Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …

Resistance/Refusal Of Violence In The Neoliberal City: Black Lgbtq+ Communities In Chicago And New York (1989 – Present), Marc Ridgell

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Since the 1980s, Black queer and trans communities across U.S. cities have experienced racist and classist exclusion from gay neighborhoods, police and interpersonal violence in neighborhoods more generally, and medical racism in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Despite these forms of antiblack and anti-queer oppression, Black queer and trans people have performed acts of resistance and refusal to build community and experience better worlds. This research project examines how Black LGBTQ+ communities have responded to systems of racism, classism, queerphobia, and misogyny by claiming their “right to the city.” Specifically, this project explores how Black LGBTQ+ people in both Chicago and New …

Laywoman Of Right Faith: The Religious Writings Of Wang Peihua (1767-1792), Meijie Shen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONLaywoman of Right Faith: The Religious Writings of Wang Peihua (1767-1792) by Meijie Shen Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Language and Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2022 Professor Beata Grant, Chair

This dissertation is a case study of an eighteenth-century Buddhist laywoman named Wang Peihua (1767-1792) from the affluent Jiangnan area of imperial China. This period saw the flourishing of women’s education and writings, thanks to which we have collections left behind by them that document their own lives and in their own voice, which enabled us to explore their religious experience. As women started to …

The Pursuit Of Holiness In Early Modern Southern Italy, Mary Andino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My research explores lay understandings of holiness and sanctity in Palermo and Naples in the period 1563-1734, with particular attention to the entanglements of religion, gender, and culture. To get at contested notions of holiness, I study putative saints, persons who in their lifetimes gained a reputation for holiness but were never formally canonized. I include both false saints (persons tried by the Inquisition for pretending to be saints) and stalled saints (those for whom a canonization process was opened but never concluded). I show how sanctity engaged local communities as well as the Church hierarchy and bring to light …

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

Subjectivities Of Struggle: Charting Inscriptions Of Violence And Refusal On The “Cuerpo Territorio” Of Peru’S Defensoras, Natalia Guzmán Solano

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Subjectivities of Struggle: Inscriptions of Violence and Refusal on the ‘Cuerpo Territorio’ of Peru’s Defensoras” calls into question the colonial assumptions underpinning contemporary understandings of extractivism. The sixteen months of ethnographic research I conducted with the defensoras (women ecoterritorial defenders) of Cajamarca is situated at the fraught extractive frontier where social conflict paralyzed the expansion of a large-scale mining project and generated a coalitional struggle against extractive-led economic development. This dissertation conceptualizes extractivism as a modern/colonial product of power and knowledge that has feminized the land and inhabitants from the time of the European invasion of the Americas. While recent …

Crip Time In Fin-De-Siècle Spain: Disability, Degeneration, And Eugenics, Erika Rodriguez

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A period of intense nation-building, the late nineteenth century was marked by the search for medical and legal solutions to the increasing number of bodies that did not align with culturally constructed expectations of productivity and reproduction in Spanish modernity. Authors of this time used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. In carrying out this analysis, I raise the question of how representations of disability created a space to reconfigure the social values that determined what lives matter. Focusing on canonical realist …

Its Skin Is My Skin, Bryan Page

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text examines the complexity of attempting to empathize with bodies that are vastly othered from my own. This broad yet nuanced subject crosses epistemological boundaries and complicates the dualities between both the mind and body, and between the corporeal and the virtual. My desire to better understand the conditions of another’s experience originates from a painful traumatic loss which caused me to feel isolated and incomplete. In response to this suffering, I long to emotionally connect with other beings and create artwork that attempts to bridge the qualia of individual experience.

I am interested in the capacity (or lack …

Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias In Queer American Literature From Walt Whitman To Willa Cather, Benjamin Meiners

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In “Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias in Queer American Literature from Walt Whitman to Willa Cather,” I argue that the colonial discourse of primitivism played a central role in the queer literary imaginaries of both canonical and non-canonical U.S. authors. Building on the work of historians of sexuality who trace the complex development of the twentieth-century homo-/hetero- binary, I show how literary works produced in this historical moment—roughly 1860 to 1925—explored and in some instances even advocated alternative queer modes of citizenship and erotic imagination and practice. Focusing on the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willa …

I'M Sorry For Everything, Hille Sennott

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My work is rooted in the fact that women are practically conditioned to apologize for everything, and tells the intimate story of my life. By recording my apologies for several months and deeply examining my behavior, I noticed themes and made work based on these — work that exposed my private moments. I noticed a disconnect between times I needed to apologize, and this compulsive need to take on the blame for every little thing. I examine the feminine battle of soft and strong, eventually coming to the conclusion that there are occasions calling for both. Women are taught to …

We Are A Fantasia: Violence, Belonging, And Potentiality In Transgender Latina Sexual Economies, Andrea Bolivar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation ethnographically centers the lives of sex working transgender Latinas in Chicagoland. Based on 14 months of research collected between June 2015 and August 2016, I introduce "fantasia" as a racialized queer analytic to illustrate the unique ways in which transgender Latinas are objectified, racialized, and dehumanized in sexual economies of labor and in U.S. nation more broadly. Fantasia conveys trans Latinas' sexual otherness on account of their race and gender. They are imagined as hypersexual because they are Latinas, and fetishized because they are transgender women. Fantasia also indexes their ephemeral presence--they are always at risk of disappearing …

Make Love And War: Chinese Popular Romance In Greater East Asia, 1937-1945, Chun-Yu Lu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation examines Chinese popular romances produced and consumed in the Japanese colonized and occupied regions, including Taiwan, Manchukuo, and Shanghai, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. I investigate the complex relationships between emotion, representation, and consumption vis--vis wartime discourses and sociopolitical turmoil. Through extensive archival research in Taiwan, China and Japan, I (re)discovered and reevaluated five important wartime popular romance writers and their works. In addition to fiction, sequels, film and stage play adaptations, Japanese translation and readers/viewers responses all together create the cultural phenomena of the popular romance genre. In this dissertation I ask the following questions: How are …

American Undergraduates Undone: Social And Intellectual Dysfunction On Campus, Noelle P. Jones

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The pivotal, formative years of typical undergraduates, ages 18-22, represent a time when students mold their distinctive identities, social personalities, and intellects more intensively than during any other period of their lives. Developmental theorists Arthur W. Chickering and Linda Reisser call this process “journeying toward individuation—the discovery and refinement of one’s unique way of being—and also toward communion with other individuals and groups, including the larger national and global society” (35). In today’s college climate, students flummox and astound parents, professors, and researchers due to their individual immaturity and disengagement with learning. Although these complaints identify nothing new in America, …

Objects Of Desire: Toward An Ethics Of Sameness, Amber Jamilla Musser

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Through an examination of objectum sexuality, an orientation in which people sexually orient themselves toward objects, this essay reflects on what constitutes sexuality, the nature of intimacy, and the agency of objects. Using the discourse of similarity, I suggest that we read objectum sexuality as a mode of understanding subjectivity under neoliberalism. I also suggest, however, that we read it as a phenomena that could open into an alternate set of ethics. More specifically, I argue that objectum sexuality allows us to think critically about the displacement of the subject, the animacy of objects, and understandings of attachment.

Old Europe, New Europe, Eastern Europe: Reflections On A Minor Character In Fassbinder’S Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, Anca Parvulescu

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

In today's Europe, the term Eurosceptic often accompanies accusations of retrograde nationalism, irrational feelings, even fanaticism. When applied to Europe, skepticism, one of the critic's formative traits, acquires a bad reputation, as if it can only be an annihilating, rather than constructive, form of doubt. And yet skepticism is a much-needed critical affect, particularly when it comes to Europe. If we need to be skeptical of anything, it is Europe. Today one hears claims about Europe having become postnational, postracial, even post-Europe. How else can the literary and cultural critic welcome such claims other than with a healthy dose of …

European Kinship: Eastern European Women Go To Market, Anca Parvulescu

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

No abstract provided.

Reading, Writing, And The Whip, Amber Jamilla Musser

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a life and readership of its own and as writing exercise, and exemplifies what Michel Foucault termed a "technology of the self." The link I am forging between Krafft-Ebing and Foucault's technologies of the self offers a reevaluation of …

The Professor's Desire: On Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Anca Parvulescu

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

No abstract provided.

Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable Of Postmodern Sentimentality, Rebecca A. Wanzo

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

This essay analyzes the relationship between feelings and politics in Octavia E. Butler's novels "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents." Comparison of the sentimentalism approach used by the author and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; Characteristics of Butler's novels which are categorize as postmodernism; Significance of feeling of the novels' heroines to political activism.

To Die Laughing And To Laugh At Dying: Revisiting The Awakening, Anca Parvulescu

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

No abstract provided.

Masochism: A Queer Subjectivity, Amber Jamilla Musser

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble elaborates what may be called a queer subjectivity. Characterized by non-essential, performative identity, her theory has been criticized because, according to its critics, it does not give the subject political agency. Liberal theorists, such as Seyla Benhabib, have been particularly concerned with the political effects of this form of subjectivity on already marginalized social groups while other theorists, such as Susan Stryker and Ed Cohen, have articulated concern that the theory does not sufficiently account for embodiment, affect, and identity. This essay brings Deleuze's theory of masochism in dialogue with Butler's theories of subjectivity in an …

Intepreting Gender, Linda Nicholson

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

No abstract provided.

Comment On Rosaldo's "The Use And Abuse Of Anthropology", Linda Nicholson

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

No abstract provided.