Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity And Trauma In Two Fairy-Tale Retellings, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Transgender identities in fairy tale retellings are rare, but can reveal much about gender fluidity. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird conflates transgender identities with mirrored falsehoods and fairytale spells, pathologizing a trauma victim who turns out to also become an abuser, while Gabriel Vidrine’s novella “A Pair of Raven Wings” depicts a queer transgender man with dignity, making it clear that the trauma he suffers is at the hands of bigots rather than being an invention of a sick mind or the cause of his transition. Pairing these fairy-tale retellings illuminates the topic of gender fluidity in fairy tales …

Black Travel And Presence In The Building Of South Africa [Book Review], Robin L. Turner

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This review of Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob S. T. Dlamini. The original can be found here

The Most Beautiful Of All: A Quantitative Approach To Fairy-Tale Femininity, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Feminist folklorists have long asserted that women’s bodies are represented in fairy tales differently than men’s bodies, in normative and sexist ways. By using computational approaches to analyze a corpus of canonical fairy tales, I assess these claims and establish that women’s bodies are depicted in distinctive ways in fairy tales. This finding is important for scholars interested in fairy-tale studies, gender studies, and computational approaches to folklore studies.

Archival Of The Fittest: The Role Of Archives In Constructing Gay Dutch Historical Memory, Brooks Hosfeld

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Truth, particularly in history, is subjective and constructed through memory. Memory, in turn, is created by archivists, as they actively choose and preserve the narratives made available to researchers and the public; they hold a key position in deciding what is widely understood about what happened in the past. In the same way archivist bias leads to historical erasure, archivists establish historical remembering when they actively make space for individuals and groups who are traditionally omitted from past narratives. Community archives stand distinct from state counterparts, as they restructure what is deemed valuable enough to be preserved within historical memory, …

The Reification Of Hegemonic Masculinity Via Heteronormativity, Sexual Objectification, And Masculine Performances In Tau Kappa Epsilon Recruitment Videos, Viki Tomanov

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Fraternity members constitute a large percentage of men who hold highly influential jobs in politics, large corporations, and the like. Since fraternities are limited to men-only, it is important to examine how masculinity is both rhetorically constructed and subsequently performed. Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE), the fraternity with the largest amount of chapters nationwide, is the focus of my analysis. Its popularity among college campuses signifies that its recruitment is successful and that, regardless of initiation into the fraternity, many men (and women) view TKE as an example of masculinity. In my analysis, I examine TKE recruitment videos from various universities …

Masculinity And Men’S Bodies In Fairy Tales: Youth, Violence, And Transformation, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The study of masculinity in fairy tales lags behind the study of femininity, a lack this article addresses by reviewing the intersections of masculinity studies and feminist theory and using a dataset based on canonical fairy-tale collections to empirically tease out representations of men's bodies in fairy tales. Crucial findings include the significance of youth, physical stature, violence, and transformations in depictions of men's bodies in fairy tales, which contribute to a construction of hegemonic masculinity as fragile yet the unmarked norm.

Queer Theory, Sex Work, And Foucault's Unreason, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

During the late nineties, leading voices of the sex worker rights movement began to publicly question queer theory’s virtual silence on the subject of prostitution and sex work. However, this attempt by sex workers to “come out of the closet” into the larger queer theoretical community has thus far failed to bring much attention to sex work as an explicitly queer issue. Refusing the obvious conclusion—that queer theory’s silence on sex work somehow proves its insignificance to this field of inquiry—I trace in Foucault’s oeuvre signs of an alternate (albeit differently) queer genealogy of prostitution and sex work. Both challenging …

Why Can’T A Woman Fail Like A Man? Gender Differences In Perceived Competence Following A Mistake, Kathryn Kincaid

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Stereotypes are pervasive and can significantly influence the way we perceive and evaluate others. When people occupy roles that are not congruent with stereotypes (such as a stay-at-home dad or a female CEO), past research has suggested that they are evaluated more harshly than those in roles that are stereotype-congruent. The present study examined the role of gender stereotypes by asking participants to read a vignette about a college student and their performance in a class. In these vignettes, the student’s major and gender were manipulated such that there were students in gender stereotype-congruent majors (female nursing major, male computer …

“See Ourselves As Others See Us”: Empathy Across Gender Boundaries In James Joyce’S Ulysses, Madison V. Chartier

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Many critics originally attacked James Joyce’s Ulysses for its dark representation of gender relations. Today, many scholars consider this criticism prematurely formed and recognize that these early critics responded more to Stephen Dedalus’s antagonistic, misogynistic views in the novel’s opening chapters than to the rest of the epic and the views of the novel’s main protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who displays a much more receptive, appreciative attitude toward women. These scholars now believe that gender relations as portrayed in Ulysses actually undermine preconceived notions of a gendered hierarchy. However, this difference in character perspective is not the only or even the …

Review, Other Dreams Of Freedom: Religion, Sex, And Human Trafficking, By Yvonne C. Zimmerman, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Review of Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, by Yvonne C. Zimmerman. Published May 2015 in The Journal of American Studies.

Reform Judaism And Lgbtq Identity In Indiana: A Sociological Study Toward Greaterunderstanding And Inclusion, Gregory Ethan Zemtsov

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

LGBTQ Jews are collectively an underrepresented population, and their identification with two minority groups exposes this group of individuals to a great deal of potential hardships. Jewish culture, the largely secular LGBTQ community, and the ever-present gaze of heteronormative Christian society at large unfortunately have the ability to permutate and coalesce in a myriad of destructive ways at the expense of LGBTQ Jews. While the media and academia largely ignore this community at the national level, LGBTQ Jewry in the Midwest is worse off still. Today, there has yet to be a single published article about LGBTQ Jews in the …

Chains & Whips: Gender Roles In Bdsm Erotica Published After "Fifty Shades Of Grey", Laura Lines

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Ever since the release of E. L. James' erotic romance novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, in 2011, more novels with bondage/discipline/dominance/submission/sadomasochism (BDSM) content invaded the romance market, targeting adult women. These novels sparked controversy: some applaud the increased popularity as a way for women to be more open about their sexuality and embrace experimentation with kink in the bedroom. Others criticize these novels as harmful examples of unrealistic, abusive relationships where women are subservient to a dominant man. Since these novels became popular in recent times, my research consists of a content analysis of popular BDSM erotic romance novels published …

Angel Outside The House: The New Woman In Brittish Periodicals 1890-1910, Lindsay Rosa

Graduate Thesis Collection

The New Woman described in short fiction and editorial articles in British periodicals not only presented the ideal New Woman to readers, but served to shape the perceptions of the reader depending on the demographic of the targeted reading audience for that specific periodical. The audience for specific British periodicals featuring the New Woman included conservative families whose youth saw the New Woman figure as a role model. The New Woman figure easily connected to readers, particularly young, female middle-class readers, who easily identified with her because she possessed similar socioeconomic characteristics. Just as there were many New Women characters …

Fifty Shades Of Fucked Up: On The Use And Abuse Of A Sexual Subculture To Sell Books, Viviane Panagiotis Linos

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In Fifty Shades of Grey, James masterfully utilizes a first person narrative to ease readers into unfamiliar sexual territory. However, while introducing relatively accurate terminology to enlighten her readers on BDSM practices, James further perpetuates the pseudo-acceptance of such sexual deviance by relying on mainstream, vanilla, or non- BDSM practitioning audience members to insert their own normative framework into the narrative (Weiss, 2006, p. 114). This literary approach allows readers to unknowingly utilize these fictional texts as an educational tool to understand BDSM. Fifty Shades of Grey utilized as a pedagogical tool is counterproductive to an accurate understanding of BDSM. …

Diversity In Times Of Austerity: Documenting Resistance In The Academy, David Moscowitz, Terri Jett, Terri Carney, Tamara Leech, Ann M. Savage

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical …

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer: The Alien Other And The Science Fiction Of Sexual Difference, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than …

Quantifying The Grimm Corpus: Transgressive And Transformative Bodies In The Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What do bodies mean in fairy tales? Donald Haase’s engagement with the Grimms’ fairy tales has offered some hints, ranging from his attention to feminist scholarship on the Grimms to his multifaceted review of recent Grimm scholarship that addresses various meanings of bodies in the language and translation of their tales. Inspired by Haase’s work and encouragement, I created a database that lists every mention or description of a body in the Grimms’ tales and in five other European tale collections. I detailed the results of this quantitative investigation in my dissertation, generally treating all the tale collections as part …

Strategic Silences: Voiceless Heroes In Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In a number of international fairy tale types, such as ATU 451 ("The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers"), the female protagonist voluntarily stops speaking in order to attain the object of her quest. In ATU 451, found in the collected tales of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen as well as in oral tradition, the protagonist remains silent while weaving the shirts needed to disenchant her brothers from their birdlike forms. While this silence is undoubtedly disempowering in some ways as she cannot defend herself from persecution and accusations of wickedness, here I argue that the choice to remain silent …

“A Southern Expendable”: Cultural Patriarchy, Maternal Abandonment, And Narrativization In Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina, Natalie Carter

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Bastard Out of Carolina is a remarkable text for many reasons: Allison’s unsentimental portrayal of profound poverty in the Old South; her unflinching depiction of incest; and the conclusion—devastating for character and reader alike—all contribute to the “flawless” nature of this novel. Perhaps most remarkable, though, is Allison’s ability to seamlessly weave a particularly Southern tradition of masculinity and violence into this heartbreaking tale of a daughter’s trauma and a mother’s abandonment. In this article, I will investigate Allison’s multifaceted portrayals of trauma in Bastard Out of Carolina, which—when combined with an analysis of social and economic traditions in …

The Affective Economy Of Marriage: Or, No Spouse Left Behind, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

True to form, Dean Spade & Craig Willse deliver a fierce critique of the liberal politics surrounding same-sex marriage from the left of left in their recent "Marriage Will Never Set Us Free." Following suit on a spate of similar such critiques from such collectives as Against Equality, Beyond Marriage, and their own I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal, Spade & Willse eloquently and incisively lament the way in which "same-sex marriage advocacy... has made being anti-homophobic synonymous with being pro-marriage," and, in the process, cast "Left political projects of racial and economic justice, decolonization, and feminist liberation" …

The Black And The White Bride: Dualism, Gender, And Bodies In European Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Fairy tales are one of the most important folklore genres in Western culture, spanning literary and oral cultures, folk and elite cultures, and print and mass media forms. As Jack Zipes observes: ‘The cultural evolution of the fairy tale is closely bound historically to all kinds of storytelling and different civilizing processes that have undergirded the formation of nation-states.’¹⁴³ Studying fairy tales thus opens a window onto European history and cultures, ideologies, and aesthetics.

