Worldbuilding A Queer Before: D&D As A Neomedievalism For A Modern Age,
2025
University at Albany, State University of New York
Worldbuilding A Queer Before: D&D As A Neomedievalism For A Modern Age, Brianna M. Thompson
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has had countless participants and audience members in the course of its over fifty-year existence. It has also been the subject of several studies that attempt to capture its unique form of performative play. Yet, there has been a scarcity of scholarship on how D&D acts as a neomedievalism and how that can offer a queer kind of opportunity to its players, allowing them to find a place in a past that is historically inaccessible and yet endlessly in the process of being (re)imagined. Using an interweaving of archival theory with queer and performance studies, particularly …
“A ‘Normal’ Life”: Red Dwarf, Temporality, And The Neuroqueer Absurd,
2025
University at Albany, State University of New York
“A ‘Normal’ Life”: Red Dwarf, Temporality, And The Neuroqueer Absurd, Gretchen B. Graf
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)
The science fiction series Red Dwarf, beginning in 1988 and broadcasting sporadically over the past nearly four decades, takes place more than three million years in the future where human beings have gone extinct. All, that is, except one; the show’s central character, Dave Lister, is the last known living human being in the universe, outliving humanity by remaining in stasis during a radiation leak that killed the rest of the crew of the titular mining ship. Besides Lister, the narrative also focuses on the nonhuman beings that keep him company. Besides residing in the genre of science fiction, …
Phantasma,
2025
University at Albany, State University of New York
Phantasma, Grace Wright
Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)
Ever since the infamous Ides of March, scholars have been debating the true psychology behind Brutus’s betrayal. The purpose of this project is to take a step back from the politicized motivations and explore the emotional, strenuous conditions of Julius Caesar’s assassination. This project will transform William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a novella with its central focus on the relationship dynamics between the key figures of Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. The intention of the novella is to not only analyze the play through a critical queer lens, but to interrogate the themes of violence and desire that surround male relationships …
Voices To Faces: The Midnight Cowboy’S Picaresque Journey,
2025
Portland State University
Voices To Faces: The Midnight Cowboy’S Picaresque Journey, Dave Patterson
Anthós
John Schlesinger’s 1969 film, Midnight Cowboy, tells the story of Joe Buck, a Texan who dreams of working as a hustler in New York. Schlesinger’s resulting tale follows the framework of the picaresque, wherein a naive rube ventures to the big city to pursue a better life and exposes societal ills along the way. In this article, Patterson reveals how Joe Buck’s internal tension derives from his materialism, symbolized as disembodied voices, and his devaluing of human connection and empathy, symbolized as faces. The voices from his radio’s advertisements and game shows reinforce his flawed assumptions about life. A midpoint …
Grieving In Doorways: A Critical Autoethnographic Exploration Of Embodied Knowledge Amid Shifting Reality And Radical Possibility,
2025
Cal Poly Humboldt
Grieving In Doorways: A Critical Autoethnographic Exploration Of Embodied Knowledge Amid Shifting Reality And Radical Possibility, Holly Rae
Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects
This thesis is a critical autoethnographic exploration of embodied knowledge amid shifting reality and radical possibility. Beginning and ending with my own body, I explore how grief, as an embodied companion, offers wisdom and power in moments of profound change. Rooted in a methodology of slowness, rest, walking, and active listening, this work resists the extractive pace of modernity and instead invites building a relationship with grief and discomfort. This research is an experiment in co-creating knowledge with bodies and their intersectionality within systems that would keep us separate from knowing our embodied knowledge. As a location of research for …
True Crime Podcasts As A Scene Of Feminist Reckoning: A Comparative Analysis Of My Favorite Murder And Sistas Who Kill,
2025
Cal Poly Humboldt
True Crime Podcasts As A Scene Of Feminist Reckoning: A Comparative Analysis Of My Favorite Murder And Sistas Who Kill, Rachel C.C. Matteri
Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects
This research examines the cultural impact and ethical implications of true crime podcasts (TCPs). In recent years, TCPs have become a powerful cultural force, with White women often emerging as the primary storytellers and most visible participants in the genre. Their dominance in this space is not neutral and it carries representational weight. It explores the potential for feminist activity made possible by the auditory, self-publishing genre of podcasting. This work focuses on the buddy-comedy subgenre of TCPs. The concerns of this text are that TCPs are dominated by White feminist values and are not an intersectional feminist project. Textual …
