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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
To Be Everything: Sylvia Plath And The Problem That Has No Name, Alanna P. Mcauliffe
To Be Everything: Sylvia Plath And The Problem That Has No Name, Alanna P. Mcauliffe
Student Theses and Dissertations
This thesis explores, in depth, how the poetry of Sylvia Plath operates as an expression of female discontent in the decade directly preceding the sexual revolution. This analysis incorporates both sociohistorical context and theory introduced in Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique. In particular, Plath’s work is put in conversation with Friedan’s notion of the “problem that has no name,” an all-consuming sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that plagued American women in the postwar era. This notion is furthered by close-readings of poems written throughout various stages of Plath’s career (namely “Spinster,” “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Elm,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” …
Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen
Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …
Betty Friedan And Juliet Mitchell: Critiques Of Ideology And Power, Jennie Eagle
Betty Friedan And Juliet Mitchell: Critiques Of Ideology And Power, Jennie Eagle
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My thesis attends to a common thread of critique in two founding documents of “second-wave” feminism: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Juliet Mitchell’s “Women: the Longest Revolution.” I am interested in the ways in which both foundational texts de-naturalize male supremacy by defining it as ideological. The concept of ideology as employed by three notable social theorists – Marx’s concept of a social mythology disseminated by ruling elites to uphold various forms of hierarchy, operating through internal contradictions; French communist Louis Althusser’s concept of a social practice disseminated by the institutions of civil society; and Michel Foucault’s identification …
Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, And Italian State-Building, 1850-1890, Diana Moore
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 …