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

Love In The Time Of Capitalism: A Marxist Feminist Reading Of Modern Times, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Dr. Brooke Beloso's contribution to Marxism and the Movies: Critical Essays on Class Struggle in the Cinema, Ed. Kevin K. Durand and Mary K. Leigh, McFarland Publishers.

Sorting Out Donkey Skin (Atu 510b): Toward An Integrative Literal-Symbolic Analysis Of Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article debates the merits of fairy tale interpretive frameworks that privilege the psychological and symbolic, versus those that utilize a literal and feminist orientation. Using ATU 510B as a test case, for its intriguing blend of real-world elements and the fantastic, the author suggests that a synthesis of literal and symbolic theories allows for the fullest understanding of the polyvalent meanings of tale, which is particularly problematic due to its depictions of incest. Drawing examples from canonical as well as contemporary versions of ATU 510B, various psychoanalytic and feminist interpretations of the tale type are put to the test, …

Modernist Women In Three Acts: The Stage For Political Protest, Jennifer B. Redmond

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

In this essay, I will draw upon Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Sh011stories, "Bliss" (1918), "The Woman at the Store" (1912), "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais" (1918), George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), and Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One 's Own (1929), to defend Jeffreys's idea that "lesbianism" was, in many cases, nothing more than a bond of friendship between two women - a private experience that took on a different meaning in the public eye.

Additionally, I wish to support Gubar's notion that gender norms frequently existed secondarily to the importance of women gaining more …

Conservative Feminism And Its Potential To Interact With, Influence, And Transform Traditional Feminist Identity, Aja Cacan

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The recent emergence of conservative female public figures has posed a challenge to the traditional notion of feminist thought. Although they define their particular form of success in terms of conservative ideology, many of these women operate according to feminist paradigms, and would not even have the opportunity to assume such a public role if it were not for the past feminist breakthroughs that have cleared the way. Their association with feminist logic and adoption of the feminist moniker notwithstanding, these conservative women most often speak out in reaction and opposition to traditional liberal feminist views and activism. Regardless of …

Sex, Work, And The Feminist Erasure Of Class, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this essay, I trace the contemporary feminist debate on prostitution to the period in which Catharine MacKinnon and Gayle Rubin deemed Marxism inadequate to the task of theorizing women’s oppression. In seeking to surmount this perceived inadequacy, both thinkers counterposed alternative theoretical frameworks for analyzing women’s oppression that nonetheless relied upon certain of Marxism’s central tenets. In a reliance that took the form of strikingly similar translations of Marxism foregrounding what came to be known as radical feminism (in the case of MacKinnon) and queer theory (in the case of Rubin), both theorists problematically render class as, respectively, gender …

Queering Kinship In ‘The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers', Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The fairy tales in the Kinder- und Hausmiirchen, or Children's and Household Tales, compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are among the world's most popular, yet they have also provoked discussion and debate regarding their authenticity, violent imagery, and restrictive gender roles. In this chapter I interpret the three versions published by the Grimm brothers of ATU 451, "The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers," focusing on constructions of family, femininity, and identity. I utilize the folkloristic methodology of allomotific analysis, integrating feminist and queer theories of kinship and gender roles. I follow Pauline Greenhill by taking a queer view of …

Defying Borders: Transforming Learning Through Collaborative Feminist Organizing And Interdisciplinary, Transnational Pedagogy, Terri Carney, Margaretha Geertsema Sligh, Ann M. Savage, Ageeth Sluis

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The authors provide a case study of how a group of faculty members was able to initiate a transformation in student learning and institutional structures at a small university in the Midwestern U.S. through the introduction of collaborative feminist organizing and pedagogy. It details faculty-led initiatives that set the stage for innovative teaching and learning, and it describes the authors' experience in the face of resistance when introducing a global women's human rights course into the university's new core curriculum. Because of its divers, interdisciplinary and transnational content, this course challenged deeply ingrained disciplinary and pedagogical borders of both traditional …

"Speak Softly But Carry A Big Can Of Paint" - Banksy, Wall And Piece: Street Art As Radical Political Activism, Rosemary Reedy Booth

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The English street artist Banksy best describes the power of street art as radical activism through his assertion in his 2003 collection, Banging Yallr Head Against a Brick Wall, that "[ It] is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss" ( II ). Banksy is notorious because he is a prolific street artist yet his identity has never been revealed. He plays a prominent role in the current international street art …