Digital Commons Network^™

Building The Body, Jasmine Flowers

Masters Theses

Bodies and space co-produce each other and the process of co-production originates racializing and gendering work.

The concept, thesis, and subsequent design are informed by the historical context around the House for Josephine Baker by Adolf Loos. Presented here is the culmination of research which grounds itself in the relationship between Primitivism and Modernism, theory on the body and flesh, architectural graphic standards, spectacle, gaze, surveillance, hypervisibility, invisibility, implications of privacy versus publicity, expressions of Blackness and its place in femmehood (a neologism that expands “womanhood” to be trans-inclusive), all of which directly engage in co-production.

This co-production changes how …

Film Women Violence, Madison R. Ross

Masters Theses

As a condensed version of social reality, film has become a more common object of modern sociological and criminological investigation. As such, we can explore film to understand taken-for-granted as well as innovative constructions of social phenomena. Among these are gendered violence. We can use film to dig deep into its logics, elaborated in visual and narrative representations. Prior literature has analyzed crime films and the behavioral constructions within them, outlining the representations of serial homicide, rape, mass shootings and revenge. However, few studies have outlined films that do meaningful, non-voyeuristic representational work on the issue of violence against …

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …

Japanese Pronoun Adventure: A Japanese Language Learner's Exploration Of His Japanese Gender Pronoun, Takumi Nakano

Masters Theses

In Japanese, there are various kinds of first-person pronouns, and some of them express the referent’s gender identity. Gender-neutral pronouns are made in English- speaking world day by day, but there is not any common first-person pronoun which indicates the gender identity that positions the referent’s gender somewhere between masculine and feminine. The present paper conducted a life story research on the “Japanese life” of an advanced learner of Japanese at a university in the United States who has been exploring his gender identity by coining and using a new Japanese first- person pronoun 㛪 ore, which indicates “in the …

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …

Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, And Anxiety In Parsifal, Tyler Cole Mitchell

Masters Theses

Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered …

Content Analysis Of Social Tags On Intersectionality For Works On Asian Women: An Exploratory Study Of Librarything, Sheetija Kathuria

Masters Theses

This study explores how the social tags are employed by users of LibraryThing, a popular web 2.0 social networking site for cataloging books, to describe works on Asian women in representing themes within the context of intersectionality. Background literature in the domain of subject description of works has focused on race and gender representation within traditional controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). This study explores themes related to intersectionality in order to analyze how users construct meaning in their social tags. The collection of works used to search for social tags came from the Association …