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Feminism

American Studies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest May 2019

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …


Betty Friedan And Juliet Mitchell: Critiques Of Ideology And Power, Jennie Eagle Feb 2018

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 …


Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths Jun 2017

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …


Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan Jun 2016

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …