Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Tracing The Dispossession Of The Enslaves Black Woman And A Potential For Resistance., Lila R. O'Conell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Women’S Sexuality And The State: A Beginning Look At Virginity’S Relationship To The Law, Ariana Strieb

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This is a beginning look at the relationship the state has with women's sexuality in the United States, specifically looking at how virginity animate the way rape trials are prosecuted.

Women’S Sexuality And The State: A Beginning Look At Virginity’S Relationship To The Law, Ariana Strieb

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This is a beginning look at how concepts about virginity animate the United States’ handling of rape cases.

Towards A Queer Weimar Cinema: Spaces, Narratives, And Influences, Elizabeth M. Lynch Sullivan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Black Ancestral Artist Path, Cerina Zuleica Shippey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The Black Ancestral Artist Path is a project dedicated to uncovering the migratory pattern between Black American Creatives from NY to Paris. Why has this trend continued today from those of the Lost Generation? What about France entices the American? And how does living there change their art and sense of self? This project also compared Black French artists and their understanding of the French colonial empire. When these two groups are brought together, how do they learn from one another? Black Americans are forced to reckon with the both the freedom and the privilege they experience being able to …

Ya Llegamos | We Are Here, Audrey Hermila Salgado

Senior Projects Spring 2023

ya llegamos | we are here, a Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College, is piece on gender and migration. It is a play that explores how family dynamics, class issues, education, and gender play a role in why people leave their home country. It explores the journey and relationship of Saturnina and Francisco as they travel across the Mexico/U.S. border.

Coup De Grâce, Violet Rea Mass

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project, composed of an introduction and a fiction piece, explores the complex power dynamics at play on the university stage put into perspective of the Human Rights study. The fiction follows young Olive as arrives for her first term at a university in a secluded valley where she must come to terms with a darkness greater than she had ever imagined.

A City In Gray Outlines, Tamar Tsiana Mayer-Deangelis

Senior Projects Spring 2023

A host of characters struggle to navigate the isolating world of a city under the regime of the Forces, a military police organization. Together or alone, they seek out meaning in their own lives and the city around them. The world seems a heavy weight to bear, but there is brightness within it to be pulled to the surface if only people are willing to try.

Plexus Being, Hannah S. French

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The Plexus; a site where divided nerves–blood and vessels come together–an interwoven combination of parts in a system. I would like to offer a critical intervention into international politics by employing visual language in a space constructed and bound by semantic language. playing with the fluidity with boundaries, inscribed as natural revealing they are there.

Collage reveals the relationships between one another, disrupting the linear mode of conduction and transmission. To collage, I am avoiding exclusionary mechanisms, working with gaps, holes, layering and lapsing of meaning. I am queering by obscuring rather than clarifying. Not only am I queering the …

On Your Mark, Get Set, Gender, Emilia Vella

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Women in sport is a territory that is seldom included in politics, yet “woman,” as an identity, is one that comes with political meaning. This thesis will be discussing the inadvertent politicality of women in sport, and the legislation, as well as systems that declare the identity as so.

Through Tender Opalescence, Yemi A. Lawrence

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Through Tender Opalescence is an documentary intimately dealing with the possibilities that unfold when one is able to hold space and fall within themselves. Broken up into sections of abstract videos of water paired with poetry, and analysis of the appropriated and re-worked horror films in popular American cinema, this piece attempts to reinterpret popular media and to highlight what that may say about how we as people have come to understand our own gender. This work finds itself being told by an unnamed narrator who has made it a ritual to go by the river to relieve themselves of …

I Femminiellə: Unearthing Sanctified Queerness, Francesca Stone Houran

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project serves as an unearthing, in the figuratively archeological sense, of the religious roots and foundations of queerness, often overlooked in contemporary gender discourses, through the exposing of pre and post-modern queer religious iconography specific to the Neapolitan third-gender community of the femminiellə. Although the femmininellə have origins in a long lineage of non-binary forms and figures throughout global and Italian history, they have been more recently brought to the surface of gender discourses through the avenue of photography, showcased in digital and physical exhibition spaces.

Ok I'M Perfect, Dania Skye Leibowitz

Senior Projects Fall 2023

okay i’m perfect

I make art as a way to externalize my anger in a way that won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been making art about my anxieties, my exhaustion, my fear. Some of my drawings scare me to look at, and to think of other people looking at. So then I make other things to protect myself from them, and from you.

Most of the time when I get into my studio, I don’t know what to do. I draw myself, and I make rectangles from fabric and I stuff them. The repetition of drawing and sewing grounds me until …

The Godshard's Word, Ari Mackoff

Senior Projects Spring 2022

A kabbalistic, speculative novella that loosely reimagines the biblical Jonah story, set in the mid-1500s in a world with an alternate gender framework. Explores concepts of Jewish textuality and canonizing, and the pushback against the divine call that characterizes certain Tanakhic figures.

Give To You/Fill My Cup, Madeline Damon Roisin Moneypenny

Senior Projects Spring 2022

At the core of my project is the assertion that the human voice functions as an instrument. During my time at Bard, my musical practice revolved around an exploration and desire to use singing as texture, as a solo instrument, and as storytelling. I wanted to challenge what it means to be a singer in a band setting, a setting that often illuminates gender in startling ways that limit the creativity and confidence of non-male players. Through this concert series, I wanted to show the singer as a player, an artist, and as integral to the work.

