charms, Catholic candles, tarot cards, sewing machines, and knitting needles. Covering courtship, break-ups, and unhappy marriages, I demonstrate the ways in which these empowering spiritual objects respond to health concerns, including malnutrition and domestic violence, in turn, situating them as alternatives to patriarchal and historically racist medical institutions. Valorizing the cultural milieu of New Orleans and the customs of the Caribbean and European heritage, and thereby conveying Dunbar-Nelson's resistance to white and male supremacist ideologies in late-nineteenth-century Southern America, the article ultimately assesses the parallels with (predominantly white) New Woman fiction, through shared themes of fraught heterosexual dynamics and women's declining health.

It has touched us all: Commentary on the social implications of touch during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper considers the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic through a focus on the sense of touch. It begins by briefly outlining current sociological and philosophical theories of touch as an empathetic, pervasive, and social sense. Taking lead from news media, it then suggests how touch and virus-enforced touchlessness intersects with issues of race, class, gender, ableism, and technology. Action taken by governing bodies in the face of the pandemic, such as the introduction of lockdowns and the emphasis on working from home, signals and protects privilege while exacerbating oppression for the marginalised and Othered. The ability to both deny touch and simultaneously flaunt advice surrounding distancing clarifies a point of departure that separates the lower classes and the racialised, the non-male and the less abled, from the male and able-bodied, the white and wealthy.