This post is based on the presentation I gave at GIFCon 2025 [Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations] for its “Queering the Fantastic” event on 7th–9th May 2025, but I’ve done some minor revision. It is one of process drafts that will be morphed into the Webs book.
“An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies”
My presentation today is a strand of my current book project which has the working title, The Web of Women. The book traces some of the complex webs of Anglophone women’s and nonbinary people’s receptions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium in fandom, academic scholarship, and fantasy novels. My focus in this piece is feminist Tolkien scholarship today, and the need for more such work, especially intersectional feminist work. One goal is to challenge the extent to which some critical theories have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics on literature (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian White man)1 since at least the 1980s. This dismissal is not unique to Tolkien scholarship. Recently in the US, the current regime is attempting to criminalize not only those who work with these theories but people and institutions who circulate them.
In regard to Tolkien’s legendarium, I agree with Sue Kim who argues in “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: that “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race)” (881-2).2
I became interested in feminisms and Tolkien in 2012 while doing research for my essay on the grammatical construction of female bodies in The Lord of the Rings (Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium, Vaccaro).3 My interest continued, in 2014, when I wrote a feminist bibliographic essay for Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien (Croft and Donovan). As a queer feminist woman, I found a pattern of publication showing that queer and gender scholarship was published by mostly male scholars focusing on male characters and that the smaller body of work on feminist and gender scholarship by women scholars focusing on female characters was almost completely ignored, and that there was almost no queer feminist scholarship published (a pattern which has not significantly changed since 2014).4
The issue of exclusion or marginalization of gender, feminist, and critical race scholarship is one I have been considering since 2016 when I read Jane Chance’s Tolkien, Self, and Other: “This Queer Creature.” It is the first (and so far only) monograph to apply queer theory to Tolkien’s work. Chance’s work has been praised for its discussion of the connections between Tolkien’s scholarship, his teaching notes, and his fiction in spite of the “density” of the queer theory she cites (Fisher, Larsen).
As someone more familiar with queer theory5 than the two reviewers, I saw problems with Chance’s rhetorical framing of “queerness,” her almost exclusive focus on White maleness and masculinity (even down to her choice of queer theorists), and her argument about Tolkien’s appropriation of the word, “apartheid,” to describe curricular wars between the “Lit” and “Lang” faculty at Oxford. That appropriation is a recent example of the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is White-dominated, with much of the minimal work on race shaped by White scholars’ desire to defend Tolkien, or his work, against charges of racism (Reid 2017).
Chance identifies Tolkien’s “queerness” as his “secret vice” (inventing languages); his birth in South Africa; his parents’ deaths; his humility; his physical build; his religion; his scholarship; his family background as “rustics”; his adaptations of the medieval in his fiction; and his “aesthetic of a ‘queer medievalism’” (p. xii [12], Chapter 2: “Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writing”). Then, since she declares Tolkien’s identity and scholarship are “queer,” she claims his “humanism and his feminism—his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, unimportant, or marginalized—the alien, the rustic, the commoner, the poor, the female and the other” proves that he “is much more forward-thinking than has previously been considered” (xi), meaning, as she develops in her later chapters, that he is neither sexist nor racist.
My problem is not with Chance defining aspects of Tolkien’s identity or work as queer but with her failure to acknowledge the existence of his White, heterosexual, and class privileges in her desire to defend him against scholarship drawing on contemporary critical theories which she describes as attacks. She cherry-picks concepts from contemporary queer and intersectional theories to discuss his membership in marginalized groups while ignoring his membership in privileged groups that benefitted him in systemic ways that he may not have been aware of operating in his favor (and that, apparently, Chance fails to consider as benefitting him!).
The structure of Chance’s monograph follows the pattern that Diane Watt, a feminist medievalist writing in 2019, criticizes in queer medieval studies, that:
the terminology of both the history of sexuality and queer theory has become gender exclusive: homosexuality has come to mean, in common academic usage, male homosexuality; gay history is gay male history; queer sexualities are all too often queer male sexualities. Women are not given equal weight to men, and the histories of male and female sexualities are still artificially separated. (452)
A range of White queer masculinities—Tolkien’s, his male characters’, medieval literary heroes’—are explored in depth in eight of Chance’s nine chapters. All the White women—the women in Tolkien’s life, the medieval female characters Chance claims he so strongly identified with, and the female characters he created—end up jumbled together in a single token chapter with the stated purpose of proving that Tolkien was not a misogynist. I would argue that an argument that uses a male author’s female characters to support a claim about his politics is far from being a feminist argument (even allowing for the wide range of definitions of “feminism” that exist).
Orcs appear occasionally throughout the Chance’s book (and her earlier essays), as representatives of sadistic masculinity, the “queer,” the working class, or the racialized Other. The first peer-reviewed essay on racism in Tolkien written by a Black scholar was not published until 2022: Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” was published posthumously in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. He wrote the essay in the late 1980s/early 1990s and could not find an editor to publish it. Decades later, his arguments not only anticipate and rebut the defensive stance taken by White Tolkienists as a group but also go beyond to identify the historical elements of the “Orkish genocide” in The Lord of the Rings, an argument which directly counters’ Chance’s attempts to defend Tolkien. Of course, Mills’s is working with the sociological definition of racism as a system; Chance is assuming it is an individual feeling or position.
