Jacky O’Connor
- Professor of English
- Co-director of the Arts and Humanities Institute
Jacky O’Connor’s new book, “Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America,” has been published by the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. In this study, O’Connor traces representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, in plays, stories, letters and notebooks that Tennessee Williams produced from the 1940s to the 1980s. Legal history and theory provide the framework for assessing these texts and their cultural and political influence on 20th-century legal debates about identity formation, privacy, intimacy and difference.
O’Connor examined draft manuscripts and other archive materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and at Columbia University, gathering evidence of Williams’s persistent interrogations of American law in texts that he revised over many years. This research project was supported by grants and fellowships from the Boise State Arts and Humanities Institute, the Idaho Humanities Council and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A sabbatical leave in fall 2014 provided O’Connor time to complete and submit the manuscript.
BY: KATHLEEN TUCK PUBLISHED 2:14 PM / AUGUST 16, 2016