Art and Design Commons^™

More Than A Punchline: A Comparative Analysis Of Diversity In Dropout.Tv & Collegehumor, Alexander Gluchowski

Student Research Submissions

This paper examines the evolution of digital comedy through a comparative analysis of CollegeHumor and its offshoot, Dropout.tv, focusing on how each platform has approached the portrayal of diversity and inclusion. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis, the study contrasts selected episodes from both platforms to explore shifts in the representation of queer and POC comedians, and the thematic treatment of identity issues. The findings reveal that Dropout.tv significantly advances the inclusivity of comedic content, moving beyond CollegeHumor’s earlier reliance on stereotypical and controversial humor. This shift not only reflects changes in contemporary comedy but also highlights Dropout.tv's commitment to fostering …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

Goin' Down Swinging: Queer Fury, Mad Green

Graduate School of Art Theses

How can kickboxing uplift a community? How can Queer rage be utilized in community building and artmaking?

As a Queer artist, my work is inspired by my own experiences. Through drawing, printmaking, photography, video, performance, sculpture, and social practice, I dissect my violent upbringing and its lingering threads in my adult life. In this essay, I discuss the two most prominent features of my art practice: Fight and Community. I navigate these ideas through past works, such as a performance piece of me destroying a news article, a short film about institutional homophobia through aliens and immaculate conception, and most …

Cross-Pollination: Building A Co-Taught Course To Examine Art And Sex Through The Lens Of Botany, Christopher T. Martine, Diamanda A. Zizis, Anna K. Kell

Faculty Journal Articles

Driven by overlapping interests in plants, art, and diversity in sex expression, Anna Kell (Department of Art and Art History) and Chris Martine (Department of Biology) developed a course that integrates the perspectives of a visual artist and a botanist. Art & Sex Through the Lens of Botany seeks to impart the importance of making connections across disciplines and the value of visual literacy across academic lines. The course introduces foundational concepts in each field and encourages students to integrate and explore these different systems of knowledge and their intersections. In addition to developing fluencies related to both general botany …

My Gender In The Closet, Aspen Balducci

Student Sequential Art and Comics

This book details the transitioning and rediscovery of gender from a single person's perspective. Gender is not linear or binary, something all people should be free to study and discover.

Sense Make Before Book, Bradley Sinanan

Theses and Dissertations

“Sense Make Before Book” is an Indo-Caribbean turn of phrase which refers to common sense being more important than book smarts. My sister sent me a post the other day on Instagram of an Trinidadian woman using this phrase, saying it was one of Indo-Caribbean origin. I was interested and asked my mom about it. My mom says that when she was younger my grandpa said it often around their house in Princes Town, Trinidad and Tobago. This adage feels charged thinking about the history of indenture and its effects on the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.

The written word of archival history …

In Shame I Will Find Paradise, Taehee Whang

Theses and Dissertations

As a Korean American non-binary digital artist and designer, my recent explorations have focused on using voice as a medium to articulate nuanced feelings of displacement and the intricate relationships between language, identity, and expression. This journey expands beyond my personal experiences with gender dysphoria, delving into the lives of non-binary and transgender individuals undergoing gender-affirming voice therapy. Through my thesis research, I have developed interactive multimedia installations inspired by dialogues with individuals such as Umico Niwa, who traveled to Korea for voice feminization surgery, and Jeong Yoon Lee from Hyperlink Press, a four-year participant in Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). …

Collaborative Storytelling In The Parable Task: The Dramaturg As Game Designer In Pervasive Performance, Percival Hornak

Masters Theses

Proceeding from a framing of theater as collaborative storytelling, I argue for defining role-playing games as a kind of performance and for their value in structuring experiential and participatory theater. Building on the impulse at the heart of experiential and immersive theater to place the audience within the world of the performance and center their experience, I explore what it means for theater artists to cede control over how audiences make meaning of their work in favor of letting narrative emerge from the participation of the audience during the performance event. I propose a framework called pervasive performance that merges …

What Could A Trans Book History Look Like? Toward Trans Codicology, J D. Sargan

Criticism

This article draws on critical trans studies and queer archival practice to propose a book historical mode that extends what we know about the premodern trans experience beyond the recovery of individual biographies. Instead of turning to textual sources for the identification of transness, the author looks to Susan Stryker’s call for the “recuperat[ion of] embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of knowledge production.” Bibliography, he suggests, makes claims of objectivity that engender a particular reluctance to respond to such calls. But the lived reality of archival research is one of affective embodiment. Affect theory is an area that, …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

You Are Cordially (Un)Invited: My Korean Femme Strategy And Aspiration For Survival And Queer Futures, Nahyun Kim

Masters Theses

You are cordially (un)invited: My Korean Femme Strategy and Aspiration for Survival and Queer Futures documents a series of ceremonies dedicated to the years I have survived. This book has branched from a project of the same name that consists of a durational installation, performance, and series of events. The project and book are an aspirational gesture to send off the part of myself–that had to compromise, comply, and negotiate with institutions–for a rebirth to live a life beyond survival.