As a feminist queer scholar, I find little in Chance’s monograph useful although her work did inspire me to address what is missing in it, first, in a collection of queer approaches to Tolkien, but also another on racisms, race, and Tolkien (forthcoming next year from McFarland), and now in the my Webs By Women project.
I have begun analyzing academic anthologies on Tolkien to identify work by women scholars (and at least one genderqueer scholar, according to their contributor information!)6 and work that uses feminist, gender, and intersectional approaches to Tolkien’s legendarium.
Table I (Selected Anthologies 1968-2024) (on pp. 1) has data from the twenty anthologies I’ve worked through so far, along with notes on p. 2. The list of anthologies is not complete: I began with the first collections published on Tolkien’s work in the US (Isaacs and Zimbardo, 1968) and the first in the UK (Giddings, 1981), and began working through the rest on my shelves. I will be adding to this list, as well as tracking selected journal articles and (perhaps?) some monographs in future. Given the tens of thousands of publications in Tolkien studies, there is no way this will be a comprehensive statistical analysis. But it will, I hope, become a starting point that others might build on.
I identify the total number of chapters (excluding the introductions) in each anthology; the number and percentage of chapters written by women scholars (and the genderqueer scholar); and the number of chapters that I see as examples of feminist, gender, and/or intersectional approaches to Tolkien’s work.
One hundred and twenty-three of the two-hundred eighty-one chapters are by women authors and the genderqueer author, approximately 45% of the total.
However, the percentage of those chapters in individual anthologies ranges from the low of 10% or 13% (Bloom, Kerry) to the high 85%-86% (Croft & Donovan, Agan).7
Almost half of the chapters (9/20) fall into the 20-30% essays by women, and 7/20 between 40-73%. Research in media studies and linguistics show that when more than 20% or so of a group are women, that men (and women!) tend to perceive them as being 50% or more of the group and dominating it in ways that often lead to backlash. While chapters in an academic collection aren’t the exact equivalent of people talking in a group, some parallels do exist.
The increasing gender diversity of authors is likely caused by the extent to which primarily White women in the US have benefitted from affirmative action in academia in recent decades.
Moving from the demographics of the scholars to the topics and approaches in the chapters shows that 59.5, or 20% of the chapters, focus on female characters, while 24, 10%, use feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches. The list of 24 chapters using feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches and a list of nine rhetorical elements I identified in them is on pages 3-4; the characteristics are listed below.
The 24 chapters using feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches are spread over nine anthologies: six of which only have one feminist, gender, or intersectional chapter. More recent publications show modest growth with Perilous and Fair, given its focus on “Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien,” adding over half the chapters to the total, being something of an outlier.
Croft and Donovan do reprint seven earlier essays that they consider the most important of earlier works, but even recent anthologies on more general themes, without any reprints, have no more two chapters. Two of the 24 chapters are by men which allows me to note that I am looking at rhetorical elements, not whether the author is a woman, or whether they consider themselves a feminist, although I am considering adding “identifying themselves as a feminist in the text” as a later list item!
Reading through the 24 chapters resulted in my identification of nine rhetorical patterns (page 3). No chapter has all nine, all have at least three. In addition, the three chapters about female characters that did not strike me as feminist lack any of my listed elements (Jennifer Neville’s “Women,” Romuald I. Lakowski’s “Titania, Galadriel, and the Fairy Queen of Medieval Romance,” and James T. Williamson’s “Emblematic Bodies: Tolkien and the Depiction of Female Physical Presence.)
The scholars whose chapters I characterize as using feminist, gender, intersectional approaches tend to:
1. Focus on female characters from the legendarium ignored by previous scholarship; or,
2. Engage with relevant Tolkien, genre, or related scholarship on female characters, genre, aspects of world-building, etc.; or,
3. Develop contrarian/against the grain/resistant readings of female characters who have been the focus of previous scholarship; or,
4. Apply feminist theories including, as necessary, other related theories such as gender, queer, postcolonial, reception theory, etc., i.e. the dreaded “postmodern”; or,
5. Contextualize the legendarium in what was known about medieval texts, languages, and cultures during Tolkien’s lifetime; or,
6. Contextualize the legendarium in the context of contemporary medieval scholarship which differs; or,
7. Contextualize the legendarium in the 20th century by drawing from primary and secondary historical sources rather than using the simplistic and lazy defense of “he was a man of his time”; or,
8. Contextualize the legendarium in the 21st century by asking “questions concerning interactions between the text and the primary world, drawing on methods from history and the social sciences” (Reid 2017 34); or,
9. Focus on questions of production and reception, including adaptations, translations, transformative works, or other media.
I do not blame individual scholars for their choices in a culture which elevates and valorizes the [straight, White] male as universal, but for any who might be interested in being part of the solution to this problem, I can suggest a few things.
