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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
An Impossible Standard: The Virgin Mary And The Construction Of Southern Womanhood, Dean Symmonds
An Impossible Standard: The Virgin Mary And The Construction Of Southern Womanhood, Dean Symmonds
Undergraduate Research Awards
This paper examines Southern literature about white women in its religious and cultural contexts to illuminate the deeply embedded connections between the figure of the Virgin Mary and the archetypes of the white Southern Belle and Dixie Madonna, and reveal both a complex web of cultural constructions designed to control, critique, and constrain Southern women, and how women use those constructions to free themselves.
Spiritual Essentialism At Standing Rock, Yitazba Largo-Anderson
Spiritual Essentialism At Standing Rock, Yitazba Largo-Anderson
Undergraduate Research Awards
In this research paper, I argue that the indigenous communities at Standing Rock, North Dakota practice spiritual activism. Their resistance towards the Dakota Access Pipeline is not only rooted in Indigenous identity, but is also a form of spiritual essentialism that is shared among indigenous tribes across the globe. Although spiritual essentialism is shared among a surplus of tribes, their shared spirituality of healing directly tied with the earth and body can also be understood by non-Native people, if practiced without appropriating, profiting, and romanticizing Indigenous spirituality. Standing Rock’s choice of language in rejecting the word “protestors” and identifying as …
Coming Together As One: How A Los Angeles Magazine Fostered The Lgbt Community, Gina Wiese
Coming Together As One: How A Los Angeles Magazine Fostered The Lgbt Community, Gina Wiese
Undergraduate Research Awards
There is no decade that evokes such discomfort for LGBT folk than the 1950s. Those who were privileged enough to benefit during the era remember the decade fondly as the age of a tremendous economic boom and American identity transforming with the victory in both Europe and the Pacific. White heterosexual families migrated from cities to the suburbs and turned out children almost as fast as the factories were producing fridges and washing machines. But LGBT Americans were put under a sudden microscope; there was a mass culture of conformity to which those who failed to perform heteronormativity stood out …
Discursive Mapping: Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca And Thomas Jefferson’S Construction Of Selfhood And Otherness, Monica Doebel
Discursive Mapping: Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca And Thomas Jefferson’S Construction Of Selfhood And Otherness, Monica Doebel
Undergraduate Research Awards
The binary of savage versus civilized was deeply embedded in the structure of early American society and the consciousness of early generations of colonizers, codified through multiple methods of inscribing meaning upon native land. Thomas Jefferson, in his pseudo-scientific Notes on the State of Virginia, taxonomizes life in native America using maps, charts, and textual descriptions for the purpose of consolidating an American identity premised on superiority over native people and black slaves. In contrast, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca maps native America purely through language, constructing the illusory infallibility of European colonizers while crafting an overall narrative of native …