Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Below The Neck, Above The Knees, Desiree Dawn Kapler

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the act of violation in the context of trauma and healing through the use of personal narratives and experimental film. My research allows personal storytelling to transform into a larger and more universal theme of generational trauma and dysfunction. Through a feminist lens, I challenge social norms of body autonomy for the sick and abused, capitalism’s social effects on the poor, and passed down maternal lessons from the women who are doing the best that they can with the lives and opportunities that they have been given.

This work is created in spite of the labels my …

New Patriarchies: A Turbulence Of Source And Subject, Stephen Fuller

Theses and Dissertations

Experiencing a turbulence of source and subject in the variable inversions and supports of one source to another--the wreck of the U-352, Carpeaux’s Ugolino and his Sons, a movie poster for J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, and Cassiopeia mythology--these four sources as sons, in sacrifice to and surviving by way of “daddy” documentation, are here refigured to reenact and critique the patriarchally recreational, monumental, cinematic, and mythological infrastructures supporting the sources of this work and thereby serving to critique the newer patriarchies to which these sources and their subjectifications here seek to cross consumptively dead end. Following three public …