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Theses/Dissertations

Biopolitics

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Understanding Authoritarianism, Fascism, Far-Right Politics, And Anti-Democratic Processes, Paul Viafranco Apr 2023

Understanding Authoritarianism, Fascism, Far-Right Politics, And Anti-Democratic Processes, Paul Viafranco

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Paul Viafranco seeks to understand the rise of Authoritarianism, Fascism, Far-Right Politics, and Anti-Democratic Processes, by delving into Executive Order 9066, Marine Le Pen’s use of medievalism, Donald Trump’s discourse, and the various factors that contribute to the need for seeking asylum or refugee status.


The Assemblage Of The Dead : Speech, Subjectivity, And Being Human, Nazia Manzoor Dec 2021

The Assemblage Of The Dead : Speech, Subjectivity, And Being Human, Nazia Manzoor

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT“The Assemblage of the Dead: Speech, Subjectivity, and Being Human” reimagines the construct of the human as a political subject of the state through a bio(necro)political lens. The project re-envisions the conceptual framework of biopolitics through an engagement with the figure of the living dead, centralized in Giorgio Agamben’s work through his casting of the figure of the Muselmann as the cipher that reveals the limits of humanity and being human. With a bid to counter-narrate the twinning of death and resistance and death and subjectivity as foundational markers of humanity in current critical scholarship of the field, this project …


A Foray Into The Camp: Human And Ecological Liberation In Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature, Mitchel Jurasek Jan 2021

A Foray Into The Camp: Human And Ecological Liberation In Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature, Mitchel Jurasek

Honors Projects

Through the analysis of two contemporary conversion therapy novels in North America, this project explores the intersections of biopolitics (specifically camp theory), queer theory, ecocriticism, and YA literature. Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer are paired with scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Joshua Whitehead, Greta Gaard, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Claudio Minca, Catriona Sandilands, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Marder to create a complex and intricate understanding of how ecologies impact queer youths’ experience in conversion therapy camps. The effect of such an intersectional and ecological understanding of queer becomings …


Necropolitical Resistance In Early Modern Drama: Violence And Death As Agentive Acts In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Madison Jansen May 2020

Necropolitical Resistance In Early Modern Drama: Violence And Death As Agentive Acts In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Madison Jansen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy has been widely-read by the academic community, but not always for its own sake. Its influence on the Revenge Tragedy genre, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, have been common topics, sometimes at the expense of readings that engage with the play itself. This thesis continues a tradition of applying the ideas of Michel Foucault to the Early Modern era in order to interrogate the role of power, knowledge, and sovereignty. This thesis explores the way that Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, and the related concepts of necropolitics and necroresistance, create significant new ways of understanding the …


Vectorial Realities: Foucault And The Politics Of The Literary Address, Jiyoung Ryu Sep 2018

Vectorial Realities: Foucault And The Politics Of The Literary Address, Jiyoung Ryu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the politics of contemporary literature via addressing the theoretical problem at the heart of Foucault studies. The Kantian problem of articulating the “origin” of knowledge was also at the core of Foucault’s oeuvre. The dissertation derives a concept, here-elsewhere, from its analysis of The Order of Things to argue that here-elsewhere addresses the problem at hand via articulating the difference and the sameness that spans the Kantian continuum of I-Other. It denotes the continuum as a relative spatio-temporality with a vector, which reflects Foucault’s interest in the modern physics. As a realist and critical concept, …


Racial Roots Of Romanticism: American And European Africanism Are The Creation Of Bio-Politics, James Flynn May 2017

Racial Roots Of Romanticism: American And European Africanism Are The Creation Of Bio-Politics, James Flynn

Honors College Theses

The British Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Edgar Allan Poe shared a number of similarities in their writing styles. Both men came onto the scene early in their respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the first generation of British literary Romantics, while Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In the work of both men there is an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. This focus on race has been covered at length by authors such as Toni Morrison in her book …


The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor Jan 2016

The Somewhere We Wish Were Nowhere: Dystopian Realities And (Un)Democratic Imaginaries, Benjamin B. Taylor

Senior Independent Study Theses

How do political practices influence mass culture? Conversely, how does mass culture influence political practice? This project addresses these questions by turning to the concepts of utopia and dystopia. Imagined utopic and dystopic visions express both the hopes and anxieties of the societies producing them. Dystopias also highlight the mechanisms of power that function within particular social orders. Through readings of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I demonstrate how utopia and dystopia function and how we can respond to dystopic realities by theorizing solutions that are more conducive to the …


Viral Possibilities: Media, The Body, And The Phenomenon Of Infection, Daniel Mcfadden Aug 2015

Viral Possibilities: Media, The Body, And The Phenomenon Of Infection, Daniel Mcfadden

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines how the concept of virality is articulated in popular culture, and the connection that this articulation shares with notions of the virus in philosophical thought. The first chapter traces the emergence of a new wave of virus media following the geopolitical changes following the end of the Cold War, and the further shifts that have occurred in how the virus is culturally considered. The second chapter examines the politics of a phenomenological encounter with media depicting viruses. The third and final chapter discusses how understandings of the virus shape the notion of community as both a material …


The Queen's Three Bodies : Representations Of Female Sovereignty In Early Modern Women's Writing, 1588-1688, Erin V. Casey-Williams Jan 2015

The Queen's Three Bodies : Representations Of Female Sovereignty In Early Modern Women's Writing, 1588-1688, Erin V. Casey-Williams

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role …


Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky Dec 2011

Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms bio-power. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at …