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Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan Sep 2020

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …


Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert Jul 2020

Affective Histories Of Southern Trauma: Shame, Healing, And Vulnerability In Us Southern Women’S Writing, 1975–2006, Faune Albert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the affective impacts of historical trauma around slavery and segregation in the US South, arguing for the importance of understanding US Southern history through the ways in which it has lived and continues to live in and on the bodies of Southerners marked by race and gender and class and within emotional life in the South. The texts in this study—Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1988), Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels (1992), and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006)—engage the affective impacts of intergenerational and insidious trauma through portrayals of Southern women struggling to give voice …


Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer Jul 2020

Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary theorists like Hélène Cixous and other French feminists have written about l’écriture feminine, a deconstructive force which allows female writers more freedom from male-dominated areas. Because Christianity has been historically male-dominated, Christian women have long used this idea to great effect, using their writing as a space in which they are free to assert power and authority. Mormonism, which arose in the 1830s during the Second Great Awakening, has grown to reinforce a patriarchal model for both family and church leadership, making Cixous’ separate space of writing necessary for Mormon women of the twenty-first century. The Mormon poet …


"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain May 2020

"Monsters In Suburbia": Women's Bodies, Monstrosity, And Motherhood In The Mere Wife, Claire M. Bonvillain

Honors Theses

This thesis explores themes of monstrosity in Maria Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife in connection with issues of women's bodies and feminism. It analyzes prominent female characters in the novel and the relationships of their bodies to patriarchal authority, showing how and why bodies are deemed monstrous. It discusses the role that motherhood plays in patriarchal society, as well as explores alternatives that the novel offers to this system.


“That Confusion Of Who Is Who, Flesh And Flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, And The Body In Postwar And Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Renee Blevins Apr 2020

“That Confusion Of Who Is Who, Flesh And Flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, And The Body In Postwar And Contemporary American Literature, Jennifer Renee Blevins

Theses and Dissertations

In “That confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh”: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature, I investigate how the body limits, disrupts, ruptures, or recuperates the mother/daughter relationship in postwar and contemporary texts by twentieth-century US women writers. These narratives portray the construction of female subjectivity when the feminine self seems insufficiently distinct from the mother (or daughter). In four chapters arranged chronologically by decade, I examine texts by Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Edwidge Danticat. On the one hand, mothers in these texts …


Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath Feb 2020

Voice, Choice, And ( Material ) Agency: The Sexualized Feminine Body In Young Adult Literature, Tharini Viswanath

Theses and Dissertations

My study unites two disparate strands of feminist theory: the linguistic, which emphasizes the relationship between language and power, and the material, which argues that the human body has its own agency. I raise three main points. First, I contend that the sexualized feminine body is the site of neither the linguistic nor the material independent of one another, but both the linguistic and the material existing in a state of fluidity and interdependency, which combine to grant the young female character agency. Second, I contend that feminist novels should not only have strong female characters, but that they should …


Letter Blocks, Lukas Graham Hemmer Jan 2020

Letter Blocks, Lukas Graham Hemmer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of prose and poetry exploring language as a material object.