The first is one is already happening: the need for more “themed” publications: Clare Moore and Rory Queripel are co-editing a special journal issue on “Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” and Cami Agan and Clare Moore are co-editing an anthology in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Perilous and Fair’s publication, ‘Great Heart and Strength:’ New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
I see the need for more attention to intersectionality, a concept Kimberlé Crenshaw developed as part of critical race theory. I’ve included a quote from an introduction to intersectional feminism written by Roza Cseby on page 5 of my handout, followed by a quote with Alexander Doty’s six definitions of “queer,” along with his warning to avoid assuming that “queer” automatically means “progressive” (pp. 5-6). The last pages are my Works Cited list.
Some of the goals I have for my project are ones I hope others may find useful (and, as often is the case, I think that the goals are applicable beyond the feminist queer, or queer feminist, scholarship. They include:
1. rejecting claims of an authorial intentionality that is privileged over readers’ interpretations;
2. considering adaptations and transformative works as deserving of analysis in their own right rather than evaluating how accurately they conform to the source text;
3. moving beyond a single-axis approach to identity (whether of author, characters, or readers); and
4. valuing how different readers create different or contradictory interpretations of texts based on their experiences, even when they are working from a feminist, gender, or intersectional approach.
Thank you!
WORKS CTED
The debate between the spelling of “white” and “White” in writing (in multiple professional and personal contexts) is an ongoing and complicated one with good arguments on various positions! After some years of using the lowercase spelling for “white” (and uppercase for Black), I changed my mind as I was writing the introductory chapter for the anthology on racisms and Tolkien (under contract, and under peer review with McFarland). At this point, I am using “white” only if it is in a direct quote from a source, or is used as a color term for something that is not about skin color; that may change in future! I did some research which I cite in the anthology and which I share here for those who are interested in the debate.
Burnett, Lynn. “On Capitalizing ‘White.’” Cross Cultural Solidarity, crossculturalsolidarity.com/on-capitalizing-white/.
Clark, Simon. “How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics.” Center for American Progress. 1 July 2020, americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/.
Daniszewski, John. “Why we will lowercase white.” AP Blog, Associated Press, 20 July, 2020. blog.ap.org/announcements/why-we-will-lowercase-white.
Ewing, Eve L. “I’m a Black Scholar Who Studies Race. Here’s Why I Capitalize ‘White.’” Medium, 1 July 2020, zora.medium.com/im-a-black-scholar-who-studies-race-here-s-why-i-capitalize-white-f94883aa2dd3..
Laws, Mike. “Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’).” Columbia Journalism Review, Analysis, 16 June 2020, cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php.
Mack, Kristen, and John Palfrey. “Capitalizing Black and White: Grammatical Justice and Equity.” MacArthur Foundation, 26 Aug. 2020, macfound.org/press/perspectives/capitalizing-black-and-white-grammatical-justice-and-equity.
Kim, Sue. "Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film,” in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2004, pp. 875-907..
Reid, Robin Anne. “Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and Femininities in The Lord of the Rings.” The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 98-118.
The habit of failing to cite scholarship by women is common to academia:
Healy, Kieran. “Gender and Citation in Four General-Interest Philosophy Journals, 1993-2013.” Kieran Healy. 25 Feb. 2015, kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/02/25/gender-and-citation-in-four-general-interest-philosophy-journals-1993-2013/.
Savonick, Danica, and Cathy N. Davidson. “Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.” LSE Impact Blog. 8 March 2017, blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/08/gender-bias-in-academe-an-annotated-bibliography/.
Since the 1990s, I’ve been hearing various complaints about the “density” and “difficulty” of feminist theory, ditto queer theory, presented as objective/factual claims (and these are often from tenured faculty with Ph.Ds who musta read some dense stuff to get the damn degree—students facing this stuff for the first time get complaining rights—and I always told them how difficult I found some of the Deconstruction stuff!). That’s a complicated issue, but my response has always been more or less that a lot depends on one’s familiarity with a body of work and individual reader response to a specific body of work. I do find SOME specific works by queer theorists (and feminist theorists) difficult to work with, thus I don’t, but there are LOTS of other works by queer theorists and feminist theorists (and nowadays feminist queer theorists) to be worth reading and which I happily work with!
There is no way to know how many scholars are gender-queer, or non-binary, or gender-fluid, especially in the past when those terms did not exist (all I had in the 1960s-1970s-1980s was “weird”). Seeing changes that allowed people to feel safe to identify their non-normative gender identities and/or sexual orientations the last decade or two has been wonderful; I am no sure how long it will be safe given the current regime’s attacks on LGTBQQI+ people.
Anyone tempted to make the claim that the women editors are making subjective/biassed choices to publish more women instead of the “best” essays can fuck right off because a similar argument could be made about the men—except that of course men always get to be “individuals” and “women” don’t. Anyone posting that sort of garbage in my Substack will be banned/blocked/banished/BEGONE! You have been warned.
Thanks for your comments on Chance's book. Although my own published criticisms are different from yours, I was always struck by how she tried claiming marginality for Tolkien despite his many obvious advantages.