Digital Commons Network^™

Social Spaces, Places, And Substance Use In Shaping Queer Identities, Alessandra Milagros Early

Dissertations

Research has suggested that queer people may be more likely than their cisgender heterosexual counterparts to use substances. Largely, these higher rates are commonly explained through frameworks of victimization or (ab)use that render substance use as a form of coping or inherently problematic. While some queer people do use substances to cope, the social spaces, places, and contexts in which use often occurs are often obscured or ignored. More recently, contemporary queer criminologists have explored queer substance use and have considered how it is intimately linked to social space, place, identity formation, and community building. This dissertation draws from queer …

Men, Women, And Italians: The Masquerade Of Narrative And Identity In Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Ruth A. Holmes

English Theses & Dissertations

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement …

Trans* Streamers On Twitch.Tv: The Intersections Of Gender And Digital Labor, R. Lawson

Theses and Dissertations

Twitch.tv is a live entertainment platform where individuals live stream events, including playing video games, playing board and tabletop games, creating art, and more. Twitch has a diverse base of streamers, but Twitch has just begun. The most common approach has focused on cisgender, heterosexual white men in the cases where it has been studied. Though these streamers should be studied in sociology, this focus leaves out the experiences of both cis women and Trans* streamers. This research proposal tries to situate the relationship of Trans* streamers with both the platform and their audience, seeing if these relationships affect their …

Insane Asylums In Britain During The Nineteenth Century, Jeanna Mankins

History Theses

This thesis analyzes insane asylums, in Britain, during the nineteenth century and argues that government, society, and gender had a profound impact on insane asylums and determined the quality of care that female and male patients received as a consequence.

Unended Middle Passage: The Exhausted Flesh Of A Resistant Enslaved Woman, Yipu Su

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The supine position that characterized the existence of the captive Africans on the slave ship, “The Brookes,” haunted the two female autobiographers of the two mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives/autobiographies this essay discusses. Both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs voluntarily adopted the supine position as their status of living when resisting sexual violence in slavery, which nevertheless exhausted their flesh. This essay draws on Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh/body antithesis and Saidiya V. Hartman’s theory of gender construction in slavery to discuss the nature of intended exhaustion. This essay examines to what extent was the strategy of intended exhaustion efficient for both …

Sweetness And Femininity: Fashioning Gendered Appetite In The Victorian Age, Michael Krondl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since at least the nineteenth century sweetness and a preference for sweet foods has been linked to femininity. Western, middle-class women learned and reproduced normative gendered dietary behavior due to both private and public pressure to control their appetites and those of their children. In performing their gendered roles, they came to embody them through everyday rituals such as teatime. Sugary foods and drinks served as necessary props in these performances. Theorists, most prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began to propose a linkage of sweet foods with femininity in the seventeen hundreds. In the following century, the medical profession explained women’s tastes …

Divinity School: A Novel, Ella Marie Schmidt

Honors Projects

I wrote Divinity School, an Honors Project for the Department of English, under the auspices of my project advisor, Professor Anthony Walton, and my readers, Professors Marilyn Reizbaum, Ann Kibbie, and Aaron Kitch. Divinity School is a novel whose conflicts are religious, generational, and familial. Set mostly in Hoboken, New Jersey with vignettes in Manhattan, Vienna, the west coast of Ireland, and an anonymous New England college town, it is the story of one family and the open secrets that keep them apart. Hal Macpherson is a Divinity School professor uged into premature retirement by allegations of misconduct; his …

The Impact Of Religion On Gender, Sexuality, And Abortion Politics: A Comparative Study Of Northern Ireland And The Republic Of Ireland., Sabrina L. Collins

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Over time, organized religion has impacted many aspects of societies across the globe. In this study, I focus on the island of Ireland – a clear case study with a history of sectarian religious divides that play out in a democratic society. Through my analysis I find that religion has operated quite differently on both sides of the Irish border as it relates to public opinion on abortion, sexuality, and gender roles. Specifically, there are striking cross-national differences regarding the importance of religious group identity compared to levels of personal religiosity in shaping public opinion on the issues studied.

