Rebecca Lynne Eskildsen. Flipped: the gender of book covers. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
Adviser
My thesis examines the online conversation surrounding gendered book covers, particularly in the past few years, including Maureen Johnson's coverflip" experiment from last year. I focus on how dominant culture influences book covers with regard to the gender of the author, and also examine the impact of the conversation about gendered book covers. I primarily use the frameworks of Raymond Williams and Helen Pleasance to discuss the failures of the conversation that dislikes gendered cover art to actually enact any change in the dominant culture that creates and accepts these covers. I argue that participants in that conversation continually use the language of the current dominant culture when discussing aspects of existing book covers, such as the color pink, which frustrates the efforts to move away from gendering book covers from becoming truly emergent because their language feeds back into dominant culture."