Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Projecting Culture Through Literary Exportation: How Imitation In Scandinavian Crime Fiction Reveals Regional Mores, Bradley Hartsell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the beginnings of Swedish hardboiled crime literature, in part tracking its lineage to American culture and unpacking Swedish identity. Following the introduction, the second chapter asserts how this genre began as a form of escapism, specifically in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna. The third chapter compares predecessor Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Roseanna, and how Sweden’s greater gender tolerance significantly outshining America’s is reflected in literature. The fourth chapter examines how Henning Mankell’s novels fail to fully accept Sweden’s complicity in neo-Nazism as an active component of Swedish identity. The final chapter reveals …

‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor

Doctoral Dissertations

Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

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 …

“Everything Seemed Very Queer”: Divergent Temporalities Of Normative Relations In Mrs. Dalloway, Crystal Brooke Clark

Masters Theses

Queer theory predominantly aligns normative relations to normative experiences of time and connects queer affiliations to queer temporal spaces. Heterosexuality, marriage, sexual reproduction, and the family are hallmarks of normative temporality, as they enact and maintain a progressive, future-oriented, genealogical timeline. However, normative attachments do not always follow queer theory’s narrative of straight time. Closely observing the structure of normative relationships and, in terms of my study specifically, marriage, uncovers assumptions constructing the constitution of normative temporality. I discuss queer theoretical works by Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and others to see how current theories typically oversimplify normative …

Get Thee To A Nunnery: Unruly Women And Christianity In Medieval Europe, Sarah E. Wolfe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will argue that the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdæla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts also demonstrate that Queenship grew fragile after the spread of Christianity, and women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe.

The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

The Ambiguity Of Antony And Cleopatra: Interrupting Phallocentric Schemes Of Objectification Through The Mutual Gaze, Sydney Paluch

Honors Theses

This thesis proposes an alternative to the male gaze, using Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of ambiguity in order to understand the subversive sexual politics underlying Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The concept of the male gaze was first identified in feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which explains how film is explicitly constructed around the male gaze. Since the publication of Mulvey’s article, feminist theorists such as Linda Williams and Mary Ann Doane have attempted to construct a feminine counterpart to the male gaze. Unfortunately, these theorists have typically concluded that such …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

Lesbian Love Sonnets: Adrienne Rich And Carol Ann Duffy, Robin Seiler-Garman

Senior Theses

Our conceptualization of sexuality is rooted in gender. Modern, western society defines sexuality as which genders one is and is not attracted to—often appearing as a binary between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Recently, however, queer theorists have begun to push against the idea of binary sexuality altogether.

The interplay between gender and sexuality additionally manifests in the history of literature. Because the two are so intimately intertwined, writing about sexuality necessitates writing about gender. Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich and Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy are two poetry collections where, as lesbian poets, gender and sexuality play an important role. …

Becoming Pamela: The Fight For Maternal Authority In Pamela Ii, Danielle Pollaro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In Pamela, Volume II, Pamela and her husband, Mr. B, clash over breastfeeding their child. The conflict over breastfeeding represents a contest for control over the maternal body and with it control over woman’s authority. The eighteenth-century created the concept of motherhood in order to maintain and perpetuate the patriarchy’s social, economic and sexual hierarchies. Pamela, Volume II propagates eighteenth-century domestic discourse by instructing and constructing the idea of the good wife and mother. Pamela’s failure to resist domesticity reveals patriarchy’s role in establishing gender identity. The novel functions to reinforce, strengthen and sustain eighteenth-century domestic discourse to stabilize …

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.

Flesh In Line With The Mind : Gender In Caitlin Kiernan’S The Drowning Girl., Sarah Buckley

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This paper analyzes how Caitlyn R. Kiernan in her novel The Drowning Girl characterizes gender identity, particularly in regards to women, both transgender and cisgender. The book's characterization of gender roles for cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women, while seeming on the surface to subvert sexist stereotypes, reproduces the pitfalls of feminist literary criticism popularized in the 1970s and 1980s. Notably, such themes include viewing women's madness as a method of transcending masculine rationality, a dichotomized essentialism of masculinity and femininity, and universalizing women's experience without regards to race, class, and nationality. Transgender autobiographical and literary archetypes employed in …

The Madwoman Persists: Expression As Resistance In Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter Of Snow And H.D.'S Hermione, Spring Healy

Honors Projects

Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and H.D.’s HERmione each feature a female narrator struggling to survive in a patriarchal society that confines them and polices the movement of their bodies through space in attempt to gain control. The characters Marthe Gail and Hermione Gart experience bouts of insanity in response to their confinement by the patriarchy. I explore the various ways these two women push against their confinement, and argue that despite their places in society, Marthe and Hermione are able to use expression—writing, language, voice, movement, sexuality—to successfully resist the patriarchy and create legitimate identities.

