Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Listening To "Silence": Alternative Modes Of Communication In Korean And Korean American Women's Literature, Judy Joo-Ae Bae

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

South Korean feminist activity may be relatively unknown to many Western readers; however, a distinct form of feminist activism can be seen when considering alternative modes of communication that are not less than, simply different from “speech” or “voice” as forms of agency celebrated in the West. Alternative modes of communications such as silence, song, touch, and performance also speak important messages which can be heard when understood through local knowledges. In the three cases of South Korean and Korean American women’s fictions used in this dissertation, I unpack these alternative modes of communications used by the female protagonists through …

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

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This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

Unmade And Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity In Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction Through The Lens Of The Indian “Mutiny” Of 1857, Madison A. Bettle

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Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that …

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette

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This dissertation explores representations of trauma and mental distress in twentieth-century novels and films. Drawn on research that emphasizes the ways that marginalized communities—in particular women-coded, racialized, and Indigenous persons—have historically been pathologized, the thesis considers how select novels and films query biomedical approaches to mental illness and critique psychiatric contexts, which prioritize social control more than they provide substantive and humane forms of support and care. How might representations of trauma and mental distress be understood without confirming regimes of psy-authority or psy-power? The thesis takes up this core issue by building on theories drawn from Mad Studies, illuminating …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

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Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

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Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

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This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

The Voice As An Object Of Desire In The Work Of Ann Quin, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a discussion of the voice as an object of desire in the work of Ann Quin. In life Quin suffered from bouts of silence and after death her work was itself silenced; I believe investigating the voice as an object is a fitting way to think about her work. My first chapter discusses the object voice as a silent, interior voice using the concept of the voice which Mladen Dolar develops to expand on Jacques Lacan naming the voice as an object of desire. In the second chapter I continue my discussion of the object voice with …

Representing Modern Female Villain: On Feminine Evil, Perverse Nationhood, And Opposition In Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Barbara Guerrero

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This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on modern female villainy by further exploring the ways in which 20^th century female villains are represented as well as the functions they carry out in the text. In this study, I look at Rómulo Gallegos’ doña Bárbara from Doña Bárbara (1929) and Salman Rushdie’s Indira Gandhi from Midnight’s Children (1981). I argue that both villains are a combination of already-existing forms of evil in more recognizable contexts as well as a rejection of and opposition to modern values. Firstly, I examine how the villains both conform and resist the formula …

Politics, Ethics, And Aesthetic Play In Diasporic Iranian Visual Literature: Neshat, Satrapi, Bashi, Soltani, Mehraneh Ebrahimi-Eshratabadi

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Does the study of aesthetics create response-ability or have tangible effects in the real world? Does the ambivalent form of word/images created by diaspora artists change our gaze toward the Other and the landscape of the possible? In the age of a global march against abstract terror which seems to be only reinforcing terrorism, the sign “Muslim-woman” along with the concept of democracy have become rallying cries for novel civilizing-missions. Leaving aside the failed efforts of littérature engagée, I resonate with Jacques Rancière that the study of aesthetics is intertwined with that of politics. Gayatri Spivak, too, asserts that …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

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This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

Architectures Of The Veil: The Representation Of The Veil And Zenanas In Pakistani Feminists' Texts, Amber Fatima Riaz

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My dissertation, which works at the intersections of feminist theory, architectural theory and postcolonial literary theory, examines the spatiality of the zenana and the burqa as represented in Pakistani literary and cultural texts. I propose that the burqa creates a portable closet, an interstitial, liminal, “third space” that allows Pakistani (secluded and veiled) women to not only traverse the borders between the private (female, domestic) and public (male) spaces, but to also signal chastity and religiosity while in the public, and semi-public spaces of the cities and villages of Pakistan. I argue that the dupatta, the chador and the hijab …

Total Men!: Literature, Nationalism, And Mascuilinity In Early Canada, Aaron J. Schneider

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This thesis identifies the figure of the totally competent man (a model of early Canadian masculinity distinguished by an unprecedented breadth of competence) as a recurrent feature of early Canadian literary texts, and examines the development and representation of this figure with particular attention to its deployment as a model of national manhood by early Canadian literary nationalists. It argues that the production of a broadly competent model of manhood as an ideal model of national manhood by early Canadian literary nationalists was an anxious work carried out in the face of real and sensible threats to the new nation …