Digital Commons Network^™

Individual Thought Patterns: Women In New York's Extreme Metal Music Scene, Joan M. Jocson-Singh

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme metal music (EMM) is both an umbrella term and a sub-category of heavy metal. Although women have a small but steady presence in heavy metal, this number shrinks when applied to the EMM scene. Using ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews, this study surveys women in New York's EMM scene to address participation, gender performativity and feminist musicology.

Private Conversation, Gahee Park

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper "Private Conversation" discusses the themes, contexts, and influences relevant to paintings and drawings I made during my MFA studies.

Desire And Fantasy Between Commercialism And Personal Room, Yukimi Otagiri

Theses and Dissertations

I apply two aspects of my life history to my art; my childhood experiences and my advanced studies in sociology. My work therefore combines a highly personal reading of my experiences of social interactions and my ongoing analysis of the nature of capitalism and socialism, commodification and media, especially in regard to the experiences of women in particular and consumers in general.

Why The Business Of Love Is Bull$Hit, Deanne Gaston

Capstones

This is a narrative piece about the experience I had when I became a love guru/advice columnist.

Link: https://deannegaston.atavist.com/why-the-business-of-love-is-bullshit

Toxic Toys, Bad Vibrations, Samantha Lee

Capstones

The global sex toy industry is worth a full $15 billion, and approximately half of America's adult population have previously incorporated a vibrator into sexual play. And yet, despite sex toys’ ubiquity in the boudoir, no local or federal authorities have taken on the mantle of regulating the safety of sex toys -- some of which have been reported to break during use, electrocute its user, or even leach poisonous chemicals.

In the absence of regulatory strictures, can sex educators, toy manufacturers, and adult store owners ensure adult products are safe enough for a growing customer base?

This narrative takes …

Lgbt In Colombia: A War Within, Monica Espitia

Capstones

On the surface, Colombia appears to be at the vanguard of the gay rights movement, having extended legal rights to same-sex couples and transgender people in recent years. But for many of the nearly five million Colombians who are LGBT, these rights have been largely meaningless as a result of the deep-rooted prejudice that often results in violence.

Gay, lesbian and transgender Colombians have been actively persecuted by armed groups involved in Colombia’s decades-long civil war. Members of the LGBT community are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be threatened and abused by both legal …

Genres Of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, And Community, 1970-1983, Meredith A. Benjamin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The desire to record lives and the conviction that such recordings would serve an important purpose for other women were the motivations behind much of the autobiographical writing in U.S. feminist writing of the 1970s and 80s. In Genres of Feminist Lives: Autobiography, Archives, and Community, 1970-1983, I argue that feminist writers in this period used autobiographical writing to create a sense of community among their readers: a new feminist public. Realizing the inadequacy of a sense of identification, these writers encouraged their audiences, in the words of Audre Lorde, to transform silence into language and action. While scholars …

Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who …

‘Open, And Always, Opening’: Trans- Poetics As A Methodology For (Re)Articulating Gender, The Body, And The Self ‘Beyond Language’, Lizzy Tricano Kaval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Poetry is a useful medium for exploring the fluidity and possibilities in language beyond the everyday terms of normative language. For trans- and genderqueer subjects, whose identities cannot be articulated within the linguistic boundaries of binary gender, and whose outward appearance challenges the cultural logic of gendered visibility, poetry becomes a valuable and necessary tool for survival, disruption, activism, and personal and public empowerment. Through syntax, word choice, semantic and non-semantic qualities of language, poetry helps articulate the inexpressible, complex, and unstable gender identities and subject positions, even as they change or multiply. It gives names to felt ideas, which …

The Bodies, Minds, Desires And Scorn Of Britain's "Stepdaughters Of War", Alexandra J. Lightle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis revolves around Evadne Price’s novel, Not So Quiet… Stepdaughters of War, published in 1930 under the pen name Helen Zenna Smith. The book delves into the inner life of a young female driver in a voluntary ambulance corps in France during World War I. Throughout the novel the reader is witness to the hardships of young women who left their sheltered drawing rooms only to be plunged into the apocalyptic landscape of the Western Front. They were ill informed as to what they were volunteering for and they struggled desperately to cope with the heretofore unimagined carnage. …

Between Life And Literature: The Influence Of Don Quixote And Madame Bovary On Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction, Victoria Tomasulo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo-American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue …

A Comparative Perspective Between Farc Guerrilleras And Chechen Black Widows, Denise Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will explore the similar and different characteristics between Colombian female combatants who are members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and the Chechen female suicide bombers who joined the Chechen insurgency movement. It shall provide a brief historical background of how the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, and the Chechen insurgency movement ascended into prominence during civil conflicts in Colombia and Chechnya respectively. It will discuss how many women in both countries would pursue a different form of activism and defy patriarchal norms by engaging in acts of violence in the name …

“Vital Glowing Things”: The Art Of Women’S Writing, 1910-1935, Elizabeth C. Decker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rising field of new modernisms continues to breathe new life into the literature of marginalized writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. By imagining modernism as a series of modes and strategies, and expanding the axes upon which we map modernism’s boundaries, we make way for writers who were shut out by the often imbalanced, limited modernism of the past and illuminate the field with new possibilities. This dissertation takes part in this exciting, vibrant conversation by identifying a mode of modernism present in the literature of three early twentieth-century women writers, who all used visual art techniques to …

