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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse May 2024

“Beating Back The Past”: The Psychological Justifications Of Violence In Toni Morrison’S Fiction, Catherine Buhse

English Honors Theses

This thesis examines the traumatic experiences that consume characters’ lives and, in the absence of psychological healing efforts, manifest into violent actions in Toni Morrison’s three novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. I focus on the gendered experience of the female characters Pecola, Sula, Eva, and Sethe, except for the male character, Cholly in The Bluest Eye. Focusing on Morrison’s humanization of violent characters and her sharing of their full life stories, I establish the characters’ internal justifications for their violence to challenge the accepted depiction of all criminals as evil. The three chapters follow the manifestation of trauma …


The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem Jun 2022

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …


Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono May 2021

Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his conclusory section of his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” stating, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (52). Yet, Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive makes a statement which complicates the idea of the monster being “our child” when discussing that the normative (conservative) movement will “recurrently frame their political struggle…as a ‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our …


“Your Love Is Too Thick”: An Analysis Of Black Motherhood In Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives, And Our Contemporary Moment, Kaitlyn M. Spong Dec 2018

“Your Love Is Too Thick”: An Analysis Of Black Motherhood In Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives, And Our Contemporary Moment, Kaitlyn M. Spong

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, Kait Spong examines alternative practices of mothering that are strategic nature, heavily analyzing Patricia Hill Collins’ concepts of “othermothering” and “preservative love” as applied to Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved and Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Using literary analysis as a vehicle, Spong then applies these West African notions of motherhood to a modern context by evaluating contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter where black mothers have played a prominent role in making public statements against systemic issues such as police brutality, heightened surveillance, and the …


'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, And Home, Rondrea Danielle Mathis Jan 2015

'She Shall Not Be Moved': Black Women's Spiritual Practice In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, And Home, Rondrea Danielle Mathis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

‘She Shall Not Be Moved’: Black Women’s Spiritual Practice in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, and Home argues that from The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s debut novel, to her 2012 novel, Home, Morrison brings her female characters to voice, autonomy, and personal divinity through unconventional spiritual work. The project addresses the history of Black women’s activist and spiritual work, Toni Morrison’s engagement with unconventional spiritual practice, and closes with a personal interrogation of the author’s connection to Black women’s spiritual practice.


“It Made The Ladies Into Ghosts”: The Male Hero's Journey And The Destruction Of The Feminine In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Catherine Ruth Schetina Jan 2014

“It Made The Ladies Into Ghosts”: The Male Hero's Journey And The Destruction Of The Feminine In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! And Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Catherine Ruth Schetina

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is a consideration of the intertextual relationship between William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It considers the objectification and destruction of women and female-coded men in the service of the male protagonist's journey to selfhood, with particular focus on the construction of race, gender, and class performances.