As a book and project, You are cordially (un)invited is a culmination of my experiences as a Korean femme, using …

Dirt Circus: Queering Sports And Home Through Filth, Hannah Patteson

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA Thesis Exhibition, “Dirt Circus”. I outline the history of circus and carnival culture and the ways in which queer identities are expressed through these artistic modes. I describe the nonconforming expressions of gender in these arenas through bearded ladies, aerialists, clowns, and the freak show. I then explore various groups from the 70’s to present day, including Bread and Puppet Theater, The Cockettes, and Split Britches, who utilize performance to further their ideologies of gender freedom, anti-capitalism, and sexual liberation. I compare our differing uses of cheap art and public engagement within the realm of …

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

Destabilize (Achtung) Baby: Performance Text, Phenomenon, And Writing As A Condition For Radicalizing An Historically Bourgeois Artform, Jeremy Kadetsky

Theatre Thesis - Written Thesis

The author seeks to define the preconditions for creating performance text that has the possibility to not only create exciting compelling performance; but also has the affordance to radically change the way in which dramatic theatre is produced. In creating their own dramaturgy, Jeremy Kadetsky draws inspiration from the post-structural linguistic writings of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva; the queer theory espoused by Jack Halberstam and Sarah Ahmed; and the written and realized work of contemporary American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Sibyl Kempson, and Agnes Borinsky. Ultimately, they find a working criteria for writing in a way that promotes fecundity, jouissance, …

Become The Monster: Identity, Perception, And What It Means To Be Inhuman, Juniper Amundson

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This collection of crocheted pieces illustrates what monsterhood is, how monsters are created, and what it means to become one. Following concepts from queer and disability theory, monsterhood is established as an externally constructed identity that is traditionally imposed on others rather than self-initiated. The pieces illustrate three significant steps in understanding and unpacking how monsters come into being: finding the language to name the monster, embodying that language, and liberating that embodied language from the systems of oppression that shape it. In applying these steps to my own narrative as a disabled transsexual graduating college mid-pandemic, I demonstrate the …

Exploring The Influence Of Globalization And Self-Expression In Shaping The Vietnamese Lgbtq+ Community In Urban Vietnam, Minh-Thy Tyler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The LGBTQ+ community is estimated to make up around 9% to 11% of Vietnam’s total population. Over the past few decades, Vietnam has undergone significant changes, marked by its increasing interconnectedness with the global community. These changes have also brought about a shift in perceptions and advocacy toward the LGBTQ+ community. Also bringing along a change in attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community in Vietnam is self-expression and fashion. Through drag or wearing gender-nonconforming attire, queer individuals are able to challenge the restrictive gender binary prevalent in Vietnamese society. Self-expression and fashion are also critical in helping queer individuals form and …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

The Tretter Project: Queer History, Laura E. Migliorino, Christopher Bohnet, Lisa Vecoli

University Art Collection Books

The Trettor Project: Queer History zine shares LGBTQIA+ history through the photography of selected items from the Jean Nickolaus-Tretter Archive of Queer History. The Tretter Archive is located at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The zine was provided with permission of the artist and publisher Laura Migliorino. An art exhibit of the photographs was exhibited in the Winona State University Darrell W. Krueger Library October 2023 through December 2023.

Ok I'M Perfect, Dania Skye Leibowitz

Senior Projects Fall 2023

okay i’m perfect

I make art as a way to externalize my anger in a way that won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been making art about my anxieties, my exhaustion, my fear. Some of my drawings scare me to look at, and to think of other people looking at. So then I make other things to protect myself from them, and from you.

Most of the time when I get into my studio, I don’t know what to do. I draw myself, and I make rectangles from fabric and I stuff them. The repetition of drawing and sewing grounds me until …

Michelangelo Buonarroti And Homophobia In The Renaissance, Grace T. O. Ray

The Confluence

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was a young man with an aristocratic background when he first met famous artist Michelangelo Buonarroti in Rome. Tommaso was known to be an incomparable physical beauty, with intelligence and elegant manners, as well as being a member of one of the most illustrious families of Rome—the Orsini. Some have said this is what drew the artist to Cavalieri from the start. Though not much is known about their encounter, it is confirmed that Cavalieri remained a close and loyal companion to Michelangelo for thirty-two years until the artist’s death in 1564. Furthermore, throughout their years together …

A Photo Documentary: Exploring Queer Identities In Kwazulu-Natal, Nicholas Graves

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Media can be a powerful tool in examining the structures of power that both hinder and advance LGBTQIA+ representation and subsequently, lived experiences. Therefore, being able to understand the varying feelings that everyday South Africans feel towards queer people, will be measured through the media that people consume. For the vast majority of South Africans, this would look like movies, TV soap operas, and discussions that take place on the radio. Understanding the role media plays within the country is vital to understanding the overall progress that has been made.

The media’s ability to reflect lived experiences within gay and …

Choice-Based Games And Resilience Building Of Gender Non-Conforming Individuals: An Exploratory Study, Yuri M. Cantrell

Masters Theses

Research on gaming and user experience of the general population has been abundant, but gender non-conforming (GNC) individuals’ experiences had been largely overlooked until recent years. Using a phenomenological approach, the goal of this study is to find deeper understanding of this phenomenon by exploring what gaming experiences shape the identity of the participants. The exploration of gaming and gender non-conforming experiences through interviews can fill a gap in the current literature on gaming culture regarding this specific population. By taking a closer look at this topic, patterns and themes within games may provide insight to potential resilience building activities …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …