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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Look At Her: The Subversive Spectacle Of Grande Dame Guignol Cinema, Michelle Smith
Look At Her: The Subversive Spectacle Of Grande Dame Guignol Cinema, Michelle Smith
English Theses
While the Grande Dame Guignol films of the early 1960s served in their time to capitalize on the reputations of aging female stars and the growing popularity of the horror genre, an updated reading of this subgenre proves that it is rich with social critique regarding the feminine experience, social performance, and the tendencies of classical Hollywood cinema that promote a dominant, patriarchal social narrative. While many popular and critical responses diminish them as “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” films, the Grande Dame Guignol tradition’s transformation of its actresses from glamorous icons to unrecognizable villains rejects such limiting appraisals by focusing on …
“Your Love Is Too Thick”: An Analysis Of Black Motherhood In Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives, And Our Contemporary Moment, Kaitlyn M. Spong
“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 …
Motherhood Makes A Matriarchy, Lily Mann
Motherhood Makes A Matriarchy, Lily Mann
Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects
This analysis will discuss the topic of matriarchies, how they created, and how they are sustained. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Coven are used as examples of matriarchies, wherein Hawthorne’s matriarchy is at its start, whereas Murphy’s matriarchy is coming to a potential end. This will be examined through a comparative analysis between the characters in Hawthorne’s early American work with the characters in Murphy’s contemporary work. Ultimately, Hawthorne’s matriarchy is much more insidious and potentially damaging to a patriarchal norm than Murphy’s reclusive patriarchy. Hawthorne’s matriarchy has the option to disrupt a patriarchal …
Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming
Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.
Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Affective Dissonance: (Post)Feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood, Judith Lakämper
Wayne State University Dissertations
In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and …
Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley
Mothers At Work: Reconstruction And Deconstruction Of Patriarchy In Gone With The Wind, Catherine Willa Staley
Theses, Dissertations and Capstones
In this thesis, I explore the performances of motherhood in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and how those performances conflict with culturally constructed expectations of that role. An analysis of Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, and how each woman compares to the South’s model for motherhood, reveals implications that extend beyond the novel’s Civil War setting to reveal the ongoing negotiation of modern readers still living within patriarchal conceptions of mothering. In Chapter 1, I outline the novel’s spectrum of motherhood, which is composed of characters who nurture and manage others. Each individual on that spectrum contributes to or …