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Recognizing The Twentieth-Century Love Story, Angela Francis Sep 2018

Recognizing The Twentieth-Century Love Story, Angela Francis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recognizing the Twentieth-Century Love Story investigates an alternative framework through which we can understand the form and function of love stories in the twentieth century. While the love story has previously been understood in terms of a requirement that the lover renunciate passion in order to enjoy a positive narrative outcome, I suggest that some love narratives instead center mutual and “accurate-enough” recognition as a requirement of the desired happily ever after. In addition to requiring that the characters “know themselves,” such recognition goes beyond framing the loved other as an independent subject by also recognizing the beloved in ways …


The Redemption Of Goethe’S Eternal Feminine: Discovering The Reality And Significance Of An Archetypal Phenomenon, Mariana Weisler Sep 2018

The Redemption Of Goethe’S Eternal Feminine: Discovering The Reality And Significance Of An Archetypal Phenomenon, Mariana Weisler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis traces the phenomenological history and significance of the archetype of the Eternal Feminine, as well as her role in Goethe’s Faust. Although the Eternal Feminine (Goethe’s “das Ewig-Weibliche”) first appears in literary form in 1832 with the publication of Faust: Part II, she has an ancient archetypal history that reaches from the age of pre-patriarchal domination into the modern era. This thesis contends that the Eternal Feminine is a Jungian archetype—a “primordial image” or motif that exists unconsciously and evokes a universal experience within both the individual and the society. Five historical figures exemplify the archetype of the …


Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman Sep 2018

Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional …


To Whom Occurs The Haunting: A Singular Exploration Of A Disturbed Femme Psyche, Meghan E. Addison May 2018

To Whom Occurs The Haunting: A Singular Exploration Of A Disturbed Femme Psyche, Meghan E. Addison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By utilizing critical experimental writing, my capstone project will be an exploration of the haunting effects of transgenerational trauma and its lasting impact on the present-day psyche of one disturbed female subject - myself. Relying on multiple formats of writing, including but not limited to: memoir, autobiography, diaries, letters, poetry, and prose, as well the incorporation of multiple disciplines including the likes of: psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, and critical theory, I will make an attempt to utilize the micro in exploration of the macro: to explore my unconscious realm in order to understand a larger political context surrounding female madness and …


Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert May 2018

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …


Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin May 2018

Progressive Commemoration: Public Statues Of Historical Women In Urban American Cities, Melanie D. Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Women who made notable accomplishments are underrepresented in commemoration. Some American cities have brought women to the forefront of becoming visible through commemoration in statues. This thesis compares the commemoration of historical women in four different American cities. Stakeholders hold the key to implementing and changing public policy to increase the visibility of women and people of color in public monuments. Cities which lack representation of women and people of color may learn from and follow the efforts of a leading city to achieve lasting and effective change in representing those who historically been underrepresented.


Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick May 2018

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …


“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright May 2018

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …


Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley May 2018

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …


Queer Repurposed Artifacts: The State Of New York City’S Contemporary West Village Bars, Stephanie Debiase Feb 2018

Queer Repurposed Artifacts: The State Of New York City’S Contemporary West Village Bars, Stephanie Debiase

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, there has been a shift in queer bar culture in New York City’s West Village, and this thesis aims to explore what these changes are and why they are happening now. How do West Village bars survive when queer populations are forced out? While there are various ways to consider how and what survives in the Village, three variables will be addressed: queer history, or the history queer-identified groups using activism, safety measures, or collaborating with outside sources to secure their rights and overall wellbeing; (post)gentrification, beginning with the 90s when mainstream LGBT groups teamed up with …


Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash Feb 2018

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …


Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, And Italian State-Building, 1850-1890, Diana Moore Feb 2018

Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, And Italian State-Building, 1850-1890, Diana Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy and Italian State-Building, 1850-1890” is a study of Protestant and Jewish transnational reforming women who took advantage of a period of fluidity to act as non-state actors and impact Italian unification and liberation, a process known as the Risorgimento, and subsequent Italian state-building. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini’s spiritual brand of romantic cosmopolitan nationalism, as well as Giuseppe Garibaldi’s military campaigns, and believing that women had a god-given duty to provide education, morality, and uplift to oppressed groups, they worked to provide Italy not only with physical unification but also moral regeneration. Through an examination of …


Female Autistic Perspectives: Limits In Diagnosis And Understanding, Alexandra Helmers Feb 2018

Female Autistic Perspectives: Limits In Diagnosis And Understanding, Alexandra Helmers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has increased dramatically within the last two decades, with males being diagnosed, on average, four to five times more than females. Although researchers in the medical community have searched for a biological explanation for this discrepancy, no definitive cause has been found. I argue that our understanding of autism is primarily a social and cultural construction, in addition to a diagnosable medical disorder. The gender disparity in diagnosis reflects cultural narratives surrounding social interaction and the widespread belief in two distinct gender roles. Furthermore, narratives surrounding the topic of autism tend to unintentionally highlight …


Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung Feb 2018

Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1920, women in the United States finally won the right to vote. The campaign for suffrage, which began in the 1848, with the first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, NY, involved the efforts and enthusiasm of countless women who believed that they both deserved and needed the right to vote. This dissertation investigates the ways in which women artists both responded to and contributed to this divisive movement through painting and sculpture during the final decades of the campaign, when visual culture and propaganda played a crucial role in advancing the suffrage and anti-suffrage agendas. The literature …


Espacios Alternativos Y Nomadismo En Tres Poetas Salvadoreñas De La Guerra: Leyla Quintana, Kenny Rodríguez Y Eva Ortiz, Juana M. Ramos Feb 2018

Espacios Alternativos Y Nomadismo En Tres Poetas Salvadoreñas De La Guerra: Leyla Quintana, Kenny Rodríguez Y Eva Ortiz, Juana M. Ramos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the literary production of Leyla Quintana, Kenny Rodríguez, and Eva Ortiz, three Salvadoran poets who participated actively in the Civil War of El Salvador (1980-1992), and produced their literary work in that same period. It explores, from the perspective of Nomadism developed by Rosi Braidotti, the resignification of the feminine subjectivity, as well as the construction of new figurations in order to articulate a counter discourse that challenges the official hegemonic and heteropatriarcal narrative. In the same order, it questions the validity of the cultural codes established and imposed by those groups that hold the political and …