Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …

Bozo The Clown: An Icon As American As An Apple Pie In The Face, Gregory Kent Oswald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is no single path toward the creation of an American icon, a person or item with resonance to all in the country as well as having an ability to serve as a symbol of America itself for those outside the borders. This thesis considers certain elements that propelled the journey of the entertainment for children, Bozo the Clown, into a representational figure in the minds of young and old. Like all things American, his roots include many elements from outside the country: the name derives from foreign tongues mostly in derisory terms, but in at least one instance as …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

Fragmentation And Fabulation: Reflexivity And The New Black Documentary, Joanna Lehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis concerns the photographic representation of Black bodies in new, reflexive documentary forms that have been increasingly produced and exhibited in the midst of America’s renewed discourse on race. Approaching this argument categorically, focused on the themes of fabulation and fragmentation, my task here is to uncover the gaps and overlaps between earlier critiques of the documentary image and more recent discourse on photography and race by exploring the specific methods through which select recent documentary projects embed and expand these critiques.

Fragmentation is a category of production I use to frame a movement of Black photographic artists …

Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on the material and metaphysical aspects of the Hudson Yards, the largest private development in US History. With its roots in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, the site is representative of neoliberal ideology. It is also one in which cultural production is central. This is in terms of the rationalization and mythos of the building of the space itself and the dreamworlds created to obscure the mechanisms of extraction and accumulation that make such a complex possible. The Hudson Yards is particularly interesting because, as Cindi Katz might suggest, topography lines connect it to transnational capital. And …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

Infinity Wars: Post 9/11 Superhero Films And American Empire, Peter J. Bruno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last two decades, superhero films have accounted for some of the most popular and financially lucrative films of all time. This thesis analyzes some of the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of various superhero films following their post 9/11 boom. Beginning with America’s response to the events of 9/11 and a subsequent retreat into a Manichean world of good versus evil, I introduce the term “empirical reality” in order to account for the ways daily American life is shielded from the worst effects of U.S. foreign policy. On screen this manifests by perpetuating the myth of the “clean war” …

The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify an over looked subset of racial identity as seen through film narratives from the 1930’s through the 1950’s pre-Civil Rights era. The subcategory of racial identity is the necessity of passing for Black people then identified as Negro. The primary film narratives include Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Lost Boundaries (1949), Pinky (1949) and Imitation of Life (1934). These images will deploy the troupe of passing as a racialized historical image. These films depict the pain and anguish Passers endured while escaping their racial identity. Through these stories we identify, sympathize and understand the needs of Black …

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Manifest Density: Decentering The Global Western Film, Michael D. Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Western is often seen as a uniquely American narrative form, one so deeply ingrained as to constitute a national myth. This perception persists despite its inherent shortcomings, among them its inapplicability to the many instances of filmmakers outside the United States appropriating the genre and thus undercutting this view of generic exceptionalism. As the Western has migrated across geographical boundaries, it has accrued potential significations that bring into question its direct alignment with national ideology and history. Rather than attempting to define the Western in terms of nation or myth, we should attend to how each new text reconfigures …

Party On, Derrida!: A Queer, Deconstructionist Look At Wayne's World, Glam, And The Losers Of Rock And Roll, Michelle A. Arp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What do you get when you mix a girl from Long Island, critical theory, a movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, David Bowie, and alternative rock of the early 2000s? A lot of losers, a lot of queerness, and plenty of room for deconstruction.

Part performance studies, part queer studies, and part memoir, this study is a cross-genre and experimental analysis of postmodern ideologies, rock and roll, and comedy. More specifically, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the slash” (Of Grammatology, 1967) in relation to high and low culture via comedies, such that of Wayne’s World …

How Lucille Ball Fought The Patriarchy, While Lucy Ricardo (Indirectly) Contributed To Second-Wave (White) Feminism, Anam Rana Afzal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Author Stephanie Coontz argues that our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms. In actuality, the happy, homogenous families that we “remember” from America in the 50s were a result of the media’s denial of diversity. Also, women’s retreat to housewifery after working during WWII was in many cases, not freely chosen. In his study of sitcoms, Saul Austerlitz claims that once television arrived in American cities after the war’s end, its impact was immediate and incontrovertible, and no sitcom caught America’s eye as …

Musicking, Discourse, And Identity In Participatory Media Fandom, Aya Esther Hayashi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I study three forms of music-making within media fandom and their respective communities: filk, roughly, the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy fandom; wizard rock, a punk/DIY movement inspired by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels; and the YouTube musicals of Team StarKid and AVbyte. I consider their individual histories and the popular music movements and genres that influenced their respective developments. Even though the practices of these three communities are very different, their participants use similar, if identical, discourses when discussing what they do and why they do it, including but not limited to: openness, …

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite its reputation as one of the most countercultural and anti-establishment voices in mainstream television comedy, Saturday Night Live helps produce and reproduces cultural norms. Using weight and gender as a lens, this paper investigates Saturday Night Live’s methods of creating, imitating, and evoking the fat female body in order to limit female agency and police unruly female power. It contends that even the inclusion of nonnormative female bodies—fat bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color—is merely a reiteration of the techniques of neoliberal multiculturalism for the television audience.

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Engaging The Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods, Kevin L. Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a recent decade in American history whose unique notion of self-periodization generated important questions of ethical engagement and withdrawal. Situated during a time of an increasingly complex relationship between literature and theory, thinkers in the 80s self-consciously shifted towards making claims about their present moment which were based on the logic of rupture, and which thus created an either-or logic of pessimism or optimism in response to this rupture. These kinds of self-periodizing notions generally are collected under the rubric "postmodernism" and the first chapter deals with a transatlantic movement between theorists such as Fredric Jameson and …