I composed 14 …

Sisterhood: : Locating The Photography Of Carrie Mae Weems, Latoya Ruby Frazier, And Deana Lawson Within A Rhizome Of Black Feminist Discourse, Taylor Fama Ndiaye

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Nipples Are Magic, Ogechi V. Egonu

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Public Bathroom: Tracing A History Of Architectural Symbolism And Social Control, Mayim Frieden

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Through a cross-disciplinary analysis of New York City's urban, architectural and infrastructural histories, this thesis explores the various sociocultural beliefs, dynamics and tensions that led to the architectural typology of the public bathroom. In turn, the controversies often associated with public bathrooms are contextualized, and the demarcating and influential capabilities of architecture are made apparent. This work spans from the 19th century and into the 2010s, demonstrating how architectural and urban design and planning can contain and uphold determinations made hundreds of years prior.

A Look At Sex Work And Onlyfans Through Self-Definition And Hegelian Dialectic, Morenike Ea Fabiyi

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Kanshi: The Vehicle Of Cultural Exchange And Feminism, Xin Guan

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

Pussy Envy: Subversion Of Androcentric Discourse In Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto, Sarah L. Kearns

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project examines the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and Aristotelianism on Valerie Solanas’ radical 1967 text, the SCUM Manifesto. Mapping out the future of women’s liberation from patriarchy, SCUM offers a blistering critique of the male-dominated social order and a plan of action for a women-led utopia devoid of the male species. The ingenious manifesto, however, was only introduced to the public the following year, after the author became notorious for shooting Andy Warhol. Solanas, who never intended for an association between SCUM and the shooting, was condemned by feminists of the second-wave movement as a madwoman, save for a …

Electric Snake, David Y. Liang

Senior Projects Spring 2022

A blend of fantastic, noir, and cyberpunk elements. Prose.

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

The Immigrant Nannies Of New York City: An Examination Of The Friendships Between Nannies And Mother-Employers, Esmeralda Paula

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This ethnography focuses on the emotions of the women of color who elaborated on their experiences working for wealthy, white families in ethnographic interviews. This project is interested in the connections formed between nannies and mother-employers with the goal of better understanding the positionalities of female domestic workers of color. Immigrant populations are frequently depicted by news outlets as overworked, underpaid, and poor. When interacting with nannies, I realized that these women did not consider themselves impoverished despite working in a role that is identifiable with servanthood. The labor that nannies perform calls back to a long tradition of women …

Sympathetic Resonance, Loren K. Ames

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Speakers come alive in motion. They come in twos — couples conversing in our cars, pockets, and homes. They tremble, cry out, laugh, and sing like we do. In Sympathetic Resonance, speakers occupy—and animate—a resonant landscape. The topography of queer speech is refracted through metals, cast along a wire, and reimagined in a dialogue composed of feedback tones. Throughout the environment, resonant materials perch and recline in silence, suggesting worlds of sound not yet imagined.

Fragments Of An Anarcha-Transfeminist Sociology Of Sex Work, Veronica Andrek

Senior Projects Spring 2022

The purpose of this study is to explore ways in which feminist and sociological theory can be expanded by looking at the experiences of transgender women who are engaged in sex work specifically with an eye for transfeminist and anarchist political theory. Based on qualitative interviews with five transfeminine sex workers, I found that transfeminine sex workers, while facing substantial obstacles such as criminalization, transmisogyny, and poverty, are capable of building communities and forging new meanings in their lives. Within sex work are opportunities by which to reimagine labor and its role in our lives, with the possibility of abolishing …

Theophila, Theophila Mathilda Barickman

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project attempts to understand the relationship between a Medieval anchoress and Christ as a romantic relationship rather than a spiritual metaphor. Mystical marriage, the union of a human woman with Christ, son of God, is a popular formulation of the relationship a medieval anchoress experiences through her religious enclosure. Through analysis of a collection of thirteenth century Middle English texts written to instruct anchoresses on the maintenance of mystical marriage, I argue that the love between the anchoress and God is produced through action rather than a spontaneously generated emotion. The Katherine Group, or Ancrene Wisse Group, consists …

When I Grow Up, Everyone Will Love Me: Gender Performance And Liberation, Hannah Eisendrath

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Blue Girandole & The Grand Hotel: Reconsiderations Of Sodom And Gomorrah In Proust's À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Emma West Alcorn

Senior Projects Fall 2022

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

Unexpected Modes Of Gendered Inheritance: How Royal Women Bequeathed Knowledge And Power In Sixteenth Century Europe Through Letters, Translations, And Memoirs, Mary Rebecca Reid

Senior Projects Spring 2021

During the sixteenth century, western European women were rarely able to inherit property, money, or titles. Even for noble women privileged with education, monarchies favored male heirs, and women rarely ruled as regents. It was even more rare for a woman to inherit from another woman. Such restrictions required women to work within rigid gender roles and develop more unconventional modes of inheritance. Rather than passing on material goods or a title, women could pass on certain social inheritances, such as personality traits or religious and educational teachings to their daughters. In order to examine these social inheritances, I have …