Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Spirit Of Female Modernity, Yuan Yuan

MA Projects

"The Spirit of Female Modernity" rejoices in the empowering synergy of women and art modernist aesthetics. It focuses mainly on the work of female artists, designers, musicians, and fashion brands that break several epochs and media. The goal is to motivate by illustrating how women in diverse artistic and design fields embraced and, in some cases, reinterpreted the language of modernist art to reflect their period's concept of modernity. This carefully curated exhibition highlights the new and thought-through role that women artists embarked on in helping to shape the history of art through the modernism lens of feminist practice. It …

“And I’M Going To Destroy You.”: Persona And Gender Performativity In Ernest Hemingway’S The Garden Of Eden, Nicole Minton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While debate of Ernest Hemingway’s authorial masculine persona in connection to The Garden of Eden has been a point of interest in literary scholarship, no single work has tied together theory of gender performativity to persona. A borderline parodic display of masculine adventure has encouraged a one-dimensional view of Hemingway, who is viewed by audiences as the pinnacle of masculinity. However, this image is complicated by the publication of Eden, which reveals an author interested in gender and sexual identity fluidity. Rarely has a single text called into question so controversially an author’s public image. Eden showcases an empathetic …

Love On The Spectrum: Djuna Barnes’S Case Against Categorization In Nightwood, Kaitlyn A. Alford

Masters Theses

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a challenging and beautiful text that continues to confound readers almost 100 years after its original publication. Though the text is often read as a “lesbian” novel, I consider the possibilities available when we read this text instead with a more open queerness in mind. By looking at the novel’s treatment of image, time, history, gender, sexuality, and identity, a new way of reading is revealed which rejects moves of taxonomization and categorization. This thesis explores how Barnes challenges dominant modes of representation and understanding, not to be a simple contrarian, but to present a new …

The Postmodern And The Personal In Edna St. Vincent Millay’S Aria Da Capo, Roxanne Rankin

Munn Scholars Awards

Aria Da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1919 play, has thus far been largely ignored in literary criticism. This essay, through a historical survey of Millay’s previous critical reception followed by a close reading of Aria Da Capo, attempts to explain and then bridge this gap in academic scholarship. A postmodernist reading of the play will then illustrate why Millay’s work still confounds scholars today and how Aria Da Capo specifically continues to be relevant more than 100 years after it was first produced.

Re-Visioning The Modern/Ist Body: Literature, Women, And Modern Dance, Marisa Higgins

Doctoral Dissertations

This project explores the connections between modern dance and modernism Though initially, these connections might seem inchoate, modern dance provides a way to consider how expressive movement in modernism and gender restrictions prompts a physical response. Dance is inherently stylistic movement, and it is vital to explore how movement offers women a way to engage or respond to modernity. By investigating the role of movement in modernist literature and the particular tension between constraint and freedom that characterized female movement during this period, I argue that expressive movement and embodied performance offers a means of self-exploration and self-actualization. Specifically, it …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Femininity Reclaiming Chivalry In The Harry Potter Series, Ashley M. Watson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper focuses on the reclaiming of chivalric values by female characters in the Harry Potter series by comparing them to Arthurian characters. Scholars have extensively compared the narrative of the Knights of the Round Table to the global phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, but in this paper I explore, through a feminist lens, a character comparison of the Harry Potter novels and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. I will show how female characters in modern literature reclaim chivalry. This is important because it exemplifies a shift in the position of women into a more active role. I …

(In)Hospitable Modernity: Hospitality And Its Discontents (1920–1953), Daniel A. Hengel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the tacit forms of political activity operating through the performance and space of hospitality in modern fiction. I read the habitus, praxis, and dissemblages of hospitality in modern fiction as conduits that reveal dialectics of submission and resistance to Victorian and Edwardian markers of normativity. This is ultimately an infrapolitical work. I locate fulcrums of dissent, cloaked in a guise of hospitality, in the domestic sphere and the politicization of formerly private spaces into sites with the potential to reorder legitimated forms of agency. This project attempts to uncover veiled forms of sociopolitical resistance in and through …

Audience And Narrative In Female-Authored Diaries Of The Twentieth Century: Analyzing Diaries As Modernist Texts, Rose Grosskopf

College Honors Program

During the early twentieth century the literary modernists reacted to a changing world by pioneering new literary forms that could depict the subjective experience of thought. Their new forms eschewed tradition, convention, and narrative and experimented with literary techniques that could depict the mind in an expanded moment of time.

In her modernist essay “A Diary,” Gertrude Stein reveals the similarities between diaries and her own experimental modernist literature. “A Diary,” which is both modernist literature and a diary, provides a critical lens by which to examine other diaries as modernist texts. An analysis of the diaries of Anne Frank, …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

The Gendering Of Death Personifications In Literary Modernism: The Femme Fatale Symbol From Baudelaire To Barnes, Amanda Mcnally

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The time of modernity, defined here as 1850-1940, contributed to massive changes in the representation of the feminine in literature. Societal paradigm shifts due to industrialism, advances in science, psychology, and a newfound push for gender equality brought transformation to the Western World. As a result of this, male frustrations revived the ancient trope of the femme fatale, but the modern woman—already hungry for agency, tired of maligned representation in heinous portrayals of skeletons, sirens, and beasts—saw a symbol begging for redemption rather than the intended insult. Women of the nineteenth century infused texture to a two-dimensional accusation that argued …

Virginia Woolf And Gertrude Stein’S Repurposing Of Feminine Domestic Language Through The Lens Of Bakhtinian Heteroglossia And Dialogic Theory, Samantha Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways that Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and “The Good Anna” recapture feminine domestic language in order to produce a new form of feminist heteroglossia, a reworking of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogic theory.

The Bird That Flew Backwards, Robin Gow

English Honors Papers

The Bird that Flew Backwards examines women poets from literary Modernism in the 1910s and Beat culture in the 1950s. Analyzing these eras in tandem reveals contrasting historical constructions of American womanhood and how sociocultural trends influenced how the “poetess” constructed herself and her work and illustrates the retrograde nature of women’s rights in the 1950s. Through close reading, digital mapping, and historical background, The Bird that Flew Backwards establishes a new critical perspective by linking the more well-known Modernists with lesser-known women in 1910s Greenwich Village Bohemia. This linkage between eras branches off to explore themes of formation of …

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.

Weird Modernisms, Alison Nikki Sperling

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes “the Weird” as a pervasive theme across literary Modernism. Drawing from early versions of weirdness in the pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) and from the magazine’s most famous writer, H.P. Lovecraft, I demonstrate that the weird must not be limited to tentacular horrors present in supernatural fiction of the period. Instead, I argue weirdness is a category bound to non-normative experiences of material embodiment. Drawing from feminist materialisms, queer theory, disability studies, and nonhuman theories, this project develops a concept of the Weird that is more expansive and ultimately more ethically engaged with otherness and bodily difference. …

Complexity Of Women's Liberation In The Era Of Westernization: Egyptian Islamic And Secular Feminists In Their Own Context, Assim Alkhawaja

Doctoral Dissertations

Informed by postcolonial/Islamic feminist theory, this qualitative study explores how Egyptian feminists navigate the political and social influence of the West. The following meta-questions guided this research: How do women in Egypt who self-identify as feminists define feminism? How do they use this definition in their activism? How is Westernization influencing Egyptian feminists and their participation in national and political conflicts?

Data sources were based on individual interviews. The findings indicate that although the phenomenon of Westernization in Egypt had both negative and positive influences on the Egyptian women’s liberation movement, it has caused major divisions between secular and Islamist …

"The Last Of The Great Bohemians": Film Poetry, Myth, And Sexuality In Greenwich Village And The Atlantic, 1930-1975, Thomas Winfield Hafer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Greenwich Village, a final generation of bohemians contested the rise and trajectory of gay liberation. During the 1930s, this generation blended modernist poetry and sexuality to develop a new manifestation of bohemia. In the postwar period, they transformed modern poetry into the new artistic medium of film that was critical to shaping postwar American art and culture. This wave of bohemia was built on certain modernist principles, including a universalist understanding of sexuality and identity that was different from, and incompatible with, the growth of identity politics in the 1960s. This dissertation argues that this was a last gasp …

An Uncommon Splice: Seeking Mutations In The Life-Writing And Short Fiction Of Mary Butts And Djuna Barnes, Susan George

Theses and Dissertations

Immersed in a web of short stories, poetry, and supporting biographical and life-writing sources, I investigate the narrative significance beneath and beyond two British and American modernist women authors. I evaluate sisterly connectedness between their literary production, publishing histories and life writings present in a specific cultural-temporal moment and genre: the short story. By looking on these unique, forgotten fictions through a new materialist lens, I argue for their short fiction's greater inclusion in the canon of women's modernism. Chapter I tests correlations between two authors undergoing the same stresses, alienations, joys and desires by taking up tenants of material …

The Materialism Of The Encounter: Queer Sociality And Capital In Modern Literature, Michael David Schmidt

Wayne State University Dissertations

In The Materialism of the Encounter I argue for the critical importance of queer sociality as a confrontation with global capital in which sexualities emerge as a material history necessary for rethinking the broader experiences of twentieth century modernity. To do so, I draw together a series of transnational texts--Henry James's nonfiction travel narrative The American Scene, Djuna Barnes's canonical Nightwood, and two neglected novels, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's The Young and Evil and Claude McKay's unpublished Romance in Marseilles--that exhibit a mode of sociality and literary practice I am calling the "encounter." While the …

Pragmatism And Democratic Embodiment : The Poetics Of Constructive Conflict In Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, And Laura (Riding) Jackson, Aidan Patricia Thompson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My dissertation, "Pragmatism and Democratic Embodiment: The Poetics of Constructive Conflict in Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Laura (Riding) Jackson," establishes a methodology based on William James's notion of the subject (1890) as fluid to interrogate how these poets, working roughly between 1860 and 1970, complicated questions of writing in order to critique systems of gender. I reconsider a presumed relation between language and feminism in Modernist Studies that understands the aesthetic practice of unsettling linguistic norms to be counter to feminist concerns relating to the body. Through this reassessment, I argue that the poets anticipated problems associated …

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …

A Portrayal Of Gender And A Description Of Gender Roles In Selected American Modern And Postmodern Plays., Bonny Ball Copenhaver

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to describe how gender was portrayed and to determine how gender roles were depicted and defined in a selection of Modern and Postmodern American plays. This study was based on the symbolic interaction theory of gender that suggests that social roles are learned over time and are subject to constant reinforcement. The significance of this study was derived from the broad topic of gender because gender issues are relevant to a variety of fields and exploring the effects of gender in one field contributes to the understanding of gender in another field.

The plays …