Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bedeviled Beauty: My Journey Through White American Theater Institutions, J'Aila C. Price

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Game console: Oculus Quest

World: American Theater Institutions

Player: Minority

Place: United States

Level: “Ain’t no way.”

This thesis explores the contrast between the Westernized philosophies ingrained in my education and my identity as a Black female artist. It sheds light on the difficulties of pursuing higher education in the arts and the gaps that arise from limited exposure to culturally diverse Black resources, revealing the systemic issues in Western performance education. The paper also discusses the insights gained from my journey as a Black female artist, focusing on my thesis performance of Blood at the Root, which is …

Hozier, Tiktok, And Sapphic Rhetoric, Sophia Marie Kovalcik

English Theses & Dissertations

Through the process of social circulation and critical imagination, Sappho’s poetry, which maintains rhetoric that women, nature, and love are related to ritual and feminine divinity, intersects with queer digital rhetoric. Via discussion of feminist spirituality rhetoric, Marie Cartier’s lesbian theology, and rhetorical and literary analysis of Sappho’s lyrical fragments, I explore her Ancient Greek mythological, cultural aesthetics. I then connect sapphic rhetoric to two contemporary artifacts that represent or influence contemporary feminist, digital, and queer identities: the lyrics of the Irish musician Andrew Hozier-Byrne, known as Hozier and TikTok comment sections surrounding Hozier’s music and concert clips.

The Sanctuary Of Demeter And Kore: The Portrayal Of Corinthian Gender Ideologies In Ritual Landscape, Kaia C. Brose

Dissertations and Theses

The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth reflects gender ideologies and concerns within the larger region of Korinthia. Archaeological finds particularly serve to illustrate the sanctuary’s role in maintaining these gender ideologies and concerns. This thesis focuses on the depiction of gender ideologies that reflect a shift toward a wealthier material culture in sixth-century Corinth with themes of feminine virtue and fertility prevalent in the sanctuary. The study of certain ceramics shapes and iconography serves to reveal the sanctuary’s role within the larger religious landscape it was located in. The kalathos, pyxis/Frauenfest scene, and the liknon illustrate the presence …

No Going Back: Un-Fixing The Future Of De-Extinction, Jessie L. Beier

Animal Studies Journal

‘Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world’ proclaims the Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences website, adding, ‘And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it’. For Colossal, this involves combining the science of genetics with ‘the business of discovery’ in order to bring back the woolly mammoth, which will not only help ‘rewild’ lost habitats, but also contribute toward ‘making humanity more human’. De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence, often with the goal of reintroducing species to the wild and restoring ecosystems. While still in its nascent state, the science of …

Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …

Digital And Spatial Humanities Mapping: Eurasia-Pacific Early Trade And Belief Linkages, Igor Sitnikov, David Blundell

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The Eurasia-Pacific is a dynamic region of rapid economic growth, cultural awareness, natural resource exploration, and military buildup. The concept of the region is relatively new, featuring contested vast areas of geo-resource space of numerous cultures and languages. The current findings in anthropology and archaeology and even its more specific subfields such as folklore are important contribution to the understanding of periodic environmental changes and technical innovations were the main forces of transformations in social structures that have determined the mechanisms and levels of cross-cultural trade activity across the region. We have traced early trade and belief linkages across Eurasia-Pacific …

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on …

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, …

Textiles, Gender, And Materiality: A Response, Bettina Bildhauer

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This response outlines the predominant current conceptions of gendered materiality in contemporary theory (such as Karen Barad’s development of Judith Butler’s thought) and in medieval studies (such as work by Caroline Walker Bynum). It identifies and expands upon four themes from the two articles in the section that are pertinent to the descriptions of textiles and other material objects in a wider range of medieval texts and current medievalist scholarship: 1) the idea that textiles and other material things can have biographies; 2) the idea that textiles are today (but not necessarily in medieval writing) perceived as connective networks; 3) …

Excavating Gender: The Embodiment And (Re)Presentation Of Social Relations In Mierzanowice Communities Of The Early Bronze Age, Mark Paul Toussaint

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The construction of gender in a society is based on a discursive relationship between culture and biology. Ideological components are often translated into structural factors, which condition access to social and biological resources and exposure to risk. Cumulative differential health outcomes for groups can become embodied in ways that affect the skeleton. By conducting population-level analyses of skeletal markers of health and trauma, bioarchaeologists work backwards to attempt to reconstruct social conditions. Archaeological and mortuary context is an important part of this process.

