Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Vegetal Being: Dreamwork, Ritual, And Performance In Han Kang’S The Vegetarian, Briana Hanratty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I am writing towards an ecofeminist informed reading of the English version of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith. My aim is to display how, like an ecosystem of complex interdependency, it is impossible to separate body from theory from text from ecological context. To engage with this form of ecofeminism, I center an autotheoretical methodology with voices from ritual theory and performance theory in order to examine how Yeong-hye, the titular vegetarian of Han Kang’s novel, operates as a narrative-level metaphor for the desire for erotic ecology as a mode of ecological and …

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. …

Ancestral Queerness: Normativity And Deviance In The Abraham And Sarah Narratives, Gil Rosenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Interpreters of the Abraham and Sarah narratives in Gen 11-21 often focus on the importance of the line of inheritance, through a particular biological child. While they also note the many irregularities in Abraham and Sarah's familial relationships and activities, there has been no sustained attention to the combination of deviance and normativity that characterizes these narratives. I argue that, due to their particular combinations of normativity and deviance, Abraham and Sarah are Queer, where Queer is a general, cross-cultural category which includes but is not limited to contemporary forms of queerness (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc.).

Using …