Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …

Source Credibility And Trust Of Media Information Based On Gender Of Reporter, Madison R. Urse

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

An experiment was used for this study to explore if the gender of a reporter impacts perceived source credibility and thus trust in information. Previous research has shown how gender biases can affect how topics are covered, reported on, perceived and marketed in the journalistic world. Modern media and newsrooms are meant to mirror reality as they convey information to the public, yet women continue to be gatekept out of reporting on certain types of news. Further, changes in the mode of delivery of news are also impacting the journalism landscape. Thus, this study employed a digital stimulus to explore …

The Evolution Of Sunset Magazine's Cooking Department: The Accommodation Of Men's And Women's Cooking In The 1930s, Jennifer Hoolhorst Pagano

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that …

What Is The Role Of Drag Art In Modern Day Spain?, Kevin Ludemann

Honors Projects in Modern Languages

Esta obra sirve para educar mejor al público y desacreditar estereotipos negativos y comunes que las Transformistas enfrentan al examinar el proceso de cómo ha llegado a ser al Transformista moderno. Específicamente, la pieza examina las preguntas “¿Cómo ha influido el arte de transformistas en producciones artísticas a lo largo de la historia Española en el arte de Transformistas en España hoy en día?” y “Cual es la meta, expresión del individualismo, la sátira social, el entretenimiento, o una combinación de los tres?”. La comedia comienza al examinar el papel de travestis en las Comedias que imitan a la sociedad …

Fantastical Body Narratives : Cosplay, Performance, And Gender Diversity., Tiffany M. Hutabarat-Nelson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to explore how the phenomenon of cosplay has been able to produce and sustain a diversity of gender expression due to its emergence from an activity-based community that emphasizes creative play. This creative energy is manifested through cosplay as an active, ritualized practice in which gender diversity is invited to be realized as a distinct possibility, resulting in a display of a full range of masculinities and femininities as well as crossplays and genderbend cosplays. I argue that cosplay can therefore be understood as a phenomenon that destabilizes the gender binary—its active practice promotes the production and …

Performing, Sensing, Being: Queer Identity In Everyday Life, Justin J. Rudnick

Communication Studies Department Publications

Drawing from performance, affect, and queer theories, I explore how queer identity is storied, performed, and sensed in everyday life. I access performance and sensory ethnographic practices to examine how queer persons “do” their identities on a daily basis. I draw from data collected through ethnographic participation in a queer-friendly district of Columbus, Ohio in addition to in-depth interviews with fourteen self-identified queer persons I met through my fieldwork. My approach privileges observations and reflections of mundane moments of everyday life to position queer identity as a routine, repetitive, habitual, and otherwise performative practice. I question the emphasis on verbal …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

A New Kind Of Body Project: Blogging And The American Teen Girl, Sarah E. Beach

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Through a framework of Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s 1997 work, The Body Project, this paper seeks to provide insight into how the American teenage girl’s body project has adapted and changed through the use of online blogging. Brumberg found that over the course of the 20^th century, girls changed their focus from an inner body project to an outer one. The paper uses a sample of 40 blogs, read in the month of April, 2014, and is divided up into four blog types: diary, pro-ana, style, and whole-self. By reading a girl’s online thoughts, readers will gain valuable insights …

The Cookie Jar Dilemma, Kelcy Dolan

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This article explores the possibilities in both men and women’s refusal to take responsibility in the war against rape as well as rape culture. Beginning with Zerlina Maxwell’s viral criticized appearance on the Sean Hannity’s talk show, the article questions not only why responsibility is not taken for rape throughout society, but who is responsible and how. It then moves through this question citing several specific articles, an interview and media sources. The article contemplates whether, patriarchy, masculinity, or even instinctual and primitive thought processes dictate the assumptions and responses to the responsibility in the war against rape.

November Uri Community Diversity Project 2010, Joseph A. Santiago Mr, Riley Davis Ms, Richard V. Travisano Mr

Richard Travisano

November is National Novel Writing Month. For the first time at the University of Rhode Island November was a month for the URI community to share their stories, poems, art, and photos with the world. The Writing to Model Diversity project intends to connect individuals across cultural boundaries and borders by sharing the stories and experiences that challenge our everyday experiences and the dreams of the future. Built on the efforts of the World Voice series, URI presents a book that shares the stories and culture of the students, faculty, staff, and community members who embrace the idea of becoming …

Queer Love In Woolf's Orlando And Chu's Notes Of A Desolate Man, Pei-Wen Clio Kao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Queer Love in Woolf's Orlando and Chu's Notes of a Desolate Man" Pei-Wen Clio Kao analyses Virginia Woolf and T'ien-Wen Chu's novels in the context of gender studies. Kao's reading of Orlando and Notes of a Desolate Man is an elaboration on homosexual sensibilities of both men and women based on the concept of écriture féminine in the context of patriarchy and the former's power of subversion and change. Kao's analysis results in the finding that while Woolf's Orlando is more attuned to the feminist discourse based on an extended Western project in its period and …

Us-American New Women In Italy 1853-1870, Sirpa A. Salenius

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "US-American New Women in Italy 1853-1870" Sirpa A. Salenius discusses the Italian experience of sculptors such as Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis, who were independent, career-oriented women studying and working in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. They were among the most representative New Woman figures who started to challenge US-American society's male-dominant norm and gender-imposed limitations, while reinventing an identity for themselves. Other progressive women, who observed them in Italy, were impressed and influenced by the example of their lives and work. For instance, the influence of Frances Willard's visit to Italy became visible after her return …

Homosexual Identity, Translation, And Prime-Stevenson's Imre And The Intersexes, Margaret S. Breen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Homosexual Identity, Translation, and Prime-Stevenson's Imre and The Intersexes" Margaret S. Breen examines the role of translation in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. Breen's focus is Edward Prime-Stevenson, who, under the penname Xavier Mayne, wrote two works: a short novel, Imre: A Memorandum (1906), and a general history of homosexuality, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem of Social Life (1908). Breen argues that Prime-Stevenson's texts are relevant to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of (homo)sexuality because they point to the importance of translation in writings concerning sexual and gender identities and …

Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats" Gillian Thomson examines the re-negotiation of gender boundaries within Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Hettie Jones's Drive poems; secondary to this is how the male Beats demonstrate a more concrete, dichotomous version of such gender categories. Thomson intend to demonstrate how the women often write themselves into Beat history and how their revised performance of gender modifies the normative tropes regarding females within the Beat enclave. The theoretical backdrop focuses on how language not only records or expresses reality, but also shapes it. This is a decidedly poststructuralist …

November Uri Community Diversity Project 2010, Joseph A. Santiago, Riley Davis, Richard V. Travisano

November Diversity Project

November is National Novel Writing Month. For the first time at the University of Rhode Island November was a month for the URI community to share their stories, poems, art, and photos with the world. The Writing to Model Diversity project intends to connect individuals across cultural boundaries and borders by sharing the stories and experiences that challenge our everyday experiences and the dreams of the future. Built on the efforts of the World Voice series, URI presents a book that shares the stories and culture of the students, faculty, staff, and community members who embrace the idea of becoming …

November Uri Community Diversity Project 2010, Joseph A. Santiago Mr, Riley Davis Ms, Richard V. Travisano Mr

November Diversity Project

November is National Novel Writing Month. For the first time at the University of Rhode Island November was a month for the URI community to share their stories, poems, art, and photos with the world. The Writing to Model Diversity project intends to connect individuals across cultural boundaries and borders by sharing the stories and experiences that challenge our everyday experiences and the dreams of the future. Built on the efforts of the World Voice series, URI presents a book that shares the stories and culture of the students, faculty, staff, and community members who embrace the idea of becoming …

Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …

Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry" Paul Kintzele examines the ways in which Jeanette Winterson's 1989 novel explores and critiques aspects of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging the importance of the performance theory of gender that derives from the work of Judith Butler, Kintzele contends that such an approach must be complemented with a psychoanalytic approach that insists on a particular distinction between sex and gender. Although some scholars map the sex/gender distinction onto the perennial nature/nurture binary and thus reduce sex to biology or anatomy, scholars of psychoanalysis such as Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, read …

Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Sapphic Consciousness in H.D. and de Noailles" Catherine Clark discusses how female modernists, like their male counterparts, re-evaluated their artistic position in relation to the Greeks and Romans as they explored experimental modes of aesthetic and literary expression. However, many women writers at the turn of the century developed a unique palimpsest with their predecessors, specifically Sappho, that deconstructed and destructed conventional approaches to classical legacy and myth. Clark analyzes selected poems by modernists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Anna de Noailles in which they evoke a Hellenistic past and that collapses the artificial constructions of a largely …

Bassani's The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis And Italian "Queers", John Champagne

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Italian 'Queers'" John Champagne argues for a reading of the novel as not gay, but queer. Champagne argues that such a reading strategy emphasizes the ways in which the novel deconstructs normative gender, sexual, and even religious identities in an attempt both to resist the tyranny of the normal and to cope with the trauma of the Italian Shoah. A psycho-analytically inflected queer theory in this instance gives us access to the complexity of the novel's portrayal of Italian Jewish identity in fascist Italy and opens up onto a reflection …

Feminist Publishing Subject Of Wss Program, Daina Dickman

Daina Dickman, MA, MLIS, AHIP

Gender Identities In The Contemporary Slovene Novel, Alojzija Zupan Sosic

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Gender Identities in the Contemporary Slovene Novel," Alojzija Zupan Sosic argues that perspectives of sexual identity have become prominent topics. Based on her library and publication research, Zupan Sosic proposes that in the period of 1990–2005 the Slovene novel is illuminated by a development of the personal or intimate story. In this development, changes of sexual identity evolve through the binary system of the heterosexual matrix whereby issues of sexual minorities remain. Important innovation in the Slovene novel include aspects connected to an identity formation determined by sexual identity where perhaps the most significant innovation is found …

Queer Theory And Discourses Of Desire, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Queer Theory and Discourses of Desire," Louise O. Vasvári proposes that the multiplicity of ways that language constructs -- or silences -- the socially constructed expression of erotic desire is a necessary complement to the study of gendered and of sexual identity. Vasvári contributes to queer theory and its subfield, queer linguistics, with the term "queer" understood as more inclusive and less male-oriented than "gay" where queer theory seeks to read between and outside the lines of the dominant heteronormative discourses that studies how mainstream reproductive heterosexuality comes to be (re)produced through cultural narratives as self-evident, obligatory, …

"Two Guns, A Girl And A Playstation™": Gender In The Tomb Raider Series, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the combination of game play and narrative which combine to produce cross-gender identifications in video games, a previously underexamined potential for the production of alternate genders, one which calls into question the stability of gender, particularly masculinity, as a construct.

Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, And The Queer Closet, Jonathan Alexander, Deborah Meem

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, "Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, and the Queer Closet," Jonathan Alexander and Deborah Meem present and portray an imaginary conversation among an impossible but intriguing group of writers, critics, and fictional characters. These individuals speak in their own (published) voices, which are moderated by the author-facilitators and shaped into an extended rumination on art, the Doppelgänger, queerness, and literary influence. Through their dialogue, the actors reveal a tradition of the queer novel, running in this case from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to Patricia Highsmith's five Tom Ripley books, whereby the closet functions simultaneously as refuge …

Gender And Modernity In The Work Of Hesse And Kazantzakis, Evi Petropoulou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Evi Petropoulou discusses in her article, "Gender and Modernity in the Work of Hesse and Kazantzakis," selected basic tendencies of the modern European novel, in this case pertaining to gender identity and she exemplifies her postulates with an analysis of texts by Hermann Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. She examines the mainly male dominated literary discourse in the work of these authors in light of their theoretical indebtedness to the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel. The study offers new insight into literary representations of gender relations in modernity and how Hesse and Kazantzakis define identity, the self, and otherness.

Two Cheers For Pornography, Steven Sanders

Bridgewater Review

The existence of pornography from the earliest times and in virtually every culture attests to a remarkable universality and persistence. Of course, popularity is no proof of legitimacy. How, if at all, can pornography be justified? This question has no easy answer. Indeed, if one may judge from the controversy, consensus is far from being reached on the question of pornography. I shall suggest some things that can be said in favor of pornography, though I am by no means giving my unqualified endorsement - hence, only two cheers for pornography. Naturally, I expect some readers to disagree with me, …