Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Nightmare On Sesame Street: Or, The Self-Possessed Child, Steven Bruhm

Steven Bruhm

The late twentieth century is fascinated by the phenomenon of the gothic child, the child who manifests evil, violence, and sexual aggression. On the face of it, this evil is “caused” by either medical or social factors: medicinal drugs, radiation, or the corrupting influences of political others. However, this essay argues that the gothic child actually arises from conflicting forces of child-philosophies, the intersection of Romantic childhood innocence with Freudian depth models. These models tacitly point to a child that “is” rather than “is made”, a child that belies contemporary parental attempts to make it be otherwise. Moreover, the idea …

Review: 'Action Chicks: New Images Of Tough Women In Popular Culture', Ione T. Damasco

Roesch Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“A Highly Ambiguous Condition”: The Transgender Subject, Experimental Narrative And Trans-Reading Identity In The Fiction Of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, And Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer A. Smith

Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the constantly evolving gender identity o f a text’s transgender subject relates to the text’s narrative structure and shapes the orientation o f the reader to the text. Accordingly, this project examines how these transgender narratives deploy experimental stylistic techniques that enhance the reader’s experience of ceaseless transitioning by revealing gender as a constant process that never solidifies onto a body and by highlighting the text’s own status as process rather than finalized product. Further, this project examines how a transgender subject and his/her relationship to the body, culture, and narrative is involved in the re-vision …

Noms Et Identités Dans La Migration Des Coeurs : Vers Une Affirmation De L’Identité Caribéenne, Hanétha Vété-Congolo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights, the female characters bear the same first and last names, and act in the same way as, their counterparts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It would seem relevant, therefore, to ask about the dialectics of naming and identity set out in Windward Heights, and what this might mean for Caribbean identity. Is naming the only thing that gives Condé’s characters their identity? Or are they mirror-image projections of Brontë’s characters. Answering these questions, we may be able to determine how Condé’s work, as a new creation, establishes its own identity and whether its meaning is …

Ua32/4/1 Women & Kids Learning Together Summer Camp, Wku Gender & Women's Studies

WKU Archives Records

Booklet reviewing events at Women & Kids Learning Together Summer Camp.

Oedipus' Wake: The (Neo-)Masculinization Of The Self In Late Twentieth-Century American Women's Memoir, Thomas Johnson

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Without pretensions to exhaustiveness, this study briefly examines the mid- to late-twentieth-century flowering of western theory and criticism built around autobiographical writing and follows the feminist branch(es) of that theory and criticism through a reading of the following four memoirs: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, All the Lost Girls by Patricia Foster, Lying by Lauren Slater, and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Using both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as they relate to literature, I argue that the selves these four women write in their memoirs are not selves built around the model historically set for women by …

Cultural Analysis Of The Indian Women's Festival Of Karvachauth, Puja Sahney

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The festival of Karvachauth is celebrated by upper class married women of North India and occurs in the month of October or early November. On this day married women fast to ensure the long lives of their husbands. They wake up before dawn and eat a meal. After sunrise they do not drink water or eat any food until they see the moon at night. The moon is watched through a sieve and prayed to before breaking the fast. An important part of Karvachauth is a ritual that is performed by women in the afternoon. This ritual is hosted by …

Disclosure Interviews Marianne Hirsch. Intimacy Across The Generations: Memory, Postmemory, And Representation

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

No abstract provided.

Isolation And Community In Short Story Collections By Z.Z. Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, And Mary Gaitskill, Katy A. Howe

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Looking at short story collections by Z.Z. Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mary Gaitskill, this work explores the protagonists' development of identity in relation to others. Using relational psychoanalysis as a theoretical base, this thesis probes the tension between involvement in community and maintaining individuality.

Doers Of The Living Word: Gospel Ideology And The African American Womanist Novel, Rebecca Erin Huskey

Dissertations

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison issues a charge and illuminates the challenge that she and other African American writers face in defining the self through a racially oppressive language:

Neither blackness nor "people of color" stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and …

The Other Side Of The Podium: Student Information Needs From Inside The Classroom, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

A few things the author learned about students and research when she audited classes on her campus as part of her sabbatical.

The Other Side Of The Podium: Student Information Needs From Inside The Classroom, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Marilyn R. Pukkila

A few things the author learned about students and research when she audited classes on her campus as part of her sabbatical.

