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“I’Ve Always Identified With The Women:” How Appalachian Women Ballad Singers’ Repertoire Choices Reflect Their Gendered Concerns, Sara Lynch-Thomason

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how contemporary Appalachian women’s gendered experiences influence their choices of ballad repertoire. This inquiry is pursued through a feminist analysis of interviews with six women ballad singers from Madison County, North Carolina. In evaluating the women’s choices of ballads and their commentary on the songs, this thesis draws upon narratological theories as well as concepts from Appalachian traditional music studies.

This study finds that women’s repertoire preferences reveal contemporary female concerns for physical safety and political agency. The singers also extract hidden transcripts from ballad texts and use ballads to educate audiences about women’s historic oppression. However, …

Bertha Harris' Confessions Of Cherubino: From L'Ecriture Feminine To The Gothic South, Kara Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by her obsession with the South and informed by the liberating socio-political changes born from the 1970s lesbian feminist movement, North Carolinian author Bertha Harris (1937-2005) provides a poetic exploration of Southern Gothic Sapphism in her complex and tormented novel Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Despite fleeting second-wave era recognition as “one of the most stylistically innovative American fiction writers to emerge since Stonewall,” Harris’s innovation remains largely neglected by readers and cultural theorists alike. Nearly all academic engagements with her work, of which there are few, address her 1976 novel Lover. Instead, this thesis focuses on Confessions of Cherubino …

An Intersectional Feminist Perspective Of Emmett Till In Young Adult Literature, Claire Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emmett Till’s murder inspired many novelists, poets, and artists. Recently, Till has inspired several feminist young adult novelists who are introducing his case in an intersectional way to a new generation of readers. The works that I have studied are A Wreath for Emmett Till (2003) by Marilyn Nelson, The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) by Suzanne Collins, and Midnight without a Moon (2017) by Linda Jackson. By examining how the authors employ a feminist perspective, readers can understand how they are striving for a more inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. This is significant because the publishing industry, specifically for Young Adult …