Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Adrienne Rich And Women's Confinement, Marissa Weber

Student Writing

Adrienne Rich's poems "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law," "Living in Sin," and "From a Survivor" weave a tale of the average American housewife expressing her discontent with her day-to-day and searching for a way out. All three poems contain themes of societal oppression scaled to a personal level, and the varying conclusions speak to the harsh reality of being a woman in the mid-twentieth century. Rich's career as an activist defined her poetic style, and her feminist pieces have remained relevant decades after they were originally published.

Margaret Atwood: Amplifying The Voices Of Abused Women, Kimberly Hood

Student Writing

Margaret Atwood addresses the oppressive societal rules placed on women in her poetry. The stories of the abused are often left out of the mainstream. Her works of poetry and prose bring these silenced voices from the background and amplify them for the world to hear.

Feminist Modernist Dance, Melissa Bradshaw, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the term modernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male-orientation. …

Iron Manicures: Sex, Power, And Sedition In Margaret Atwood's Writing, Anna Zarra Aldrich

Honors Scholar Theses

Margaret Atwood has often been criticized as a bad feminist writer for featuring villainous, cruel women. Atwood has combatted this criticism by pointing out that evil women exist in life, so they should in literature as well. Every story requires a villain and a victim, for Atwood these roles are both usually played by women. This thesis will explore the idea of the woman as spectacle in both behavior and body. Women are controlled by the idea that they must care. When they stop caring, they become a threat. At the heart of Atwood’s writing are the relationships between women …

Narratives Of Incarcerated Women, Kaceylee Klein

Honors Scholar Theses

Our criminal-justice system mandates the silencing and disappearing of 2.3 million people, a consequence of its historical context as an inherently violent institution, carrying on traditions of slavery, oppression, and extortion. While any voice that makes it out of a prison cell is resisting the effort to silence, smother, and make compliant the voices of those labeled criminal, the form of publication of that voice allows more or less agency to the author depending on its conventions and structures. There is a spectrum from more controlled or mediated forms of publications to more author-directed ones and they vary over the …

A Refuge For Jae-In Doe: Fugues In The Key Of English Major, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major"

Author(s):

Seo-Young Chu (see profile)

Date:

2017

Subject(s):

Feminism, Creative nonfiction, Asian American literature, Sonnets, Social justice, Trauma

Item Type:

Essay

Tag(s):

#MeToo, Stanford, women in academia, early american

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cp82-8f39

Ethics Of Care On The Narrative Margins Of Willa Cather’S The Professor’S House And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Jeannette E. Schollaert

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Willa Cather’s Southwestern novels feature cultured male protagonists as the driving sources of action. The male characters explore the natural world and advance the plot, but Cather positions female figures, particularly spinster figures, on the sidelines of the protagonists’ plots to offer support and connection with the natural world. Using an ethic of care framework and ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s master model, this thesis examines the ways in which Cather marginalizes female figures even as they serve crucial roles in the male protagonists’ development. While the male protagonists link spinster figures and sexualized feminine bodies with the natural world, they imbue …

Performative Gender And Pop Fiction Females: "Emancipating" Byronic Heroines Through A Feminist Education, Joy Smith

Masters Theses

"I can be a regular bitch. Just try me." With this phrase emblazoned across her t-shirt, Lisbeth Salander, pierced, tattooed, and bedecked in leather, waltzes from the pages of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This woman who subverts authority, maliciously tattoos and sodomizes a man, and intentionally distances herself from close relationships of any kind has somehow managed to capture both the attention and admiration of the American audience. This disheartening phenomenon stems from a renewed interest in the Byronic heroine, a female possessing those traits traditionally assigned to Byronic heroes and men, and the rise of …

Mama's Boy, Jamie T. Berger

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

"Mama's Boy" is a book of fiction and nonfiction by Jamie Berger. It deals with mothers and sons and feminism and pornography and poker and love and New York and San Francisco and Western Massachusetts.

"Just A Girl": The Community-Centered Cult Television Heroine, 1995-2007, Tamy Burnett

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Found in the most recent group of cult heroines on television, community-centered cult heroines share two key characteristics. The first is their youth and the related coming-of-age narratives that result. The second is their emphasis on communal heroic action that challenges traditional understandings of the hero and previous constructions of the cult heroine on television. Through close readings of Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dark Angel, and Veronica Mars, this project engages feminist theories of community and heroism alongside critical approaches to genre and narrative technique, identity performance theory, and visual media …