Creative Writing Commons^™

“The Urgent Necessity For More Original Creative Works By Transgender And Gender Expansive Artists" Is Not The Title Of My Thesis., Alicia Fireel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection, academic research, and an examination of The Girl Crazy Queer and Other Fairy Tales, a play I wrote and performed in October of 2023, co-produced by The University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts and Pandora Productions, a Louisville-based theatre company dedicated to Queer theatre. This thesis and the play mirror each other; both contemplate Queer experiences, Queer histories, Queer trauma, and Queer stories. In the thesis I accomplish this through examining four subjects: myself, my play, the connection between modes of storytelling and aspects of transgender Queerness, and the perils that …

Coup De Grâce, Violet Rea Mass

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project, composed of an introduction and a fiction piece, explores the complex power dynamics at play on the university stage put into perspective of the Human Rights study. The fiction follows young Olive as arrives for her first term at a university in a secluded valley where she must come to terms with a darkness greater than she had ever imagined.

Digital Pastoral, Rebecca Holifield

Master's Theses

Digital Pastoral is a collection of original poems and a creative nonfiction essay, accompanied by a critical introduction.

Womanist Poetics: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, And Audre Lorde, Aya Telmissany

Theses and Dissertations

Today, the sentimentality associated with poetry is often condescendingly dubbed in a patriarchal society as “feminine poetry.” The first women poets who dared to attempt the pen were often met with attacks on their femaleness and harsh critiques of their writing which was likened to sorcery and witchcraft. Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Audre Lorde are three American women poets who countered these attacks and turned them inside out in favor of their own womanist poetics. They wrote about experiencing the world as women and most importantly about experiencing poetry as women. What happens to poetry when a woman appropriates …

Horse Loose: Essays On Fear And Attachment, Alyse Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I began writing my thesis about my grandmother, who lived out the last few years of her life as a new age healer speaking in tongues and believing she was the channel for an ancient Lemurian shaman. We were not close until the very end of her life, and even then I felt far away from her. Not in the least because of her estrangement with the rest of my family. I tried and tried to write about her but always ran up against her mystery. She was not a woman many knew, and if you did know her, you …

Diario Nb, Sergio A. Godoy

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As a literary text, Diario nb is a hybrid-memoir that gathers materials from my digital archive, including diary entries, poetry, academic essays and short stories I wrote for class, photos and videos, to tell the story of how I came to the realization that I was trans, what it was like to live with that realization for the first few months after it happened, and how I feel about it now, almost a year after it all happened. Itâ??s also a book about our need to explain ourselves for others, and the suffering that need can bring into our lives.

Agatha Christie: A Look Into Criminal Procedure And Gender, Carmella Monico

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

With 2020 being the 100^th year since Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published, it seems fitting to celebrate such an accomplished author with a deeper look into the inner workings of her novels. While she wrote mystery novels that involved many detectives, the two most popular are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This paper will examine these two detectives in regard to the criminal procedure each uses to solve their respective cases. Would her detectives’ work hold up in court then or even today? Additionally, the difference in gender between Poirot and Marple …

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

Properly Unhinged: A Collection Of Poems, Madison Everett

Honors Projects

This is a collection of poems that explores the identities I possess and am a part of. These identities include being half black and half white, clinically diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Generalize Anxiety Disorder, pansexual or bisexual or something altogether different (depending on the day), and cis gendered womanhood. I also explore what a poem is and what a poem is not, and how there is very little difference between the two. In a lot of ways, this is an exploration into myself and what it means to be within the world. What does it mean to …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

Tectonic, Rebecca E. Holifield

Honors Theses

Tectonic is a collection of original poems accompanied by a critical preface.

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …

A Story About A Girl With Snakes For Hair, Kate M. Turner

Theses and Dissertations

My work is autobiographical. I use various art making processes to create a visual archive of my life. By abstracting these memories and experiences, I can examine how culture works surrounding issues of identity. This is my story.

The Natural Mother Of The Child, Krys Belc

All NMU Master's Theses

The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir-in-essays about Belc’s experiences as a transmasculine birth parent. These essays use text and images to explore parenting on the margins of both motherhood and fatherhood. They also examine the ways in which legal and identity documents are limiting in their ability to describe gender and family. Topics explored include pregnancy, birth, lactation, masculinity, top surgery, medical transition, the meaning of biological relationships between parents and children, and microaggressions against transgender people.

Baby Adrian: Not An Autobiography, Adrian Catrin Retzl

Senior Projects Fall 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Lesbian Love Sonnets: Adrienne Rich And Carol Ann Duffy, Robin Seiler-Garman

Senior Theses

Our conceptualization of sexuality is rooted in gender. Modern, western society defines sexuality as which genders one is and is not attracted to—often appearing as a binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Recently, however, queer theorists have begun to push against the idea of binary sexuality altogether.

The interplay between gender and sexuality additionally manifests in the history of literature. Because the two are so intimately intertwined, writing about sexuality necessitates writing about gender. Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich and Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy are two poetry collections where, as lesbian poets, gender and sexuality play an important role. …

Memento Mori And Other Stories, Abigail Arnold

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Memento Mori and Other Stories follows historical characters straining against societal norms and pushing back against gender roles as they struggle for personal independence.

True Form Of Greatness, Michael V. Terry

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A screenplay that moves through the decade of the 90's while exploring philosophy, love, religion and tragedy in the atmosphere of collegiate baseball.

Don't Go Unless You Mean It : A Novel With Critical Afterword : Heteronormative Masculine Performance In Contemporary Fictions Of The Rural American South., Nathan N. Gower

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of a full-length novel for an adult audience as well as a substantial critical afterword to elucidate and complicate germane thematic concerns of the creative artifact. The novel, leaning on the rich traditions and many genre conventions of fictions of the American south, tells the story of an unlikely underground coal miner in Blue Banks, a fictional southern town set in the caverns and rolling hills of the western Kentucky coal fields. The narrative follows its fish-out-of-water protagonist, Cody Culver, a fledgling academic who thought he had escaped his fate as a third-generation coal miner when he …

Frida's Daughter, Myrta Vida

Theses

The purpose of my creative writing is to highlight a group of U.S. citizens still woefully underrepresented in literature proper: the Latinx middle class. I’m keenly interested in exploring Puerto Rican and first- and second-generation Latinx immigrant stories. Even though some of the experiences from these groups have been elegantly visited by writers such as Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez, and others, there are nuances to the Latinx middle class experience that are yet to be uncovered. Being stuck in the cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, and political middles in a country that has recently taken a largely nationalist …

New Year, Old Blues, Joy Bowman

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection aims through the use of folktale and familial history to investigate the bounds of gender and memory against a rural Appalachian landscape. The work utilizes superstition, myth, and the commonplace to search the shadows for the forbidden and unspoken, in an attempt to redefine and reconcile personal dissonance through an observational and at times, voyeuristic lens.

Splitting The Avocado: Short Fiction On Themes Of Power, Gender, And The Hope Of Change, Abigail Mcbride

Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate

Being a woman who writes about life then, whatever that might mean, is what this project is about, because in that way this male seeing of the world is not silenced but rather transformed by the other side of a conversation that has always been one-sided. I read that and thought, wow, I’m doing something political, something revolutionary, something that’s part of a bigger legacy of women completely revolutionizing traditional discourse!But as I look over the stories I’ve written, I find something very different. I find something intensely personal, even private, in my own relation to gender. I thought I …

Check The Box Marked Other: Exploring Gender In Family Life, Serenity E. Dougherty

All NMU Master's Theses

The concept of a traditional family structure has been fading over the last 50 years and with this decline the notion of responsibilities being determined by gender is also losing ground, though it still has a long way to go. This short story collection works to continue to normalize the increasing variety of family structures, especially variety that has its roots in new notions of gender challenging old conventions. The stories are all set in Nebraska, an ideal landscape for exploring tradition versus modernity. Though there are major cities in NE, most of the state is composed of smaller rural …

Matilde Ros Leaves The Jungle, Susana Beatriz Camacho Vivar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When Matilde defies her mother and abandons her privileged life in a South American capital to fight for environmental justice in the Amazon jungle, she never imagines her journey will bring her right back to where she started. As she insists on freeing herself, four other women around her do the same, defining their freedom when class, gender and race may still get to tell them who they are.

Five Degrees: A Short Story, Cassia E. Hinds

Honors Undergraduate Theses

An interwoven fiction piece representing four perspectives and its effects on self-awareness. The most effective way to blur the line of self in this structure is to braid the minds, voices, and stories, of each perspective. With a focal point where all the voices eventually drift to being the frame of the story, there will be a unique distance between the stories. This thesis explores the effects of different types of mental and physiological illnesses through fiction, highlighting the effect of perception on fact and the perspective of the mentally ill.

How The Soul Slips In: Virginia Woolf's (Un)Natural History Of Dogs, Allison Castle Combs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dogs have a crucial place in articulating ideas about class and sexuality in Woolf and her milieu. Her works move from considering dogs as representative instruments of class and gender in Mrs. Dalloway, to thinking more complexly about the dog/human boundary in Orlando. Human-to-animal ontologies are an evaluation of human biopolitical affiliations, where human social categories and function are embedded and reflected in canine behavior. The “anthropological machine” and the fabulated nature of the human world is exposed in contact zones associated with problems of sexuality, class, and gender, as these internal and external distinctions are able to evade human …

Fuckstutter, Anthony Francis Ramstetter

LSU Master's Theses

This manuscript is my Master thesis, which I have compiled to fulfill the requirements of a creative writing examination in poetry. It collects various pathways of poetry in terms of both form & content into professional & publishable finality. The thesis presents sections (untitled) which include subsequent themes & variations that qualifies, consolidates, & measures the poet’s work during this program of writing herein.

E To Em, Elizabeth M. Hogan

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

A poetry thesis exploring subjects of gender identity, sexuality, socialization, writing, and craft, and including a preface that credits Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich as primary influences. One-third of the manuscript features epistolary prose poems in conversation with Dickinson, while the remaining portion contains poetry written in either free verse, traditional poetic form, or field composition.

Mother's Bed: Gender Representation In Children's Literature, Karin Hanni

Senior Theses

This children's book and accompanying research paper both address gender inequity in children's literature. There is a significant imbalance of gender representation in children's literature, with the number of central male characters almost doubling that of central female characters. Additionally, the roles of males and females still tend to be stereotypical: boys are action-oriented and heroic, while girls are nurturing and passive. Further, it is believed that boys will only enjoy books about boys, while girls will enjoy books about both boys and girls. This imbalance in children's literature hurts both genders. Children not only learn to read from books, …