Education and career
Bilger holds a B.A. in philosophy from Oklahoma State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. [2] As a graduate student at the University of Virginia,she was the program coordinator of the Women's Center and a DJ at the college radio station,WTJU,Charlottesville. At the University of Virginia,Bilger studied under the direction of Patricia Meyer Spacks and Susan Fraiman and was awarded a Ph.D. in Victorian literature in 1992. [3] From 1992 to 1994,she was a visiting assistant professor of English at Oberlin College. [4]
Bilger currently serves on the Ms. magazine Committee of Scholars and is the Gender and Sexuality section editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is on the editorial boards of Pickering and Chatto's Gender and Genre Series and The Burney Journal.
Bilger's work focuses on comedy,Jane Austen,the English novel,feminist theory,popular culture,and gender and sexuality. In addition to her traditional academic writing,she has written for the Los Angeles Times , The Paris Review ,The Women's Review of Books,The Los Angeles Review of Books and ROCKRGRL. [5] Bilger is a regular contributor to Bitch magazine,Ms. magazine and the Ms. Blog,where she frequently covers issues pertaining to same-sex marriage and LGBT rights. [6]
In her book on Jane Austen and her contemporaries,Laughing Feminism,Bilger coined the term "Enlightenment feminist humor" to identify a tradition of anti-patriarchal satire and comedy that begins in the late seventeenth century and continues through Austen and beyond. [7] Enlightenment feminist humor mocks the idea that men are superior to women and promotes a more egalitarian gender system.
Bilger's most recent book,Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage,co-edited with Michele Kort (Seal Press,2012),is a collection of essays,stories and visual images that takes a "multidimensional look at how opening up the traditional order of 'man and wife' to include the possibility of 'wife and wife' is altering our social landscape." [8] In a December 2009 radio interview Bilger asserted that advocates of same-sex marriage should begin to emphasize positive changes,instead of being afraid to say that same-sex marriage does not change anything about the institution of marriage. [9] Bilger has written extensively on the legal battle regarding same-sex marriage and has covered the Proposition 8 trial in California for Ms. On August 12,2010,she was a guest on Warren Olney's To the Point and discussed the feminist implications of Judge Vaughn Walker's historic ruling on the unconstitutionality of Proposition 8. [10]
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