Arts and Humanities Commons^™

It’S Britney, Bitch, Mary Hyepock

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation engages public rhetorics surrounding pop princess Britney Spears as a case study for examining the rhetoricity of bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy is commonly understood as the legal right to control what happens to one’s body without external influence or coercion. However, one’s legal access to bodily autonomy is produced, negotiated, and maintained through discourse. In other words, one’s access to so-called “ownership” over their body and agency to make decisions about it is deeply tied to the gendered and racialized symbolic production of citizenship in the United States. Utilizing a reproductive justice framework, I investigate how Britney Spears’ …

Androgynous Figures On Etruscan Cista Handles From Praeneste, Melanie Naples

LSU Master's Theses

Muscular women and effeminate men adorn the lids of Etruscan Cistae found in Praeneste (modern Palestrina, 23 miles southeast of Rome, Italy). Cistae (Latin plural of cista) are storage containers used by the Etruscans for women’s beauty items. This thesis focuses on the androgynous, mostly nude, figures that serve as handles and are often displayed in pairs. These pairs frequently depict a man and a woman together and androgynous qualities are usually emphasized on the female figures. Discussions of the androgynous body in the ancient world have centered around Greece and Rome. Only recently (Sandhoff 2007, 2009, 2011), scholarship has …

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia Perkins

Honors Theses

Contemporary environmental art can be inspired by personal experience and reflections between the artist and their surroundings. Black women have a unique interaction with and relation to their environment. I would like to unpack the relationships between Black women and the environment by exploring a few different artists’ work, and by dissecting the effects race and gender have on one’s view of the natural world. I have studied the work of four artists: Torkwase Dyson, Allison Jane Hamilton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Calida Garcia Rawles. Environmentally, I have a specific interest in bodies of water / Black waterways because of …

The Black Performer's Toolbox: A Critical Authoethnography, Laura D. Oliver

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blackness shines bright like the moon and beams outside of identity parameters that are limiting in Western society to determine its communicative function inside and outside systems of power. When Blackness intersects with performance, various ways to construct identity are highlighted to expand our understanding of theory and methods that emphasize difference and culture. This research project aims to reimagine Blackness as a performance methodology to explore the performer’s livelihood onstage and constructions of race that impact identity offstage. Additionally, this project is built from a specific method created from the continuous use of expressive work that reflects societal challenges …

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …

Asexual Dramaturgies: Reading For Asexuality In The Western Theatrical Canon, Anna Maria Ruffino Broussard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Asexuality has recently gained recognition and visibility as a legitimate sexual orientation and identity standpoint that is usually defined as lacking sexual desire for any gender. Popular culture and the academy have both seen the emergence of a robust conversation about the definition and import of asexuality, recognizing the term as an umbrella concept covering an ever-diversifying array of identities. Within the nascent critical discourse on asexuality, theorists have sought to identify asexuality as a sexual orientation, to rethink our society’s sexual normativity, and to question compulsory sexuality, or the assumption that sexual desire is intrinsic to all people, thus …

Setting Up Shop Down South: Gay Visibility And Identity Formation At A New Orleans Bookstore, Katelyn N. Spencer

LSU Master's Theses

Looking specifically at the South’s first gay bookstore, Faubourg Marigny (FM) Books, this thesis will connect the existence of gay literature and space as impetuses of gay community identity within New Orleans. It will use the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1970s through the 2010s to contextualize the gay bookstore as a microcosm of its time and location. In doing so, it will examine how FM Books’ New Orleans location affected its function and its relationship with its community. It will also analyze how the bookstore fit into the city’s history of social tradition and aversion to flagrant …

Queer Bodies: Homoeroticism, Sensuality, And Erotica In Postmodern Fine Art Photography, Rosa Michel Pace

LSU Master's Theses

The queer body– describes the sum of assumptions and biases attributed to queer people, whereby a person’s own queer identity or expression is overshadowed by the generalizations, (mis)perceptions, and stereotypes that society imposes on that individual. Central to the scope of this thesis is the reality whereby the ostracization of queer people involves the association between the very body of the queer person with sexual acts deemed both deviant and immoral by a cis-heteronormative society. Society renders the queer body as pejoratively deviant simply on the basis of its existence alone, where any form of varied gender or sexual expression …

Grotesque Masculinities In The Works Of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, And Padgett Powell, Matt Brandon Blasi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Grotesque Masculinities in the Works of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Padgett Powell” explores how these authors use the grotesque to complicate, distort, and criticize hegemonic white Southern masculinity as represented in contemporary American literature. In “Grotesque Masculinities,” I argue that the presence of the grotesque mode in these author’s works offers a unique critical perspective by which to better understand how masculinity is constructed by and for white Southern men in literature, and how alternative configurations of identity are not only possible, but necessary to decenter whiteness and heteronormativity as dominant categories. Using what sociologists refer to as body-reflexive …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

Representations Of Female Agency In Medieval French Literature, Mathilde Pointiere

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the different ways authors portray female agency in medieval French literature. In focusing on three medieval writers, Chrétien de Troyes, Heldris de Cornouailles and Christine de Pizan, I contend that female agency arises as a result of trauma or crisis. I define my terms as follows: agency is the capacity and intention of performing actions on one’s own behalf. For a fictional character to have agency, therefore, she must be portrayed as having a sense of control and of being the owner of the action she executes. Additionally, I argue that as women characters assume their agency, …

Balancing Act: When Gender And Media Collide In Sports, Kimberly Friedman

LSU Master's Theses

Women’s Gymnastics is one of the most popular events at the Summer Olympic Games and media coverage of the team provides a unique perspective on women’s athletics, as gymnastics is traditionally considered a feminine sport. Utilizing a discourse analysis, this thesis examines the newspaper coverage received by the team in the last 25 years. This thesis explores the narratives regarding gender within the coverage and additionally explores how abuse narratives were discussed in news media throughout theses years. This research shows that how female gymnasts are discussed is growing in type of coverage received, meaning that how female gymnastics is …

