This panel on “Contested Power: Gender Relations in Literature” draws together three papers by senior English majors. Laura Mathias explores parallels between Nabokov’s Lolita and the earlier “cult of the girl” among British Decadent writers of the 1890s. Rachel Patterson investigates the presence of a queer sadomasochism in the relationships between mistresses and female slaves in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondswoman’s Narrative. In her paper, Dodie Slaton examines the escaped slave Frederick Douglass’s inability to transcend his gendered understanding of female bodies.