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The Queer Ecology Of Clouds In Nineteenth-Century British Poetics, Lucien Darjeun Meadows

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the nineteenth century, British writers were interested in the emergent science of meteorology, and their lyrical writing (their “poetics”), from poetry to creative and scientific prose, often turns to clouds as both meteorological formations and as material metaphors for human-environment interactions. These writers frequently invoke clouds to disrupt or “queer” depictions of human-environment relationships built on human domination of environmental beings. Clouds, in poetic writing, help writers (and readers) instead experience subject-subject relationships of reciprocity—a collaborative, non-hierarchical way of existing with and learning from our ecological relatives.

Dwelling in the confluence of literary studies, queer studies, and ecology, The …

Vegetal Being: Dreamwork, Ritual, And Performance In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Briana Hanratty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I am writing towards an ecofeminist informed reading of the English version of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith. My aim is to display how, like an ecosystem of complex interdependency, it is impossible to separate body from theory from text from ecological context. To engage with this form of ecofeminism, I center an autotheoretical methodology with voices from ritual theory and performance theory in order to examine how Yeong-hye, the titular vegetarian of Han Kang’s novel, operates as a narrative-level metaphor for the desire for erotic ecology as a mode of ecological and …

Regardless, ‘I’ And ‘You’: Lessons From Black Feminist Literature, Jasmine Veronica Sauceda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple from a Black feminist perspective to demonstrate oneness as capacious being. This project explores an I-You dialogue that works toward future-making through the notion of regardless, an idea from Walker’s definition of Womanist, deployed through sustained engagement with Kevin Quashie’s notion of oneness. Thus, this work extrapolates lessons found in the selected texts to demonstrate what it means to embody a capaciousness of being and how this then fosters healing in the face of trauma. In so doing, …

War Of Words: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Military's Sexual Assault Prevention Posters, Nancy Thurman Clemens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Joining the expanding discourse surrounding language and its effects, specifically regarding the performance of gender in a hypermasculine environment, this dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the United States Department of Defense's sexual assault prevention and response training materials, particularly posters created between 2009 and 2012. This dissertation examines the context of sexual harassment and assault within the military from the late 1970s until the mid-2000s. Presenting scandals that led up to the development of the Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) program, I give a brief history of the establishment and scope of responsibility for the program in …

Material Interactions: Early Modern Women’S Textual Embodiments, Olivia R. Tracy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Material Interactions: Early Modern Women’s Textual Embodiments claims that early modern women writers present embodied constructions of the sensory-domestic—the bodily practices of herbal and culinary labor, which were shared with medical and scientific practices—to locate an ethos at the intersection of medical, scientific and literary discourse communities. Drawing from approaches including ethos-as-location, rhetorical genre, and early modern ecofeminism, my articulation of a sensory-domestic ethos offers new ways to explore the ways writers construct ethos by navigating their individual standpoint, their writing context, and their “acceptable” social labor. My first section argues that early modern women engaged ingredients as agents in …

Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way gender expands and nuances W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness theory, which depicts the African American identity as a doubleness that is both American and Negro. Black feminist criticism’s nuanced formulation of DuBois’s formulation of Black identity allows the African American literary tradition to be seen through three lenses: an American, a Negro, and an African American’s gender identity. In order to further contemporize the pre-existing Black feminist criticism, I examine Hurston, Brooks, and Morrison in the three time periods that followed DuBois’s coining of double consciousness theory: (1) the Harlem Renaissance, (2) the Civil Rights Movement …

Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.

Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …

Flinging The Apron And Tearing The Kerchief: Janie Crawford's Gestures In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Madeline Elizabeth Celley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates protagonist Janie Crawford's development through her use of gesture. As the narrative moves throughout Janie's life, she becomes progressively able to communicate her feelings and desires through the use of her body's movements. By depicting Janie's subjectivity as fundamentally embodied, Hurston indicates an awareness of the cultural oppression Janie suffers, linking her body to those of women in the past that suffered as slaves. She draws attention to Janie's body by relying on her gestures in order to emphasize the …

The Caustic Pen Is Mightiest: A Tradition Of Female Satire In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, And Muriel Spark, Jaclyn Andrea Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Female satirists have long been treated by critics as anomalies within an androcentric genre because of the reticence to acknowledge women's right to express aggression through their writing. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), A House and Its Head (1935), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Jane Austen (1775-1817), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), and Muriel Spark (1918-2006) all combine elements of realism and satire within the vehicle of the domestic novel to target institutions of their patriarchal societies, including marriage and family dynamics, as well as the evolving conceptions of domesticity and femininity, with a subtle feminism. These female satirists illuminate …

The Passions And Self-Esteem In Mary Astell's Early Feminist Prose, Kathleen A. Ahearn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the influence of Cambridge Platonism and materialist philosophy on Mary Astell's early feminism. More specifically, I argue that Astell co-opts Descartes's theory of regulating the passions in his final publication, The Passions of the Soul, to articulate a comprehensive, Enlightenment and body friendly theory of feminine self-esteem that renders her feminism modern. My analysis of Astell's theory of feminine self-esteem follows both textual and contextual cues, thus allowing for a reorientation of her early feminism vis-a-vis contemporary feminist theory. An entire chapter in the dissertation is devoted to Astell's use of Descartes's theory of regulating the …