The Reel Narrative: The Portrayal And Consequent Archetypes Of Women In Selected Mainstream Philippine Romantic Cinema,
2024
De La Salle University
The Reel Narrative: The Portrayal And Consequent Archetypes Of Women In Selected Mainstream Philippine Romantic Cinema, Ma. Beatrice P. Pilar, Nathaniel Rey D. Ferrer
Sinaya: A Philippine Journal for Senior High School Teachers and Students
In Philippine society, media, particularly romance films, shapes and reinforces audiences’ perspectives, perpetuating preconceived notions and stereotypical beliefs. However, there is a lack of textual analysis within Filipino films, especially regarding female representation in media. Hence, our study explores the portrayal of female main characters in romance films. Textual film analysis, grounded in Carl Jung’s Jungian archetypes and Jean Shinoda Bolen’s female archetypes in media, was implemented on the six Filipino highest-grossing romance films from 2014 until 2019. This analysis, further supported by a feminist lens, aimed to identify the character portrayal and archetypes of the main female characters in …
No One Lives In The Future: Family Dynamics And Environmental Discourse,
2024
University of Calgary
No One Lives In The Future: Family Dynamics And Environmental Discourse, Morgan Vanek
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
In the context of catastrophic climate change, the optimism that underpins our economic models for calculating the future cost of present risks has become both untenable and dangerous. Nonetheless, even writing urgently concerned with these risks continues to invoke a version of the Child as a figure of futurity that appears to naturalize both this optimism and our present inaction. In this essay, I argue that we might find another path forward by looking back to the eighteenth-century stories that seem to demonstrate a similar preoccupation with children in danger. Taking Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress as a representative example, I …
Reading As Lesbian, Reading As Trans* And Thinking Intergenerationally,
2024
University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies
Reading As Lesbian, Reading As Trans* And Thinking Intergenerationally, Katherine Binhammer
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Written from the perspective of a critic who came of age in the queer 1990s, this essay considers the generational difference in understandings of Charlotte Charke as a butch lesbian and a transman. It argues that the history of sexuality demands an intergenerational reading practice because our objects are always engaged in a history of the present.
Ancestors In The Archives: Decolonizing Archival Research,
2024
University of Alberta
Ancestors In The Archives: Decolonizing Archival Research, Willow White
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Bringing together my identities as an Indigenous woman (Métis Nation of Alberta) and as a scholar specializing in eighteenth-century women writers has involved the continual unlearning of colonial research practices. The following essay reflects on my efforts to work with/in archives in a decolonizing way. I will share some of the practices that I have adopted, not to provide a checklist, but to join the ongoing conversation of many eighteenth-century studies scholars who share a decolonizing desire.
Reading With Aunt Bunty: Intergenerational Feminism And Eighteenth-Century Studies,
2024
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
Reading With Aunt Bunty: Intergenerational Feminism And Eighteenth-Century Studies, Alison Conway
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
This essay asks: what might an intergenerational reading practice look like for feminist critics working in eighteenth-century studies? What could be learned from reading the political and institutional conditions that have shaped reading practices, past and present, in relation to each other? I consider, here, the case of Q.D. Leavis. Reading Leavis, as well as other women who studied at Cambridge in the early twentieth century, shows me how profoundly I have been shaped by Virginia Woolf’s characterization of the university and literary history’s marginalization of women writers. What would it mean to consider the eighteenth century through the lens …
Introduction: Intergenerational Thinking,
2024
University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies
Introduction: Intergenerational Thinking, Katherine Binhammer
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
This introduction to a conversation on Intergenerational Thinking that first began at the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies in Toronto, March 2024, establishes the importance of dialogue across generations in feminist eighteenth-century studies. It synthesizes the methods the participants engage to think with past scholars, rather than disavow such work. While the topics discussed are diverse -- feminist history, Phillis Wheatley, Indigenous eighteenth-century archives, climate catastrophe and Charlotte Charke – the writers share an approach to generational thinking grounded in a critique of the assumption that the new is always better.
A Review Of Kristin M. Girten's Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism In The British Enlightenment,
2024
Northeastern University London
A Review Of Kristin M. Girten's Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism In The British Enlightenment, Peter West
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
A review of Sensitive Witnesses by Kristin M. Girten by Peter West.
A Review Of Glenn Mcgillivray's Actors, Audiences, And Emotions In The Eighteenth Century: Communities Of Sentiment,
2024
University of Kent, United Kingdom
A Review Of Glenn Mcgillivray's Actors, Audiences, And Emotions In The Eighteenth Century: Communities Of Sentiment, Semane Parsons
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
A Review of Glen McGillivray's book Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment (2023).
A Review Of Jennifer Maclure’S The Feeling Of Letting Die: Necroeconomics And Victorian Fiction,
2024
University of Northern Iowa
A Review Of Jennifer Maclure’S The Feeling Of Letting Die: Necroeconomics And Victorian Fiction, Jolene Zigarovich
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
A review of Jennifer MacLure’s The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jolene Zigarovich.
A Review Of Maeve E. Kane's Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, And Exchange Across Three Centuries,
2024
Northern Illinois University
A Review Of Maeve E. Kane's Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, And Exchange Across Three Centuries, Melissa Adams-Campbell
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
A review of Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries, by Maeve Kane
“Strange And Unusual Things”: Teaching The Speculative Fiction Of Margaret Cavendish,
2024
Northern Illinois University
“Strange And Unusual Things”: Teaching The Speculative Fiction Of Margaret Cavendish, E Mariah Spencer
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Margaret Cavendish, a prolific author and natural philosopher, defies categorization with her multifaceted contributions to literature and philosophy. While she is recognized for her groundbreaking work in various academic fields, her literature also resonates within the realms of science fiction, weird fiction, and speculative genres. This essay explores innovative approaches to teaching Cavendish's work, particularly within the realm of speculative literature, using an interdisciplinary lens. Drawing on perspectives including monster theory and the concept of the abject, students are prompted to critically engage with Cavendish's texts. By examining themes such as the monstrous, the supernatural, and the occult, students uncover …
Teaching Margaret Cavendish Through The Lens Of Scientific Anti-Realism,
2024
Villanova University
Teaching Margaret Cavendish Through The Lens Of Scientific Anti-Realism, Kevin Lower
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) only began receiving sustained attention by historians of philosophy in recent decades, but she is being rapidly integrated into the early modern philosophical canon. This essay explores one dimension of teaching Cavendish that presents difficulties for introductory philosophy students: her criticisms of experimental philosophy. Section one explains how I integrate Cavendish into the narrative of my course, identifying both historical and thematic strategies for including her in introductory philosophy courses. Section two describes methods for teaching Cavendish’s natural philosophy and identifies a pedagogical challenge to presenting her criticisms of experimental philosophy. In their first exposure to Cavendish, …
Jumping Pens And Historical Vertigo: Teaching Cavendish In The Twenty-First Century,
2024
National University of Singapore
Jumping Pens And Historical Vertigo: Teaching Cavendish In The Twenty-First Century, Anne M. Thell
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
"Jumping Pens" considers "historical and epistemological vertigo" as a useful pedagogical rubric for teaching the works of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) in contemporary university classrooms. Specifically, it looks back across more than a decade of teaching Cavendish in diverse settings in order to show how exciting this author can be for students who are just starting out in the discipline of literary studies. As this essay argues, Cavendish can make us all better, more self-aware instructors, while also developing critical and historical acumen in our students.
Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part Ii,
2024
Northern Illinois University
Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part Ii, E Mariah Spencer, Tiffany Potter
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830
The Winter 2024 edition of ABO continues the Concise Collections on Teaching series, centering on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), an "also/and" author whose expansive work defies singular categorization. Cavendish’s prolific corpus engages with a wide array of subjects, from materialism and scientific anti-realism to gender, education, and cognition. Her writings bridge both literary and philosophical traditions, blending speculative fiction with critiques of mechanistic science, particularly through her explorations of weird fiction and proto-scientific thought.
