Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …

Reframing The Pedagogical Underpinnings Of To Kill A Mockingbird: Queering A High School Text, Hovsep Hovannesian

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Given the current climate for social and political change in relation to identity and being, traditional high school texts like To Kill A Mockingbird are being rejected as degrading, out of touch, and even regressive and are being taken off the pedagogical shelf. This article pushes back on this outlook by suggesting that a more critical approach to such texts can make them not only useful but enlightening for the high school population asked to read them. Specifically, by proposing that high school pedagogy apply the foundations and frameworks of critical, identity-focused theories, like queer theory, to traditional high school …

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 …

I Preferred, Much Preferred, My Version: Exploring The Female Voice And Feminine Identity Within Memoirs Of The 20th And 21st Centuries, Alexandra Fradelizio

Senior Theses

Memoirs have long been a valuable way in which individuals share and reflect on their past experiences. The genre of memoir writing especially had a tremendous impact on a range of American female writers. This thesis explores memoirs written by women throughout the 20^th century. With the shift in women’s roles during the 1900s and early 2000s, the memoirs examined emphasize the importance of feminine identity. The analysis provided within this thesis centers on each memoirist’s unique path in determining her sense of self. Moreover, the memoirists each use the process of writing to relay the value of personal …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Fractured Identity - The Jagged Path Of Diaspora In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices, Lisa Lamor

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Representation of fractured identity issues is a thematic element powerfully present in the work of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Although identity is a commonly explored theme in general, it is through fragmentation in her novels that struggles are often identified and trauma is illustrated. Complex, fragmenting experiences of persons living in the Indian diaspora are frequently present in novels by Divakaruni along with continual employment of fracturing in terms of structure, imagery, plot, language, and character. In order to illustrate the presence of fracturization in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's literature, in this thesis I do an extensive textual examination of her first …

A Dyke's Life: Sexual Identity And Gender Performance In Radclyffe Hall's The Well Of Loneliness, Erica L. Ellsworth

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis studies sexual and gender identity and gender performance in The Well of Loneliness by utilizing postmodern theory. The protagonist in the novel, Stephen Gordon, is not only one example of the many identities of lesbianism, but she is also an example of a multiplicitous identity. This thesis also questions whether we can find the exact moment or reason why an identity is formed. An exploration of not only The Well of Loneliness but also of a character study of Stephen Gordon is important to this dialogue because both studies validate the contradictory and complimentary relationship between sex and …