Mixed Messages: Reading Contemporary U.S. Literature Of Biracial Girlhood, Candice Nicole Hale

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The tragic mulatta character is no longer an accurate representation of biracial female characters in literature. This dissertation considers the vast history of the tragic mulatto genre and its tragic and mired representations of biracial women and how they are often portrayed in literature. Within a historical, legal, and political analysis, I highlight the ways perceptions, attitudes, and representations about biracial individuals have changed, so those same shifts should change in the literature. Because of the bourgeoning field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS), both scholars and authors are recasting and rewriting the narratives and discourses of mixed-race in the …

Night Of The Witch: Alternative Spirituality, Identity And Media, Andreana Tarleton

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis works to understand the relationships witches and conjurors have with the film and television depictions of them. Employing the method of film critique, I argue that the witch stands as a cultural symbol in the US of women and femmes with power, and that their stories serve as lessons to these populations about what it means to be an acceptable woman or femme, while simultaneously creating and perpetuating stereotypes of magic practitioners. Then, using the combination of hashtag ethnography, in-person and video interviewing and internet surveys, I argue that #witchblr and #witchesofcolor, as well as the space of …

The Choreo-Story Workshops: Devising Body Narratives, Montana J. Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This multi-methodological project analyzes the utility of the proposed performance method, the Choreo-Story, within the field of Performance Studies. The Choreo-Story is a movement-based performance method, mode of devising, and performance product. It is a performance tool that can be used to understand how embodiment and dance help individuals make sense of the many identities they perform. This method highlights the body as both a text and tool for storytelling. To analyze the Choreo-Story method, I use Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Approach to examine three performance acts that occurred in the HopKins Black Box theatre between 2016 and 2018: my …

Long-Term Impact Of Welfare Reform: Biopsychosocial Barriers To Successful Transition Away From Welfare Reliance Among Rural Women In Louisiana, Jake Jerome Guidry

LSU Master's Theses

The discussion regarding government benefits and reliance on welfare benefits is one that takes place in arenas of policymaking and academia alike. These discussions often focus on poverty that exists in densely populated metropolitan areas, resulting in a scarcity of research regarding unique characteristics of rural poverty. Eighty-four rural Louisiana women participated in a longitudinal study of the impacts of welfare reform in their lives. Twenty years later, two (N = 2) rural Louisiana women, each former welfare recipients, participated in an in-depth qualitative case study examining their transition away from welfare programs. Data show that neither woman was …

Ageism And Embodied Stereotypes: A Study Of Adult Learners In Community College At Midlife, Marla Jane Erwin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Adult students are generally classified as a single group for study, yet developmental psychologists recognize separate developmental periods during adulthood that suggest adult students at midlife may experience development within higher education differently that younger adult students, in part due to ageism expressed at individual, institutional and internalized levels. This project applies the concept of lifespan developmental periods to distinguish students at midlife as a focus of inquiry using a mixed method design. Twenty-nine faculty and 205 students responded to the Relating to Older People Evalution (ROPE; Cherry & Palmore, 2008) to assess self-reports of both positive and negative ageist …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

An Archive Of Pain: In Queer Suicide's Cultural Wake, Evan Schares

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that queer death is a chief site of political struggle over gender, race, and sexuality in contemporary culture. I consider myriad archives in the aftermath of three queer suicides, an aggregate of discourses I call cultural wakes, to examine how white affective investments circulate around the forces of racism, sexism, and citizenship. I place in situ the trauma of queer pain and loss against the global backdrop of public emotionality.

Taking (Birth) Control: Empowerment Through Contraceptive Education, Meghan Saas

LSU Master's Theses

TAKING (birth) CONTROL is a body of work that educates women on their options for contraceptives, and empowers them to claim their right to choose if—and when—to have a child. Utilizing graphic design and letterpress printing processes, I created a visual system consisting of carefully honed typographic, color, and graphic styles. The bulk of the materials make up an educational toolkit for use at Delta Clinic of Baton Rouge, one of only three remaining abortion providers in Louisiana. Delta Clinic was in need of comprehensive and affordable materials for their patients on the subject of contraception. The toolkit consists of …

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20^thand early 21^st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …

Labor And Delivery: Television Performances By Pregnant Actresses From 1948-2016, Evleen Michelle Nasir

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Labor and Delivery: Television Actresses’ Pregnant Performances from 1948-2016, examines the labor of six pregnant actresses working on United States television. Mary Kay Stearns, Lucille Ball, Jane Leeves, Kerry Washington, and Katey Sagal all worked through pregnancies while filming their respective television shows. These women exemplify the multitude of actresses who maintained their careers and their pregnancies in the television industry. This is the first study of its kind to examine the labor of an actresses’ pregnant body on film while she performs a role other than herself. Previous examinations of pregnancy in performance are few but have largely focused …

Producing "Fabulous": Commodification And Ethnicity In Hair Braiding Salons, Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Black women wearing fabulous braids are a striking feature of the Afro-diasporic cultural landscape. However, the braiders and salon owners who enable this aesthetic engineering are seldom acknowledged. This dissertation investigates the experience and role of Caribbean and West and Central African women in the hair braiding industry, a rapidly growing business in the U.S. I address the complexity of these women’s multiple social roles and the multiple consciousness (King, 1988) associated with their demographic characteristics (color, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and immigrant status). The commonalities between the braiders and their mostly African American customers contrast vividly with their perception of …

Feminism Divided: Feminists For Life Of America And The National Organization For Women, Monique Daley

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.