Masculinidades En Crisis Y Prácticas De Resistencia Feminista En La Literatura Y El Cine Españoles De Autoría Femenina, Carmen Sanchis-Sinisterra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the representation of masculinity in crisis in films and novels by contemporary female authors of Spain. The films are El último viaje de Robert Rylands by Gracia Querejeta, Te doy mis ojos by Iciar Bollaín and La vida sin mí by Isabel Coixet. The novels are Amado amo by Rosa Montero, Los aires difíciles by Almudena Grandes and La conquista del aire by Belén Gopegui. The question this dissertation asks is if by introducing male characters that lack power, control and success the works promote practices of feminist resistance. The answer is that they do but, as …

In Search Of Argentinidad: Identity Affirming Bodies In Movement In Latino-America, Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a multi-sited investigation into the production of Argentinidad (the embodied feeling of Argentine national identity) post the economic crisis of 2001 known as el Argentinazo. A special attention is paid to the role of the body as a culturally and socially mediated site of identity formation. Additionally, this project engages with the intersections of cultural and psychoanalytic theories that have influenced Argentinean self-identity in addition to social identities that are negotiated in moments of personal and national crisis. This project examines the roles and relationships of family and migration within Argentinean diasporic communities originating from the Provinces …

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

How To Be A French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant, Paul J. Fadoul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900’s to the mid1930’s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate …

Feeling Political: Affect, Emotion, And Ethics In Western Political Theory, John Mcmahon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What conceptual and methodological resources would it take for political theory to be able to more deeply analyze the emotional and affective dimensions of political life? In this dissertation, I articulate interdisciplinary work on affect and emotion into political theory in order to realize four linked objectives: first, to develop a method of reading and interpreting political theory capable of tracing the theoretical work done by affect and emotion in works of political thought; second, to reassess the boundaries of the political theory canon in terms of the thinkers that ‘count’ as part of that canon as well as the …

Accessing Academe, Disabling The Curriculum: Institutional Locations Of Dis/Ability In Public Higher Education, Andrew J. Lucchesi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The field of Disability Studies has long committed itself to the project of making American colleges and universities more accessible places for disabled faculty, staff, and students. Indeed, many of the field of early ideological roots of the discipline of Disability Studies (DS) emerged from campus-based activist movements. This influence has impacted the ways DS scholars continue to frame their intellectual labor as a progressive public good. In recent years, composition/rhetoric scholars have begun applying DS approaches to questions of pedagogical and professional access as well. These critiques have drawn attention the ways teaching practice, administrative policy, and other aspects …

Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of …

Help-Seeking Latina Victims Of Domestic Violence And The Programs That Serve Them In New York City, Yolanda Ortiz-Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Domestic violence has impacted, and continues to impact the lives of many women. Although impacted by domestic violence, all women may not experience domestic violence in the same way.

The purpose of this research was to explore differences that may exist between help-seeking foreign-born Latina and help-seeking U.S-born Latina victims of domestic violence. Using a purposeful sample of 32 help-seeking Latinas who were actively receiving services in one of the many domestic violence programs in New York City, the researcher set out to explore differences in use of services, experiences with domestic violence, perceptions of domestic violence, and satisfaction with …

An Alliance Of Ladies: Power, Public Affairs, And Class Construction In Early National New York City, Alisa J. Wade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation studies elite women’s political consciousness in New York City between 1783 and 1815, contextualizing women’s position within the city’s social strata and the rise of market capitalism in the post-Revolutionary era. In a period of deferential politics, women within the leadership class played a unique role in remodeling the structure of republican government and determining who belonged within it. Building on the foundation of learned femininity, they constructed the etiquette that undergirded men’s political careers and oversaw the marriage market. They mediated divisions between new merchant capital and more established landed wealth, reinforcing dynastic stability. Moreover, they were …

Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …

Queering By Example: Sex Education In The Age Of Vlogging, Zoe M. Simpson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 1990s saw the rise of third wave feminism, queer theory and the digital age. This paper looks at how the three come together in YouTube video bloggers’ promotion of queer sex-positive ideology. Sex positivism is the belief that all safe, consensual sex is healthy, while queer theory emphasizes the diversity and instability of sex and gender identities. YouTube vloggers engaged in life-streaming profit from the entertainment value of revealing personal sexual information while framing their sexual revelations as healthy, shame-free sex positivism. In doing so, they also put their unique and sometimes changing sexualities on public display, in effect …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

"Follow The Bodies": (Re)Materializing Difference In The Era Of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Briana Grace Brickley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in …

Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils Of Paranoia In A Neocolonial Security State, Rachel J. Liebert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What follows is a feminist, decolonial experiment to map the un/settling circulation of paranoia – how it is done, what it does, what it could do – within contemporary conditions of US white supremacy. Drawing on participant observation, interviewing, scientific artifacts, reflexive journaling, and a public art project, I enter white supremacy through a burgeoning form of pre-emptive psy to capture ‘the prodrome’ – a stage-cum-population-cum-figure at the center of a transnational program of research to identify and intervene on ‘pre-psychosis’. I argue that this nascent, contested, and accelerating movement is enacting a contemporary transition from …

Christ The Queer: Gender And Sexuality In Scorsese's "The Last Temptation Of Christ", Stephen Barnett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although great strides have been made since the landmark 1969 Stonewall Riots in liberating queer equal rights, both politically and societally, there are still prevalent belief systems in strong opposition to those human rights of gender and sexuality. Biblical religion, through its various monotheistic faiths and denominations, continues to condemn queer as a sin against God because, they argue, God, (through the text of the Bible written solely by men), defines queer as an abomination. Yet, the Book of Genesis queers human gender and sexuality through its narrative of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, the first …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …