Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Playing At Women And Men: A Discourse Analysis Of Gender And Sexuality Performance In An Online Play-By-Post Role-Playing Game, Caitlin M. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online play-by-post role-playing games mark the discursive intersection between computer-mediated-communication and gaming. The performance of gender and sexuality is an important aspect of online play-by-post role-playing games.

Although play-by-post role-playing games are open world and do not have the same graphical and technological constraints as other forms of gaming, the performances on them are governed by both explicit and implicit rules. Performances of gender and sexuality are also governed by cultural standards. This thesis seeks to describe how players perform gender and sexuality within these boundaries.

This thesis describes the performance of gender and sexuality on the website Another Day …

"Hippie Acid Freak Drag Queens:" Situating The Cockettes Within An Art Historical Context, Scott Dow

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates the Cockettes – a performance group rarely referenced in art historical discourse - within Bay Area performance art, second-wave feminist art, and the Gay Liberation Movement. Contextualizing the Cockettes within their contemporary art movements provides a new understanding of the group and emphasizes their significance to art history.

The Double Féminin In The Plays Of Jean Racine, Jaime Schultz

Celebration of Learning

This work takes on a feminist approach and studies extensively the oeuvre of Racine.

Sonder: Locating The Unessentialized Self In Movement Practices, Joel Walsham

Honors Theses

This research will contend with the ever-present endeavor in many models of contemporary dance practices to ‘be yourself’ – to seek out an illusive core of your being, and engage with your essential self. Through a survey of cultural studies and social identity that includes the contributions of Judith Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Todd Reeser, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the idea of an essential self will be challenged, throwing into question the dominant conception of self used in contemporary dance practices. Through a brief review of two historical conceptions of self in dance, that of Isadora Duncan and the post-modern …

Revolutionary Every Day: A Dramatic Exploration Of Women And Their Agency In The Black Panther Party., Kristen Michelle Walker

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

This capstone project is centered around Black Panther women and explores what it means to be a revolutionary black woman dealing with politics surrounding gender in both private and public spaces during the late 1960’s and beyond. In addition, the project includes an original fictional play based on the experiences of Panther women around the world. In addressing the social conditions that impacted female Panther activism and agency, together the capstone project and play operate as a commentary on power, gender relations, and society in and around the Black Panther Party.

Finding A New Home In Harlem: Alice Childress And The Committee For The Negro In The Arts, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Alice Childress’s performing career in the 1940s was primarily associated with the American Negro Theater, a collectively run professional theater company with a mission to nurture black talent and create compelling theater for Harlem audiences; as Childress would later comment, “We thought we were Harlem’s theater.” ANT made use of all available resources to accomplish this mission; producing plays written by black and white playwrights, hiring white teachers, and accepting white actors and technicians committed to its goals.

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 …

Una Traducción Dúctil: El Beso De La Mujer Araña Y Los Códigos Artificiales, Sam Mccracken

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Behind Valencia: A Contemporary Play, Emily Charbonneau

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

SYNOPSIS The purpose of this play is to highlight the length that modern females go to in order to maintain a desired appearance, especially across social media. These desired appearances are influenced by the glamorous and unrealistic looks and physiques that are prevalent in the media. Essentially, the primary goal of these characters is to attract the attention of their male counterparts because of the gender roles society promotes. This shallow lifestyle can be completely consuming for impressionable, young females.

La Resistencia Cultural A Través Del Teatro De Las Oprimidas Para La Cultivación De La Subjetividad De La Mujer En Un Contexto De Violencia De Género: Un Estudio De Caso Del Colectivo De Mujeres Osadía / Cultural Resistance And The Cultivation Of The Subjective Through Theatre Of The Oppressed For The Woman In A Context Of Gender Violence: A Case Study With Colectivo De Mujeres Osadía In Jose Leon Suarez, Province Of Buenos Aires, Lela Biggus

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Hay en este momento en la historia una ola de movimientos feministas barriendo la vida política de Buenos Aires. Movimientos como Ni Una Menos busca, en una variedad de métodos, para interrumpir el discurso destructivo de la cultura machista que produce la violencia de género y hace que el acto de femicidio, el asesinato de una mujer por su género, sea común.

En mis investigaciones exploro cómo el Teatro del oprimido, una práctica teatral de Augusto Boal, puede transformarse en una experiencia de resistencia cultural y subjetivación de la mujer en un contexto de violencia de género. Yo pasé tiempo …

Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …

Letters To Mei Lanfang, Alexandra Dare Norman

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

As a male actor of female Dan characters, Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) is known throughout the world as the most representative performer of Chinese opera – particularly for his performance of Concubine Yu in the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine. A feminist analysis of his work in this opera reveals a series of assumptions about the definition of “Woman” in both theatre and life. This project is solo performance piece formatted in a series of open letters to Mei Lanfang, interspersed with personal stories investigating what it truly means to be a Woman – as an actor, a Christian, a feminist, …

Telethon, Jen Kennedy, Liz Linden

Published Works by SJSU Honorees

Inspired by experimental performances of the 1960s, Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden's TELETHON is a participatory performance staged in front of a live audience. The sounds of phone calls to random numbers—dial tones, ringing, voicemail, asking about feminism, surprised responses, clicks—are projected toward the audience to create a cacophonous illustration of contemporary feminism and connection. This event took place at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on March 4, 2017.

Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama And The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Claire T. Solomon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (1929-2016)" Claire Solomon analyzes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope as an apparatus of capture (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand). More precisely, her article models how such tropes imply modes of reading anachronistically and metafictionally that decontextualize gestures of resistance and conflate female writers, performers, and characters across time and place. Solomon offers a situated formalist reading of Argentine playwright Salvadora Medina Onrubia's 1929 drama, Las descentradas, revealing an avant-garde counterpoint of melodrama and metafiction as an ambiguous alternative to capture.

Approaching The Value And The Future Of The Novel: A Book Review Article On Boxall's Scholarship, Yili Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Dramatization Of Cultural Hybridity And The "In-Between" Turkey In Fazıl's Künye, Önder Çakırtaş

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dramatization of Cultural Hybridity and the "In-Between" Turkey in Fazıl's Künye" Önder Çakırtaş addresses Turkey's historical context and exposes how political, social and cultural changes were expressed in Turkey's public sphere. Using Niyazi Berkes's theory of secularism as proceeding of modernism Çakırtaş discusses different examples of stylistic strategies of cultural hybridity in the playwright's historical-based play, Künye. He investigates how political changes in pre-Turkey times signify Turkey's national striving, and how the Ottoman-conservative past metamorphoses into Turkic-secular. The study juxtaposes the perceptions of 'introduction to Westernization' and 'departure from Islamic past' in a period …

A Love Untaught By Law, Emma Oliver

VA Engage Journal

A self-proclaimed “live and let live” society, Laramie, Wyoming quickly became everything but when studied by the Tectonic Theater Company following the murder of Matthew Shepard. By drawing attention to disturbingly inherent elements of Laramie’s culture including verbal distancing, an elitist sentiment, and the belief that apathy is acceptable, the theater company exposes the hostile climate that has made this Wyoming city nearly unlivable for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning community. In analyzing the language and attitudes of the residents of Wyoming as brought to light in the play The Laramie Project, this paper confirms the danger in …

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …

Rehearsing Justice: Theatre, Sexuality And The Sacred, Victoria Rue

Faculty Publications, Social Sciences

The theatre actor’s process in a rehearsal hall is reality and metaphor. It can be a rehearsal for justice, where we can live freely. In this laboratory the actor becomes all of us. Like the actor, we inhabit our bodies and our sexualities, sometimes as spiritual practice, or as sacred and creative, even as incarnations. In particular, women’s bodies remember what it is like to be no-body and what it is like to be a some-body. The texts of women’s bodies contain their history of pain, wellness and illness.In creating a character, the actor creates a biography, an inner life, …

[Review] Annie Potts (Ed). Meat Culture, Carol Gigliotti

Animal Studies Journal

Annie Potts has curated a particularly strong and essential group of perspectives on ‘meat culture,’ described here as a coherent framework within which exist ‘a wide range of domains of production and consumption of animals.’ Meat Culture distinguishes itself in its clearheaded focus on the centrality of the misery and slaughter of animals without which the culture of eating meat would not exist.

Lifecasting & Ubiquitous Relationships, Alexis Charlotte Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My subjects do not know I exist. They do not know who I am, and they do not know their lives are the center of my painting series. But I know them - at least, I think I do. My acrylic paintings depict people in domestic spaces in specific moments in time. The relationships of person-to-person, person to space, paint to canvas and voyeur to subject drives my obsession to watch and to paint what I see. What I am seeing are a collection of pixels that make up human forms, living rooms, and kitchens. These digital bodies move through …

Walking In The City: Koji Nakano’S Reimagining And Re-Sounding Of The Tale Of Genji, Isabella Ramos

Scripps Senior Theses

Imagined Sceneries is a work written by composer Dr. Koji Nakano of Burapha University, Thailand for two sopranos, koto, light percussion, narrations, soundscapes recorded in Kyoto, Japan in December 2015, and digital projections of Ebina Masao’s 1953 print series Tale of Genji. Imagined Sceneries’ reimagining and “re-sounding” of Heian Kyoto relies on a balance between what is imagined and what is experienced in performance. Its many elements collectively explore multiple layers of Japanese histories, soundscapes, environments, and sensibilities. Using Michel de Certeau’s concepts of the city, this thesis journeys through Nakano’s imagined spaces.

[Review] Dinesh Wadiwel. The War Against Animals, Philip Armstrong

Animal Studies Journal

Are humans at war with nonhuman animals, either literally or metaphorically? What might it mean for human-animal studies – and for human-animal relations – to say so? Responding to these questions with considerable eloquence and by drawing upon a wide range of references – including 19thcentury theories of war, Continental theory, actor-network theory, and animal rights philosophy – Dinesh Wadiwel produces an argument that surprises, provokes and enlightens.

Should We Straighten Up? Exploring The Responsibilities Of Actor Training For Lgbtq Students, Matthew B. Ferrell

Theses and Dissertations

Gay actors have a long history with the notion of “straightening up” to remain castable and economically feasible in today’s market. Searching to find answers for young acting students while strengthening their own self worth, I will explore the history of gay actors in film, television and theatre and in society to understand this notion more fully. By interviewing working actors and managers in the business I will explore how I can address this question of “straightening up” to the future generation of actors and analyze how we can face the future with integrity and self-respect.

Painting With Horses Towards Interspecies Response-Ability: Non-Human Charisma As Material Affect, Madeleine Boyd

Animal Studies Journal

Leading up to the 2014 Melbourne Cup three communication modes were employed by unrelated horse welfare activists to raise awareness of cruelty in the racing industry. The intention to increase empathy with horses ties together these efforts, which are characterised as written, visual and immersive. This paper uses the lens of Jamie Lorimer’s three types of non-human charisma to consider the potential for each communication mode to achieve the goal of change towards interspecies response-ability. Charisma is considered in this paper to be a form of material-affect within new materialism that offers a more complex tool for analysis than the …

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Notes on Contributors and Editorial.

Provocations From The Field - Extinction, Encountering And The Exigencies Of Forgetting, Rick De Vos

Animal Studies Journal

Stories of species extinction interpellate and legitimate each other, accumulating, in a discrete and synchronous order, a coherent history of extinction that allows them to be utilised in scientific and historical discourses as authoritative signs. These stories also translate and inscribe social and cultural encounters, however, where groups of different human and nonhuman animals interacted and made sense of these interactions. Great auks, for example, possess stories that exceed the overdetermining official account of their extinction, having endured for at least one hundred thousand years learning and passing on the skills to live and flourish in the North Atlantic, co-existing …

Selecting Candidates For De-Extinction And Resurrection: Mammoths, Lenin’S Tomb And Neo-Eurasianism, Henrietta Mondry

Animal Studies Journal

My paper explores links between the human and animal candidates for resurrection and deextinction and focuses on the aspect of nationalist agenda in application to both species. I explore the intersection between the scientific and symbolic agendas in the resurrection and de-extinction discourse. I interpret the ideological underpinnings of the current developments in the woolly mammoth de-extinction in the Russian Federation in parallel to the theme of resurrection of historically-important personalities in contemporary Russian fiction of magical historicist bent. My particular focus is on the role of Neo- Eurasianist thinking in the choice of the candidates for resurrection and de-extinction, …

On The Authenticity Of De-Extinct Organisms, And The Genesis Argument, Douglas Campbell

Animal Studies Journal

Are the methods of synthetic biology capable of recreating authentic living members of an extinct species? An analogy with the restoration of destroyed natural landscapes suggests not. The restored version of a natural landscape will typically lack much of the aesthetic value of the original landscape because of the different historical processes that created it – processes that involved human intentions and actions, rather than natural forces acting over millennia. By the same token, it would appear that synthetically recreated versions of extinct natural organisms will also be less aesthetically valuable than the originals; that they will be, in some …

We Are Not Equals: Socio-Cognitive Dimensions Of Lion/Human Relationships, Marcus Baynes-Rock, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Animal Studies Journal

This article documents a peaceful, albeit tense relationship between Ju/’hoan and lions in the Nyae Nyae region of the Kalahari during the 1950s.1 Unlike contexts where lions kill livestock and people and are persecuted in return, the Ju/’hoan and lions of the Nyae Nyae shared waterholes without conflict. The recorded and oral histories, and cultural traditions of the Ju/’hoan suggest that this peaceful relationship had evolved over centuries. Lions were recognised as powerful creatures but unlike hyenas and leopards in the region, they were not killers of humans. Lions were seen as social superiors, and addressed with respect but this …