Sylvia Plath And The Crisis Of The Self: A Feminist Reading Of The Late Poetry, Rania Salah Mohamed

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The study of Sylvia Plath's poetry sheds light on the various approaches that can be used to read the crisis of the self in Plath's poetry. It reveals the latent power and talent of a woman poet who fought against the male tradition to express her voice and demand full recognition. Plath's late poems can be approached in different ways. The thesis examines the existential dilemma of the modern poet in a world of confusion and the psychology of defense against death and suffering in the feminist struggle against the other. These approaches are used to account for the richness …

Literary Love Making In Nicholas Sparks Novels: Finding The Balance Between The Writer’S Life And The Writer’S Work In Bestselling Romantic Literature, Ryan Spanich

Honors Theses

For almost a decade now Nicholas Sparks has been writing love stories. Not only has he been publishing his stories, but they have received high acclaim in each of their installments. Several of his novels have been made into major motion pictures and increased his popularity quite significantly. His status as a successful romantic fiction writer is undeniable, but the question is, why? What is it about Nicholas Sparks that makes his novels so engaging, and personally, what do I need to do as an aspiring novelist to try and acquire the same literary status? Sparks’s novels reach readers at …

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, Erin Rhoda

Undergraduate Research Symposium (UGRS)

Writing this collection of journalistic nonfiction has come at an appropriate time for me as I head out into the world on my own. I still don’t know if or where I’ll be working. I don’t know if I’ll be an intern or employee or if I want to go to graduate school in the future. The world is wide open before me, and that is a scary thing. However, these women have been assuring and guiding me. Meeting and interviewing them has taught me that life is subjective. They have shown me that everything we own can be lost …

Christina Rossetti, Sarah Grand, And The Expression Of Sexual Liminality In Nineteenth Century Literature, Jennifer Persinger Adams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study defines sexual liminality as a transient, threshold moment in which textual characters explore not only their sexual desires, but also their gender identities. During the nineteenth century, social critics reveal that sexuality and gender play a vital role in laws, social practices, and family structure. Thus, when authors such as Christina Rossetti and Sarah Grand produce characters that embark upon introspective journeys of their sexualities against the background of social expectation, one clearly identifies the influence of life upon art. Rossetti’s Prince in The Prince’s Progress and Grand’s Angelica in The Heavenly Twins enter into the realm of …

Et Cetera, Marshall University

Et Cetera

Founded in 1953, Et Cetera is an annual literary magazine that publishes the creative writing and artwork of Marshall University students and affiliates. Et Cetera is free to the Marshall University community.

Et Cetera welcomes submissions in literary and film criticism, poetry, short stories, drama, all types of creative non-fiction, photography, and art.

The Footnote, In Theory, Anne H. Stevens, Jay Williams

English Faculty Research

And, so, when Richard Stern published his private dialogue with himself about the physical appearance of certain writers at the 1986 International PEN conference, Joyce Carol Oates insisted on not only an angry rebuttal-punctuated by constant page referencing to Stern's "pig-souled sexism"-but photographic evidence-a kind of footnote in itself-dismissing his physical characterization of her. When Susan Gubar published "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" her essay provoked an immediate, critical, and heavily documented response from Robyn Weigman, several letters to the editor, and Gubar's own footnoted rejoinder. Jane Gallop's defense of a sexual act she engaged in with one of her students …

Land, Labor, And Colonial Economics In Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham

English

As long as critics have written about it, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan has been positioned as a counterhistory to William Brad ford's canonical Of Plymouth Plantation. One vein of critical reception has dismissed Morton's text as a flawed literary anomaly, effectively re peating Bradford's own befuddled and anxious response to Morton's aes thetics.1 A smaller but impassioned vein of literary criticism has, in turn, elevated Morton over Bradford on the basis of his egalitarianism, proto environmentalism, or multiculturalism avant la lettre?essentially cele brating Morton as a more laudable expression of individualism and free dom than that represented by the …

Punishment With Vlad Tepes - Punishments In Europe Common And Differentiating Traits, Constantin Rezachevici

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

The Children Of The Night: Stoker's Dreadful Reading And The Plot Of Dracula, Dick Collins

Journal of Dracula Studies

My intention is to suggest that the plot of Dracula was modeled on the plot of The String of Pearls, the Penny Dreadful serial that created Sweeney Todd. I am not suggesting that Stoker deliberately or consciously “stole” the plot and “rewrote it” with “differences”; nor can I prove he had read it, let alone that he had it on the desk as he wrote. Instead I am making the altogether more ordinary claim that Stoker was familiar with the earlier book, and others like it; that the memory of it provided him with a basic framework of plot; and …

"Buffy Vs. Dracula"'S Use Of Count Famous (Not Drawing "Crazy Conclusions About The Unholy Prince"), Tara Elliott

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

"The Coin Of Our Realm": Blood And Images In Dracula 2000, Alan S. Ambrisco, Lance Svehla

Journal of Dracula Studies

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire has always been our long lost twin, always held our gaze because we found ourselves translated there. Whether represented as demonized monopolist, stereotyped Jew, feudal aristocrat, or iconoclastic youth,1 what remains in all manifestations of the vampire is its ability to become what the culture both desires and reviles, to seduce in the act of producing fear. Wes Craven Presents: Dracula 2000, a film directed by Patrick Lussier, portrays the notorious vampire reveling in a world not only of blood but also of images. This rewriting of Dracula’s legend engages anxieties …

Triply Filiated: Lestat And The Three Fathers, Maureen C. Laperriere

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

The Example Of Barbara Johnson, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

Virginia Woolf: Feminism And The Reader, Anne Fernald

Anne E Fernald

No abstract provided.

Gothic Sexualities, Steven Bruhm

Steven Bruhm

No abstract provided.