Cemeteries of the Mierzanowice Culture (MC) in southern Poland (2300-1600 BCE) offer a unique opportunity to study …

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …

Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between humans and land, through the lens of the scientific and religious, bridging the physical realm with the spiritual. It acts as accompanying material to the project titled Martian Mother, supplementary information to the visual work, and an extension of the proposal, the center of the work. The proposal exists to send myself, or a like-minded individual, to Mars with artificial insemination equipment to give birth to the first Martian, becoming the first Martian Mother. This work is rooted firmly in speculative fiction, creating a nonlinear future framework for a new society and space exploration.

The Castrated Gods And Their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, And Spiritual Supremacy, Jenny Wade

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of …

Thinking With Things: Reimagining The Object Lesson As A Feminist Pedagogical Device In The Humanities Classroom, Krista Grensavitch

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I continue nascent discussions of incorporating material culture in humanities classrooms in higher education. Primarily, this conversation stems from the material turn in the discipline of history, and in the humanities, more generally. It responds to calls that students in higher education must acquire the modes of thinking particular to practitioners within their discipline. My contribution sits at the intersection of material culture theory, feminist pedagogy, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), and is a work of feminist praxis.

I centralize my own teaching practice and draw extensively from my experiences developing curricula and facilitating …

Thalassic: Women, Gender, And The Sublime In Relation To Marine Art, Kelsy Patnaude

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

The sea may be regarded as a source of tranquility as well as one of unsettling trepidation, ambiguous even in its representation. Those who are called to it must be relentless in the face of uncertainty; what awaits them is the immeasurable sublime. Defined in art as a reference to greatness beyond all possibility of control, the sublime invokes an urge to pursue pleasurable terror in the unmanageable. On heavily trafficked and dangerous seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strict gender hierarchy of authority on board ships in seafaring industries was solidified. Thus, the dominance of the male …

Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, "Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies," Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is …

The Castrated Gods And Their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, And Spiritual Supremacy, Jenny Wade

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of …

‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, And Not Surviving Patriarchy, Laurel Zwissler

Journal of Religion & Film

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, early modern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that the film, The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship to which the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of the isolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Thomasin.

New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan Of China, And The New She-Tragedy, Elaine Mcgirr

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This essay demonstrates a significant break in eighteenth-century tragedy from tales of fallen women begging (the audience) for forgiveness and redemption to a different kind of she-tragedy, in which the heroine is neither fallen nor sexually desired, but rather transcends nation and politics with the “natural” moral force of maternal love. I argue that this shift was made possible/legible by Susannah Cibber’s ill-health, which forced Arthur Murphy to reconceive The Orphan of China’s heroine and allowed a rival actress, Mary Ann Yates, to step into this new role and to establish a tragic ‘line’ defined in opposition to that of …

The Redemption Of Goethe’S Eternal Feminine: Discovering The Reality And Significance Of An Archetypal Phenomenon, Mariana Weisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the phenomenological history and significance of the archetype of the Eternal Feminine, as well as her role in Goethe’s Faust. Although the Eternal Feminine (Goethe’s “das Ewig-Weibliche”) first appears in literary form in 1832 with the publication of Faust: Part II, she has an ancient archetypal history that reaches from the age of pre-patriarchal domination into the modern era. This thesis contends that the Eternal Feminine is a Jungian archetype—a “primordial image” or motif that exists unconsciously and evokes a universal experience within both the individual and the society. Five historical figures exemplify the archetype of the …

Women In Music: Letting A Long Story Be Long Contemplating Women’S Sonic, Musical, And Spiritual Experiences In Prehistory, Deborah J. Saidel

Theses and Dissertations

Situated within deep history, this study explores the auditory and spiritual lives of Paleolithic women. It considers their personal agency in mediating the spiritual power of sound and how doing so contributes to a multifaceted musicality. The theoretical framework involves a wide spectrum of topics, from ways of rethinking the writing of history and reckoning with time, to sound studies and the study of acoustics in ancient sites, to a critical examination through a feminist lens of normative disciplinary scholarship in anthropology and archaeology, religious studies, and musicology. I explore potential audio-visual-lithic relationships for their implications for deepening an understanding …

