Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Musicology Of Record Production - Research Creation, Gender, And Creative Reflective Practice In Project-Paradigm Music Production, Lydia Wilton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research-creation project elucidates the “methodology” of producing records. As an artist-researcher, I investigate how a record producer uses the recording studio as a “musical instrument”. My primary research goal is to answer two fundamental questions about record producing that have yet to be addressed and which cannot be explored successfully by other means: “Does the record producer’s creative agency have musical consequences?”, and “If so, what are they?” Through the creative practices I adopted for this project’s artefact - an album of nine tracks, called Blasphemy, that I produced for the London, Ontario-based rock band Nameless Friends - …

Capacious Feminism: Intimacy And Otherness In Mina Loy's Poetry, Elise Ottavino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores Loy’s interest in the “woman’s cause” to interrogate how the poet was recaptured as an early feminist figure by the academy. After Virginia Kouidis “rediscovered” Loy’s work in the 1980s, the poet has been consistently drafted as a central feminist figure despite her lack of commitment to organized feminist movements of her time. This retrospective lens offers a catachrestic view of Loy’s feminism. I use “catachresis” to refer to the slightly inaccurate use of “feminism,” tinted by current perceptions of the term, but also to hint at Loy’s capacious feminine poetics. While the rise of feminist theories …

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

Instagram Influencers And Their Youngest Female Followers, Amanda Jenkins

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the content teenage girls are surrounded by on Instagram, specifically focusing on influencer self-presentation and the impacts it can have on Instagram’s youngest female users. To do so, this research identifies and analyzes the top ten most popular influencers followed by a concentrated sample of 13–16-year-old girls. Theoretically informed qualitative analysis is used to analyze the influencers’ profiles by applying Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (1956). With reference to Angela McRobbie’s (2008) work on “girl culture” and Alice Marwick’s (2015) work on “insta-fame”, the ways in which influencers code …

You Go To My Head: Women's Prescription Pill Use In Postwar America, Erin K. Brown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the postwar era, US pharmaceutical companies grew their production and distribution of prescription pills, which included barbiturates, minor tranquilizers, and amphetamines for mass consumption. Middle- and upper-class women were the majority users of these pills, finding assistance with the aid of prescribed drugs that helped correct difficulty with sleeping, eased anxiety, provided energy, and reduced the users’ size. This dissertation works to bring drug history and women’s history together to integrate the impact prescription pills had on women’s lives, positive and negative, and how and why consumers sought these drugs and the effects they promised. This project uncovers interactions …

Affect And Feminist Storytelling In Three Spanish American Novels: Leonora By Elena Poniatowska, De Un Salto Descabalga La Reina By Carmen Boullosa, And El Infinito En La Palma De La Mano By Gioconda Belli, Ayelet Ishai

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes the portrayals of the female protagonists of three Spanish American biographical novels in an exploration of identity formation within feminist literary expressions. Amidst the resurgence of auto/biographical genres, there has been an effort to revive the stories of the historically maligned, and biographical novels about women have become increasingly prevalent. The movement to recover and revise the stories of women, including those who have traditionally been interpreted within misogynist societies, reaches beyond the written text to influence not only the way a character is seen and understood, but the ways that readers see and understand themselves. As …

ʿAbdulḥalīm Abū Shuqqa’S The Liberation Of Women In The Age Of Revelation: A Translation And Critical Commentary, Ibtehal Noorwali

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

One of Muslim scholars’ modern endeavors is to identify Islam’s egalitarian and liberating views on women as espoused by its earliest sources— the Qur’an and hadith. ʿAbdulḥalīm Abū Shuqqa makes such an attempt in his six-volume, Arabic book titled “The Liberation of Women in the Age of Revelation” (Taḥrīr al-Mar’a fī ‘Aṣr al-Risāla) published in 1995. He shows evidence from the Qur’an and authentic hadith reports for women’s autonomy, involvement in communal worship, public life, politics, battlefields, and professional work, among other activities. In an attempt to analyze and bring what was considered a ‘breakthrough’ in the Islamic …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Duty To Survive Well: Neoliberal Governance, Temporality And Breast Cancer Survivorship Discourse, Rachael L. Pack

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study critically examines how discourses of breast cancer survivorship are constructed within professional and popular fields of knowledge production. In this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis (CDA) methods informed by Foucauldian, feminist, and queer theoretical perspectives to analyze a sample of texts, published in the Springer Journal of Cancer Survivorship and by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, in order to elucidate a complex understanding of how discourses of breast cancer survivorship effectively privilege and exclude particular forms of subjectivity and temporal trajectories. I argue that these discourses of breast cancer survivorship operate as neoliberal technologies of governance that …

Pitching The Feminist Voice: A Critique Of Contemporary Consumer Feminism, Kate Hoad-Reddick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation’s object of study is the contemporary trend of femvertising, where seemingly pro-women sentiments are used to sell products. I argue that this commodified version of feminism is highly curated, superficial, and docile. The core question at the centre of this research is how commercial feminism—epitomized by the trend of femvertising—influences the feminist discursive field. Initially, I situate femvertising within the wider trend of consumer feminism and consider the implications of a marketplace that speaks the language of feminism. Then, through detailed content analysis of advertising by brands like Dove, Secret, CoverGirl, and Barbie, examples of this trend …

Skin Portraiture: Embodied Representations In Contemporary Art, Heidi Kellett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, human skin has been explored as a medium, metaphor, and milieu. Images of and objects made from skin flesh out the critical role it plays in experiences of embodiment such as reflexivity, empathy, and relationality, expanding conceptions of difference. This project problematizes the correlation between the appearance of the epidermis and a person’s identity. By depicting the subject as magnified, fragmented, anatomized patches of skin, “skin portraiture”—a sub-genre of portraiture I have coined—questions what a portrait is and what it can achieve in contemporary art. By circumnavigating and obfuscating the subject’s face, skin portraiture perforates the boundaries …

More Than Plumbing: The History Of Sexual Education In Ontario, 1960-1979, Michelle K P Hutchinson Grondin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the 1960s and 1970s, Ontario educators were concerned that the “sexual revolution” would encourage youths to engage in sexually promiscuous behaviour, become unwed mothers, and contract STIs. As parents were perceived as unreliable sex educators, school administrators and educators felt compelled to teach traditional sexual values, and the importance of the nuclear family through sexual education. This dissertation analyzes the creation and instruction of sexual education in physical and health education courses throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Ontario. This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of sexual education in Ontario during the sixties and seventies through an examination …

Fatal Attraction: The Fetishized Image Of The Fatal Woman As Gothic Double, Margaret Anne Young

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Gothic heroine is often doubled by an image – a painting, statue, costume, drawing, projection, or mental image – that is preternaturally powerful and endowed with an antagonistic sexual presence. This image of the fatal woman, unlike portraits of the heroine, is a representation without a referent: a fetish object, both for fictional characters and critics.

I argue that the simulacrum of dangerous femininity is a shifting signifier rather than a one-dimensional representation of – as previous critics have argued – ‘male fears and desires’ or female empowerment. Following the work of sociologist Bruno Latour and narratologist Mieke Bal, …

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

A Feminist Defense Of Moderate Moral Intuitionism, Bill Jc Cameron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The three integrated articles of this dissertation are concerned with the epistemic status of moral intuitions. The first article argues in favour of moderate moral intuitionism, the view that while any successful moral epistemology must be intuitionist to at least some extent, it must also take intuitions to be fallible. This is accomplished by synthesizing work by Robert Audi and George Bealer into a view of moral intuitions which is capable of overcoming some major contemporary objections against intuitionism, particularly from Sharon Street and Peter Singer.

The next article raises a more powerful objection to intuitionism, applying feminist ethics and …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

An Autoethnographical Tapestry Of Feminist Reflection On My Journey Of A Fitness Model Physique, Stephanie A. Paplinskie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Weight training and fitness competitions are increasingly popular activities for many women seeking an aesthetically fit body. This thesis entails a critical reflection of the various factors surrounding my personal decision to partake in body sculpting, examining how these factors parallel the experience of other women in the fitness industry. Using a feminist theoretical framework and autoethnography, a history of feminist theory is incorporated to demonstrate some of the various perspectives surrounding women bodies. Two challenges for women are discussed in this paper: i) the fear of fat, and how it is connected to a woman’s initial decision to attend …

Fertility Preservation Technologies For Women: A Feminist Ethical Analysis, Angel Petropanagos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation I examine ethical issues that concern fertility preservation (FP) technologies for women from a feminist perspective. FP technologies involve the removal, cryopreservation and subsequent storage of reproductive materials for future use. The aim of these technologies is to preserve the option of future genetic reproduction. FP technologies have been developed in the cancer context because infertility is one of the long-term side-effects of many cancers or cancer therapies. Many FP technologies are still experimental, but some technologies are becoming available to healthy women who wish to guard against age-related infertility. Although FP technologies are expanding women’s reproductive …

Hannah Arendt And Feminist Agency, Katherine N. Fulfer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My goal in this dissertation is to articulate an Arendtian conception of feminist agency, that is, agency that aims at resistance from within oppressive situations. There is a tendency in feminist literature to depict women in the global south as if they are passive victims of their oppression, with no opportunities to resist. This tendency is replicated in feminist responses to transnational contract pregnancy, the practice in which people travel across national borders to hire a woman to gestate an embryo.

I argue that the feminist literature on contract pregnancy is polarized and unable to resolve the problematic trend of …

Day Of The Woman?: Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films, Kayley A. Viteo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the horror film sub-genre of ‘rape revenge’ for the ways it reflects and helps to constitute broader public debates about women and feminism. In order to do so, it examines two well-known representatives of the sub-genre, Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Both of these films were initially made in 1972 and 1978 respectively and were recently remade in 2009 and 2010. This thesis examines both the originals and the remakes of these films within and against their socio-historical context, with a specific focus on dominant discussions about feminism and women taking …