Digital Commons Network^™

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption In English Restoration Literature, Shawn Watkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unruly Matter: Masculine Consumption in English Restoration Literature

Over the past several decades, material culture scholars working within the “Long 18^th Century” have identified how the figure of the woman consumer became an ideological nodal point that registered new enthusiasm for emerging economic dynamics (mercantilism, nascent capitalism, etc.) while also expressing masculine anxieties about consumerism and the role of consumable goods in English society. Although many scholars have noted that men functioned symbolically and ideologically as English society’s primary consumers of material goods in the later 17^th century, there is no scholarly work that aims to describe the …

Unpresentable Members: The Theology And Radical Phenomenology Of The Sexual Flesh, Justin Pearl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unpresentable Members begins with a wager: that a proper account of the flesh and its sexual character may not only prove philosophically fertile within its own limited domain, but may also provide insight into the theological question of the proper role and place of gender and sexual difference within communities, particularly Christian religious communities. In this regard, this dissertation has two distinct goals: one phenomenological and one theological. Phenomenologically, it offers an account of the manifestation of concrete sexual determinations not only as they objectively appear across the “body-object” (Körper, le corps) but with equal importance as …

(Un)Bound : Disrupting Notions., Reid Broadstreet

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

(un) bound: disrupting notions is a selection of art work that explores gender identity through the act of interpellation and the semiotics of clothing. The project aims to clearly define how concepts of “gender” and “sex” function in our language and, in turn, how the binary terms of these concepts (man/woman; male/female) enforce our genders rather than express them. Clothing is a particularly productive form for this investigation because clothing is often the way we express our gender, and yet it is also often produced for us along strict, socially-prescribed gender lines. Typically, conversations around gender are very black …

"Ocular Proof": Race, Religion, And Gender In The Merchant Of Venice And Othello, Edward A. Cooper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project is a study of the development of early modern racial categories in England - focusing on religion and skin color as primary modes of demarcation interwoven with other prevalent categories of language, ancestry/blood, nationality, and gender - as illuminated in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Religion and skin color, then, are the primary modes of racializing individuals in early modern England and characters in Shakespeare's works. This essay studies the context of racial difference as present in English and European rhetoric, art, theater, and exploration. Given this context, the paper explores the poetic geography …