The Indian Empire And Its Colonial Practices In South Asia, Yubraj Aryal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The India, Empire and its Colonial Practices in South Asia" Yubraj Aryal claims that Bharatiya discourse supports colonization in South Asia. This discourse justifies oppression of institutions, practices, of the non-Bharatiya colonized. The article examines Indian Empire's colonialism toward the weaker, smaller nations along its border and the Bharatiya ideology at the heart of the repressive empire, which is taken to represent the South Asian subcontinent. The article looks at the way in which Bharatiya is perhaps a more oppressive ideology than Orientalism and gives a glimpse into how society, culture, history, and textuality work around power …

On The Authenticity Of De-Extinct Organisms, And The Genesis Argument, Douglas Campbell

Animal Studies Journal

Are the methods of synthetic biology capable of recreating authentic living members of an extinct species? An analogy with the restoration of destroyed natural landscapes suggests not. The restored version of a natural landscape will typically lack much of the aesthetic value of the original landscape because of the different historical processes that created it – processes that involved human intentions and actions, rather than natural forces acting over millennia. By the same token, it would appear that synthetically recreated versions of extinct natural organisms will also be less aesthetically valuable than the originals; that they will be, in some …

Identities Without Origins : Fat/Trans Subjectivity And The Possibilities Of Plurality., Mc Lampe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway to critically analyze the political power and utility of origin stories as they are used within discourses of identity. I specifically examine the dominant cultural and counter-origin stories of transgender and fat bodies and argue that the counter origin stories constructed by both trans and fat studies/activism continue to engage with norms that regulate identity. These regulations create an impossible situation for individuals who are both trans and fat as they are not recognized as intelligible subjects within either category due to their lack of appropriate …

The Archaeology Of Appetites, Molly S. Schonert

SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Through use of examining how food is produced, stored, distributed and consumed, one can take a glimpse into the past, present and even future of this planet–to better understand the complexity of human identity and the social practices or roles that define an individual, community or society. So this begins an exploration of the archaeology of food as a gendered commodity throughout our evolutionary past, emphasizing the infinite ways in which foodway practices exceeds the nutritional value of what our ancestors, family, friends and ourselves consume(d) on a daily basis. Foodways practices is an invaluable tool in any archaeologists’ tool …

Ceasing To Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers And Hydro-Logical Thought, Annie M. Cranstoun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal …

Exchanges Of Identity In Prehistoric Anatolian Figurines, Ellen H. Belcher, Karina Croucher

Publications and Research

This paper examines exchange imagery and ideology of the human body manifested through figurines from prehistoric (7 th –6 th millennia BC) Anatolian contexts. These figurines document local, regional and inter-regional communication of identity, use of materials, ideologies and skills. Taking a new approach to understanding the assemblages, this paper suggests four key themes of analysis: materials and materiality; fractured bodies; gender spectrum; and ambiguities and relationships.

“Inhumanly Beautiful”: The Aesthetics Of The Nineteenth-Century Deathbed Scene, Margo Masur

English Theses

Death today is hidden from our everyday lives so it cannot intermingle with the general public. So when a family member dies, their body becomes an object in need of disposal; no longer can they be recognized as the familiar person they once were. To witness death is to force individuals to confront the truths of human existence, and for most of us seeing such a sight would fill us with an emotion of disgust. Yet during the nineteenth century, the burden of care towards the sick or dying was shared by a community of family, neighbors, and friends; the …

Engendering The Past: An Archaeological Examination Of The Precontact Lifeways Of Women At Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, Cathy J. Beecher

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines three lines of evidence within the precontact archaeological record around Yellowstone Lake, focusing on elucidating female-specific lifeways. This work is undertaken as a means to explore concepts of gender within precontact archaeological contexts. This aim is accomplished using statistical analysis of lithic tool distribution patterns, ethnohistoric information on plants found through archaeobotanical assays and the microspatial examination of cultural fire features.

Variation in the use of obsidian and chert for unifacial tool manufacture indicates potential restrictions on the manufacture of gender specific tools as these stone resources become less available. In addition, a frame-of-reference is built by …

Patriarchy And The Power Of Myth: Exploring The Significance Of A Matriarchal Prehistory, Grace Varada Brandmaier

Senior Projects Spring 2015

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