Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

The Perfect Model: Exploring Gender Differences Within Commercial Graphic Design Preferences, Adeline Roberts

Undergraduate Theses

Personal preferences within graphic design are heavily shaped by social factors, including cultural practices. This project explores the effect of gendered-based experiences on visual design preferences, through investigating men’s and women’s preferences regarding graphic design elements, and the source of these opinions. The data was then used to create two educational images, which mimic contemporary magazine covers, visually illustrating the effects of gendered marketing and experiences on personal design preferences. These images were then attached to an interactive website, so that the findings and pieces from this project can be easily accessed by future audiences.

Cross-Pollination: Building A Co-Taught Course To Examine Art And Sex Through The Lens Of Botany, Christopher T. Martine, Diamanda A. Zizis, Anna K. Kell

Faculty Journal Articles

Driven by overlapping interests in plants, art, and diversity in sex expression, Anna Kell (Department of Art and Art History) and Chris Martine (Department of Biology) developed a course that integrates the perspectives of a visual artist and a botanist. Art & Sex Through the Lens of Botany seeks to impart the importance of making connections across disciplines and the value of visual literacy across academic lines. The course introduces foundational concepts in each field and encourages students to integrate and explore these different systems of knowledge and their intersections. In addition to developing fluencies related to both general botany …

Finding Identities: Identities In Video Games From A Gender, Race, And Identity Representation, Osayame Erinmwingbovo

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

In this paper I will bring light to the exploration of gender, race, and identity in video games. While also having a focus on how the representation crosses with social and cultural contexts. I will be researching different games from many different genres, which will show light to the way video games reflect and shape societal attitudes towards gender, race, and identity. When using close textual analysis and theoretical framework from topics that include critical race theory, media, and feminist theory. This research will help to seek to explore the nuances and complexities of representation in gaming which implicates video …

My Gender In The Closet, Aspen Balducci

Student Sequential Art and Comics

This book details the transitioning and rediscovery of gender from a single person's perspective. Gender is not linear or binary, something all people should be free to study and discover.

Suffering Juicebox, Janelle O'Malley

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

Suffering Juicebox investigates the confluences of nostalgia, trauma and identity making by means of sculpture and performance. Creating pieces with built layers of material and found objects Suffering Juicebox takes shape through collecting, forming, layering, petrifying, erasing and reimagining. Pieces are assembled into scenes attempting to rebuild what cannot be obtained. The objects collected and used are metaphors for the memories we accumulate.

Suffering Juicebox explores how gender and identity are created through layers of memory, nostalgia and trauma. Nostalgia’s etymology comes from the greek words nostos meaning “return home” and algos meaning “pain”, and together the word means homesickness. …

From Sins Of The Cities Of The Plain To Letters From Laura And Eveline: Boulton, Park, And Pornography’S Reaction To Transmisogyny, Daniel Falco

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis builds on the emerging work of scholars who view pornography as literature with sociocultural relevance and adds to trans scholarship through a dissection of gender construction and transmisogyny in a Victorian underground subversive culture. Centering the 1883 erotic novel Letters from Laura and Eveline, I examine how language and biology are unfixed to highlight fluidity within queer sex and gender, and how this helps the novel evade the taxonomical-obsessed era in which it was produced. I examine its roots in the real historical figures of Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park, two crossdressers who were arrested a …

In Shame I Will Find Paradise, Taehee Whang

Theses and Dissertations

As a Korean American non-binary digital artist and designer, my recent explorations have focused on using voice as a medium to articulate nuanced feelings of displacement and the intricate relationships between language, identity, and expression. This journey expands beyond my personal experiences with gender dysphoria, delving into the lives of non-binary and transgender individuals undergoing gender-affirming voice therapy. Through my thesis research, I have developed interactive multimedia installations inspired by dialogues with individuals such as Umico Niwa, who traveled to Korea for voice feminization surgery, and Jeong Yoon Lee from Hyperlink Press, a four-year participant in Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). …