Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unveiling Iolanta: Blindness In Nineteenth-Century Opera, Nafset Chenib

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the main tropes of representing and narrating blindness in nineteenth-century opera and fictional literature with a particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky’s 1892 one-act opera Iolanta, with its blind protagonist. Examination of the production history of Iolanta reveals that misrepresentations and misconceptions ingrained within Tchaikovsky's libretto and music have governed directorial choices, consequently giving rise to a homogeneous, predominantly unfavorable portrayal of blindness on the stage. I suggest an approach to the opera that is more consonant with the lived experience of blindness.

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the psychic effects of a life haunted by proximity to suicide. Beginning with demographic data indicating that the queer community has experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide in the U.S. since nationwide data collection began in the 1960s, my dissertation’s argument is twofold. First, suicidality shapes the experience of being queer. Second, the queer community’s history of association with suicide has shaped its relationship to death and morbidity. Therefore, in order to better address the issue of suicide in the community, a new approach is required that considers this history’s entanglement with systemic power relations and the …

Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, And Infrastructure In The Age Of The Abstraction, Patrick Smyth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Negotiated Access asks how we can exercise our values from within systems and structures over which we have little control. The project, fundamentally, is about autonomy, a specific form of resistance to control, or the ability to act on values or goals despite influence from outside or above. Negotiation, here, is the ongoing encounter with enclosing or encircling systems, entities, or spaces. It is the gap, the small room for maneuver, between ourselves and the physical or social environment.

The project begins with local and concrete challenges and radiates outward to analyze and critique broader structures, forces, and institutions that …

The Intersectional Perspective On Women And Girls With Disabilities: A Comparative Analysis, Kathryn F. Guzmán

Dissertations and Theses

People, including women and girls with disabilities have faced oppression and exclusion in society for centuries due to negative beliefs, stereotypes and attitudes that have led to stigma, discrimination and lack of support for them. For women and girls in particular, having a disability has historically meant that they were no longer considered beautiful and were seen as being incapable of meeting social and cultural expectations like marriage and motherhood. In recent decades, however, some progress has been made towards combating disability-based discrimination and promoting inclusion and full participation in society. Additionally, the adoption of the United Nations Convention on …

Accessibility Compliance And Assessments For Gateway Websites In Life Sciences: Toward Inclusive Design, Noreen Y. Whysel, Shari Thurow, Bev Corwin

Publications and Research

One main purpose of information architecture and site navigation is to enhance the effectiveness of user interfaces (UIs) by supporting and enabling task completion, accessibility, and sustainability. This is of particular importance for science gateways given the complexity of information on portal sites.

We examined the accessibility of 50 randomly selected gateway websites in the Life Sciences category in the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) catalog, using both manual and automated methodologies. None of these sites produced an accessible website as per W3C, WCAG 2.1, and Section 508 standards. The most common accessibility success in these websites was URL structure, …

Radical Solace And Young Adult Writing: Racialized Dis/Ability, Fan Fiction, And Feel(Ing)S In Composition, Jenn Polish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Deficit-model pedagogies too often abound in our writing classrooms, in everything from punitive attendance policies to content selection and course design methodologies that inadvertently favor students whose bodies fit a white supremacist, ableist norm. I develop conceptions of fandom and consent-based pedagogical practices, and I argue that these can bring us closer to radical solace in our college writing classrooms, particularly when our classrooms are full of variously marginalized students. These students too often must endure deficit-model pedagogies that assume inexpert writing styles in both their written compositions and, indeed, in the very composition of their bodies. What happens, I …

Letter From Paisley Currah, Outgoing Executive Director, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

"Unzipping the Monster Dick." I thought nothing of this title when planning the fall 2003 CLAGS and a speaker, Santiago Solis, suggested it. It seemed to me, a denizen of the world of queer studies, unremarkable, even normal as I jotted it down. Solis, who was finishing his PhD in Learning Dis/abilities at Teachers College, Columbia University at the time, had the requisite explanatory subtitle: "Deconstructing Ableist Penile Representations in two Ethnic Homoerotic Magazines."

Clags Launches Disability/Queerness Programming, Sarah Chinn

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

CLAGS kicked off our initial year of Disability and Queerness: Centering the Outsider programming on September 22nd with an evening celebrating the release of Desiring Disability, a special issue of GLQ on disability and Disability Studies, and Haworth Press's forthcoming Queer Crips, a collection of essays and stories by disabled gay men.

From The Executive Director: Disability And Queerness: Centering The Outsider, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When James Anastos, a transgender man, turned 21 and moved into a residential living environment for the neurologically impaired in Staten Island, his male gender identity became a problem. "Being transgender, they told me they could have me put away if I dressed like a boy. They didn't like the way I dressed—all boys' clothes," he told me during an interview.

Queer/Crip: The First Queer Disability Conference, Walter (Peter) Penrose

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The Queer Disability Conference, the first conference of its kind ever, held on June 2 and 3 at San Francisco State University, began with great enthusiasm of the participants, many of whom identified as both disabled and queer in some fashion or another. The opening plenary included an intersex activist, who discussed feelings of not being safe in a world where binary notions of sex and gender make being intersex perilous, and hoping that s/he would feel safe at the conference. A diverse group of activists, academics, and disabled queers provided for an interesting mix of perspectives.