The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …

The Unkindness Of Strangers: Exploring Success And Isolation In The Dramatic Works Of Tennessee Williams, Chelsea Nicole Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to explore the theme of isolation in the dramatic works of Tennessee Williams using his essay “The Catastrophe of Success” as the base theory text. The essay attacks the American idea of success though an in-depth examination of the “Cinderella myth” that Williams claims is so prevalent in both Hollywood and American Democracy. Williams’ deconstruction of this myth reveals that America’s love for stories like it results the isolation of three groups: homosexuals, women and the physically disabled and terminally ill. Williams passes no judgment on his characters, instead showing their lives as they truly are. Through …

"Some Things Grew No Less With Time:" Tracing Atu 510b From The Thirteenth To The Twentieth Century, Rachel L. Maynard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a comparative analysis of seven different variants of the fairy tale commonly known as “Donkeyskin,” classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale motif index as ATU 510B. By comparing so many different iterations of one fairy tale, it is easier to recognize the inherent attitudes concerning women and their place in society contained in this tale. Additionally, reading multiple variants from different centuries lends a perspective on the way that these attitudes changed over the centuries. Each of the thirteenth century texts considered end with their heroines trapped in loveless marriages, much like the seventeenth-century fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” their …

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, And The Arthurian Legends: Re-Writing And Re-Envisioning Women’S Roles In 19th Century England, Lisa Wagenhurst

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) the poet and Julia Margaret Cameron the photographer (1813-1879) worked collaboratively on the Idylls of the King; a work of epic poetry that Tennyson wrote about the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. His re-envisioned tales were cautionary and provided guidelines as to how women should behave or face the consequences of causing the downfall of society. Victorian society was in a precarious situation as women were expected to behave in certain ways, but at the same time they were finding their voices and beginning to speak out about patriarchal society …

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

Greening Gawain : Connecting Environmental Damage And Masculinity In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight., Austin Putty

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This paper explores medieval environmental attitudes through a historical reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the study of which provides a blueprint for what may be a method of combating climate change denial at its cultural roots, which I will argue in this paper links to an outdated mode of European warrior masculinity. This paper will demonstrate the connections between hegemonic masculinity and environmental degradation at work as a discourse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through chivalric behaviors, as well as a burgeoning environmental conscientiousness at play that undermines it. The conflict between Gawain and …

Queer Affect In T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry, Michael Houle

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Formation Of The Autonomous Woman Through A Hegelian Lens: A Comparative Study Of The British Fin De Siecle "New Woman" And The Post-Mao "Amazing" Woman, Robyn L. Buro

English Department Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hegelian concept of self-consciousness development to explore the formation of the autonomous woman within the New Woman movement of the British fin de siècle and the literature of women writers in 1980s Post-Mao China. The sexual figuration of the New Woman via an unremitting male gaze as well as the absence of individual awareness due to limited reflective self-assessment lead to a misrepresentation of the female figurehead in fin de siècle Britain. Through an in-depth study of literature by Charlotte Mew, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, the reader can identify key points of failure …

God The Father Or Mother Divine? : Subversive Theology In John Milton's Paradise Lost And Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Jordan Pace

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Recording Angels: Examining Female Narrators In Vampire Fiction And Film, Jacqueline T. Bashaw

College Honors Program

Authors of vampire fiction often grapple with the shifting gender norms of the late nineteenth century. They explore these shifting tensions through the creation of complex narrative structures, some of which incorporate female narrators. By making these women narrators, these authors carefully consider female perspectives and the authority women can wield, both as narrators in their respective texts, and as women in late nineteenth-century British society who were confined to rigid gender roles. The narrative tension that arises between the narrator and the text then allows these authors to use literature to explore and theorize about broader societal tensions.

This …