Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, And Death In Video Games, Meghan Blythe Adams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes gendered death animations in video games and the way games thematize death to remarginalize marked characters, including women. This project combines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work on the human subjection to death and Georges Bataille’s characterization of sacrifice to explore how death in games stages markedness. Markedness articulates how a culture treats normative identities as unproblematic while marking non-normative identities as deviant.

Chapter One characterizes play as a form of death-deferral, which culminates in the spectacle of player-character death. I argue that death in games can facilitate what Hegel calls tarrying with death, embracing our subjection to …

Cheenama The Trail Maker: An Indian Idyll Of Old Ontario Indigenous Ethnographic Films Of The 20th Century, Sarah Charette

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Ethnographic films of the early twentieth century, intended to document and reproduce the cultural practices, living conditions, and identities of Indigenous populations, were often rife with colonial assumptions, staged events, abnormal or uncommon practices, and the active silencing of Indigenous perspectives. Cheenama the Trailmaker: An Indian Idyll of Old Ontario, produced in 1935 by the Canadian Museum of History, attempts to recreate the day-to-day life of an Algonquin family in pre-contact North America.

Beginning with a comparative analysis of the film itself, this essay uses empirical evidence from the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan to paint a picture of the accuracy …

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

“Born Of A Spirit That Knows No Conquering:” Innovation, Contestation, And Representation In The Pcha, 1911-1924., Taylor Mckee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) was a professional North American hockey league that operated from 1911 to 1924. With markets in Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, Seattle, and Portland, the bourgeoning league was a viable competitor to the NHA and offered a distinctive approach to the developing sport. Through innovations and rule changes, the PCHA made significant strides in player safety, in line with the vision of “clean” hockey promoted by the league’s founders, Frank and Lester Patrick. In turn, these innovations were represented through newspaper accounts from the period, which helped promote a modern, scientific, and highly-marketable brand of …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

The Networked Fictional Narrative: Seriality And Adaptations In Popular Television And New Media., Nandita Dutta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From creating elaborate fan-worlds to driving large amounts of revenue into the economy, popular culture has proved to be the motivation behind, as well a reflection of, large scale acquisitions of conglomerates that have governed popular interests since the mid-20th Century. If its movements across geographic space, time, and media can be traced, popular culture production is an apt subject of research into how a cultural entity is conceptualised, transported and appropriated within another. In this study, adaptations of fictional products in the 20th and 21st Centuries are considered as manifestations of neobaroque forms of culture production and consumption. Some …

(Un)Filtered Females: Exploring The Changing Representation Of Women In Cigarette Advertising, 1920-1940, Sophia Belyk

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Throughout the first half of twentieth century, the act of smoking transitioned from being an exclusively male to a predominantly female practice. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century merely being female was considered a serious risk to developing a smoking habit. This cultural shift is reflected in contemporary cigarette advertising, in which women begin as attractive accessories to male smokers and gradually become depicted as smoking independently. These advertisements were actively engaged with the social worlds of the women they targeted, drawing upon their contemporary concerns and values, namely those of women’s liberation and an increased attention placed …