To …

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

“She Was A Disgrace To Her Sex” : Prostitution And Moral Panic In London, Ontario, 1880-1885, Margaret E. Ross

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the lives and work of prostitutes in London, Ontario, from 1880 to 1885. The city’s sex trade was shaped by class, and women worked in upscale houses of ill-fame, disorderly houses, or on the streets. Prostitutes performed domestic and sexual labour in the same spaces, and their daughters often entered the sex trade, creating a multi-generational profession. In addition to class, a woman’s race and age shaped her experience in sex work and ability to protect her labour interests from local authorities. Sex workers increasingly became the target of repressive reform efforts from the city’s elites. Late-nineteenth …

Thalassic: Women, Gender, And The Sublime In Relation To Marine Art, Kelsy Patnaude

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

The sea may be regarded as a source of tranquility as well as one of unsettling trepidation, ambiguous even in its representation. Those who are called to it must be relentless in the face of uncertainty; what awaits them is the immeasurable sublime. Defined in art as a reference to greatness beyond all possibility of control, the sublime invokes an urge to pursue pleasurable terror in the unmanageable. On heavily trafficked and dangerous seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strict gender hierarchy of authority on board ships in seafaring industries was solidified. Thus, the dominance of the male …

The Natural Mother Of The Child, Krys Belc

All NMU Master's Theses

The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir-in-essays about Belc’s experiences as a transmasculine birth parent. These essays use text and images to explore parenting on the margins of both motherhood and fatherhood. They also examine the ways in which legal and identity documents are limiting in their ability to describe gender and family. Topics explored include pregnancy, birth, lactation, masculinity, top surgery, medical transition, the meaning of biological relationships between parents and children, and microaggressions against transgender people.

Experiences Of Egyptian Female Journalists With Workplace Gender Discrimination, Mai Ismail

Theses and Dissertations

There is an upward trend in the employment of women in the media worldwide and in the Middle East. Despite their growing presence, women working in the industry continue to experience discrimination, gendered practices and sexist attitudes at the workplaces. This study examines the experiences of Egyptian women journalists. It employs a qualitative approach, building on in-depth interviews conducted with twenty early- to mid-career Egyptian female journalists. These work in state-run, private and independent news organizations whether in print, broadcast or online media. The analysis shows that the experience of female journalists is linked to various factors pertaining to the …

Inharmonic Resonance: Music And Temporality In Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Sarah Elizabeth Cash

Open Access Dissertations

This project examines the way nineteenth century authors use music in their work to complicate social expectations and hierarchies. These authors use music as a fluid metaphor for subversive possibilities that work against hegemonic readings of the text. By “music” I mean representations of people playing and listening to music, discussions of music in text, and the production of musicality through language. I posit that music confounds its own seemingly measured structure through the nature and movement of sound. Thus, “music” can operate in written text as a non-linear and non-cyclical temporal sound space, revealing cracks or ruptures in dominant …

Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford

Doctoral Dissertations

Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …

Frida's Daughter, Myrta Vida

Theses

The purpose of my creative writing is to highlight a group of U.S. citizens still woefully underrepresented in literature proper: the Latinx middle class. I’m keenly interested in exploring Puerto Rican and first- and second-generation Latinx immigrant stories. Even though some of the experiences from these groups have been elegantly visited by writers such as Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, and others, there are nuances to the Latinx middle class experience that are yet to be uncovered. Being stuck in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, and political middles in a country that has recently taken a largely nationalist …

I Hate It, But I Can't Stop: The Romanticization Of Intimate Partner Abuse In Young Adult Retellings Of Wuthering Heights, Brianna R. Zgodinski

ETD Archive

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte’s novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine’s rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show …

Gender Reflections: A Reconsideration Of Pictish Mirror And Comb Symbols, Traci N. Billings

Theses and Dissertations

The interpretation of prehistoric iconography is complicated by the tendency to project

contemporary male/female gender dichotomies into the past. Pictish monumental stone sculpture

in Scotland has been studied over the last 100 years. Traditionally, mirror and comb symbols

found on some stones produced in Scotland between AD 400 and AD 900 have been interpreted

as being associated exclusively with women and/or the female gender. This thesis re-examines

this assumption in light of more recent work to offer a new interpretation of Pictish mirror and

comb symbols and to suggest a larger context for their possible meaning. Utilizing the Canmore

database, …

Prudery And Perversion: Domination Of The Sexual Body In Middle-Class Men, Women, And Disenfranchised Bodies In Victorian England, Ashley Barnett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research argues that with the rise of the middle-class, Victorian England saw the development of a power model in which middle-class men, middle-class women and disenfranchised bodies of children and lower-class women suffered from the demands of bodily domination. Because the bodily health of middle-class men was believed to represent national health, it was imperative that he dominate his body, particularly with regard to sexual urges. Consequently, the bodies of women with whom he sought sexual release suffered from forms of bodily domination as well. Through an analysis of journals and private writings of those living in Victorian England, …

Establishing Female Resistance As Tradition In Country Music: Towards A More Refined Discourse, Catherine Keron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzes facets of resistance in the lyrics of female country music performers and explores how their articulations of female resistance draw on and rework Appalachian folk traditions within country music. Beginning with the musical practices of Appalachian women, who used music to lament their lives restricted by domestic responsibilities, this thesis examines expressions of female resistance through lyrical analysis, with a concentration on female country performers from 1995 to the present. Despite evolving into a performance tradition, female resistance in country music continues to address the lived experiences of its female audience. As such, the female resistance tradition …

Queer Literary Criticism And The Biographical Fallacy, Shawna Lipton

Theses and Dissertations

“Queer Literary Criticism and the Biographical Fallacy” engages with three fields of inquiry within literary studies: queer literary criticism, modernist studies, and author theory. By looking at the critical reception of four iconic queer modernist authors – Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf– this dissertation reinvestigates the relation between criticism and the figure of the author. Queer criticism-- despite its fundamental critique of identity—relies on the identity of the author when it blurs the distinction between the literary text and the author’s biography. Ultimately this work provides a deeper understanding of the queer relation to the modernist …

The Best Poor Man's Country?: William Penn, Quakers, And Unfree Labor In Atlantic Pennsylvania, Peter B. Kotowski

Dissertations

William Penn’s writings famously emphasized notions of egalitarianism, just governance, and moderation in economic pursuits. Twentieth-century scholars took Penn’s rhetoric at his word and interpreted colonial Pennsylvania as nothing less than “the best poor man’s country,” as reflected in the title of one of the most popular histories of the colony. They also imagined a world where all men had access to economic opportunity and lived free from the barbarity endemic to Atlantic world colonies. Despite this halcyon vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, the reality was the opposite: a colony where religious convictions justified what we today (and radicals then) …

The Role Of Education In The Assimilation Of Romani Women In The United States, Melanie Covert

Sociology Theses

The Romani are a largely unknown people group in the United States though their plight world-wide is highly visible. The story of Romani in the United States remains largely untold. This study explored the daily lives of 15 Romani women within the United States. The study investigated questions of historical prejudice, gender roles, educational achievement and barriers to assimilation with in the Romani community. Results of the study highlighted that many Romani women encounter significant barriers inside and outside of their communities that impact their ability to pursue higher education and to fully assimilate into mainstream society due to current …

The Spectacle Of Orphanhood: Reimagining Orphans In Postbellum Fiction, Afrin Zeenat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Orphan iconography has always been deployed in American literature and culture, but nineteenth-century American literature, fiction in particular, abounds in orphans, both real and imaginary. The orphan’s amphibious nature is hailed and demonized as the epitome of individualism and unbridled freedom, and also as the location of society’s anxiety. This complicated and conflicted construction of orphans animates the Social and cultural realm in postbellum America, foregrounding issues of class, race, and gender.

"Murderous Mania": Gender And Homicide In Milwaukee Newspapers, 1840-1900, Kadie Kroening Seitz

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the ways in which Milwaukee's newspapers used gender norms to make sense of acts of murder during the nineteenth century. First, women victims of men's violence are examined, particularly through the lenses of ethnicity, class and race. Women victims who did not fit into middle class gender norms were less likely to be portrayed as "beautiful female murder victims." Then, women perpetrators of violence (not exclusively against men) are discussed, including a specific examination of women's use of an insanity defense. Newspaper tropes used to describe women's motivations for filicide are also examined, and found to vary …

Bet Lee: An American Civil War Novella, Tamara J. Lafountain

MAIS Projects and Theses

An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the American Civil War. Though the war ended nearly 150 years ago and over 65,000 books have covered every aspect of the subject in that time, only a handful of recent works have explored the subject of the female civil war soldier. The vast majority of these women lived in secret; and, since secrets kept are difficult to research, it is likely that the published historical studies on the subject have found all that can be discovered (Leonard, 1999; Cooke and Blanton, 2002; Hall, 2006). This novella takes what …

“I’M A Jesus Feminist”: Understandings Of Faith, Gender, And Feminism Among Christian Women, Megan Pritchett

Scripps Senior Theses

The emergence of the Christian Right and the feminist movement in the mid-to-late 20th century have had a significant impact on the political, psychological, and social landscape of the U.S., and this is especially true for Christian women who sit at the cross-roads of these movements. To understand the context surrounding this group, I examine different areas of sociological literature: the primacy of gender and religion in identity formation, Christian marriage and gender roles, the “culture wars” of the Christian Right, and a brief overview of feminist theory. Utilizing qualitative research methods, I interviewed 13 self-identified Christian women to learn …