Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …

Tectonic, Rebecca E. Holifield

Honors Theses

Tectonic is a collection of original poems accompanied by a critical preface.

A Legacy Through Carnations, Tara Pulaski

Oswald Research and Creativity Competition

The short story, "A Legacy Through Carnations," details the unique experiences of two very different women, Martha Carrier and Lillian Carrier. Martha is subjected to the religious prosecution of seventeen-century Salem, whereas Lillian is abused by her twenty-first century boyfriend. Despite the gap between their stories, the women are connected through time and space by the injustices they face at the hands of men. Thus, the short story aims to show that modern women still face many abuses and hardships, even if they don't seem quite as apparent as those of the past.

Ang Tula, Ang Katawan, At Ang Dahas Sa Panitikan: Isang Pagbasa Sa Panitikang Bunga Ng Insidente Ng Sexual Harassment Sa Loob Ng Inww, Martina M. Herras

Filipino Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Fatale Monstrum And The Nasty Woman: Public Portrayals Of Cleopatra Vii And Hillary Rodham Clinton, Emma Baker

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

A Story About A Girl With Snakes For Hair, Kate M. Turner

Theses and Dissertations

My work is autobiographical. I use various art making processes to create a visual archive of my life. By abstracting these memories and experiences, I can examine how culture works surrounding issues of identity. This is my story.

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.

My Big Fat Catholic Queer Wedding, Kourtney Baker

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

“That’S My Boy”: Challenging The Myth Of Literary Mentorship As In Loco Patris, Neil Surkan, Robert Mcgill

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Literary mentors have long been mythologized as serving in loco patris: i.e., in the place of their mentees’ fathers. Focusing on depictions of such mentorship in Tom Grimes’s Mentor (2010), the anthology A Manner of Being (2015), and Debra Weinstein's Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. (2004), we observe that these depictions repeatedly cast mentorship as dyadic, hierarchical, and homosocial. We argue that such depictions rehearse patriarchal norms with respect to literature, gender, and parenthood while fostering fraught psychological dynamics. Consequently, we identify a need for greater self-reflexivity about mentoring relations and a greater focus on alternative forms that …

Baby Adrian: Not An Autobiography, Adrian Catrin Retzl

Senior Projects Fall 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

From Rice Eaters To Soy Boys: Race, Gender, And Tropes Of ‘Plant Food Masculinity’, Iselin Gambert, Tobias Linné

Animal Studies Journal

Tropes of ‘effeminized’ masculinity have long been bound up with a plant-based diet, dating back to the ‘effeminate rice eater’ stereotype used to justify 19th-century colonialism in Asia to the altright’s use of the term ‘soy boy’ on Twitter and other social media today to call out men they perceive to be weak, effeminate, and politically correct (Gambert and Linné). This article explores tropes of ‘plant food masculinity’ throughout history, focusing on how while they have embodied different social, cultural, and political identities, they all serve as a tool to construct an archetypal masculine ideal. The analysis draws on a …

Otherwise Sinking, Lena Ziegler

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a book-length work of prose including fiction, creative non-fiction, with small amounts of prose poetry all focusing on the exploration of female sexuality, gender roles, relationships among men and women, and mothers and daughters. The aim of the individual pieces in this collection is to enter the cultural conversation of these issues by presenting a hybrid of genres that beg for an understanding of truth vs. fiction, and the fine line between those things when dealing with matters of the body and mind.

Lesbian Love Sonnets: Adrienne Rich And Carol Ann Duffy, Robin Seiler-Garman

Senior Theses

Our conceptualization of sexuality is rooted in gender. Modern, western society defines sexuality as which genders one is and is not attracted to—often appearing as a binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Recently, however, queer theorists have begun to push against the idea of binary sexuality altogether.

The interplay between gender and sexuality additionally manifests in the history of literature. Because the two are so intimately intertwined, writing about sexuality necessitates writing about gender. Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich and Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy are two poetry collections where, as lesbian poets, gender and sexuality play an important role. …

Memento Mori And Other Stories, Abigail Arnold

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Memento Mori and Other Stories follows historical characters straining against societal norms and pushing back against gender roles as they struggle for personal independence.

True Form Of Greatness, Michael V. Terry

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A screenplay that moves through the decade of the 90's while exploring philosophy, love, religion and tragedy in the atmosphere of collegiate baseball.

Don't Go Unless You Mean It : A Novel With Critical Afterword : Heteronormative Masculine Performance In Contemporary Fictions Of The Rural American South., Nathan N. Gower

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of a full-length novel for an adult audience as well as a substantial critical afterword to elucidate and complicate germane thematic concerns of the creative artifact. The novel, leaning on the rich traditions and many genre conventions of fictions of the American south, tells the story of an unlikely underground coal miner in Blue Banks, a fictional southern town set in the caverns and rolling hills of the western Kentucky coal fields. The narrative follows its fish-out-of-water protagonist, Cody Culver, a fledgling academic who thought he had escaped his fate as a third-generation coal miner when he …

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 …

Splitting The Avocado: Short Fiction On Themes Of Power, Gender, And The Hope Of Change, Abigail Mcbride

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Being a woman who writes about life then, whatever that might mean, is what this project is about, because in that way this male seeing of the world is not silenced but rather transformed by the other side of a conversation that has always been one-sided. I read that and thought, wow, I’m doing something political, something revolutionary, something that’s part of a bigger legacy of women completely revolutionizing traditional discourse!But as I look over the stories I’ve written, I find something very different. I find something intensely personal, even private, in my own relation to gender. I thought I …

New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection aims through the use of folktale and familial history to investigate the bounds of gender and memory against a rural Appalachian landscape. The work utilizes superstition, myth, and the commonplace to search the shadows for the forbidden and unspoken, in an attempt to redefine and reconcile personal dissonance through an observational and at times, voyeuristic lens.

In Bod We Trust, Elliot Montgomery Sklar

be Still

This paper discusses body image and social norms, media and implications on health for men as for women. The important issue of body image is rarely addressed toward men's health and wellness while it is widely recognized for women.

'They Make It So Difficult To Love Ourselves', Elise "Alice" G. Roberson

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

No abstract provided.

Check The Box Marked Other: Exploring Gender In Family Life, Serenity E. Dougherty

All NMU Master's Theses

The concept of a traditional family structure has been fading over the last 50 years and with this decline the notion of responsibilities being determined by gender is also losing ground, though it still has a long way to go. This short story collection works to continue to normalize the increasing variety of family structures, especially variety that has its roots in new notions of gender challenging old conventions. The stories are all set in Nebraska, an ideal landscape for exploring tradition versus modernity. Though there are major cities in NE, most of the state is composed of smaller rural …

Fuckstutter, Anthony Francis Ramstetter

LSU Master's Theses

This manuscript is my Master thesis, which I have compiled to fulfill the requirements of a creative writing examination in poetry. It collects various pathways of poetry in terms of both form & content into professional & publishable finality. The thesis presents sections (untitled) which include subsequent themes & variations that qualifies, consolidates, & measures the poet’s work during this program of writing herein.

'They Make It So Difficult To Love Ourselves', Elise "Alice" G. Roberson

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

No abstract provided.

The Public Vs. The Private, Elise "Alice" G. Roberson

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

No abstract provided.

Matilde Ros Leaves The Jungle, Susana Beatriz Camacho Vivar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When Matilde defies her mother and abandons her privileged life in a South American capital to fight for environmental justice in the Amazon jungle, she never imagines her journey will bring her right back to where she started. As she insists on freeing herself, four other women around her do the same, defining their freedom when class, gender and race may still get to tell them who they are.

How The Soul Slips In: Virginia Woolf's (Un)Natural History Of Dogs, Allison Castle Combs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dogs have a crucial place in articulating ideas about class and sexuality in Woolf and her milieu. Her works move from considering dogs as representative instruments of class and gender in Mrs. Dalloway, to thinking more complexly about the dog/human boundary in Orlando. Human-to-animal ontologies are an evaluation of human biopolitical affiliations, where human social categories and function are embedded and reflected in canine behavior. The “anthropological machine” and the fabulated nature of the human world is exposed in contact zones associated with problems of sexuality, class, and gender, as these internal and external distinctions are able to evade human …

Five Degrees: A Short Story, Cassia E. Hinds

Honors Undergraduate Theses

An interwoven fiction piece representing four perspectives and its effects on self-awareness. The most effective way to blur the line of self in this structure is to braid the minds, voices, and stories, of each perspective. With a focal point where all the voices eventually drift to being the frame of the story, there will be a unique distance between the stories. This thesis explores the effects of different types of mental and physiological illnesses through fiction, highlighting the effect of perception on fact and the perspective of the mentally ill.

E To Em, Elizabeth M. Hogan

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A poetry thesis exploring subjects of gender identity, sexuality, socialization, writing, and craft, and including a preface that credits Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich as primary influences. One-third of the manuscript features epistolary prose poems in conversation with Dickinson, while the remaining portion contains poetry written in either free verse, traditional poetic form, or field composition.

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …