Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Urban Space, Genre And Subjectivity In African And Latin American Cinema, Matthew Marcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project studies twelve African and Latin American films from a range of eras and countries, with an emphasis on their treatment of urban space, their manipulation of genre elements, and their approaches to character subjectivity. The analysis draws on major works of urban theory by Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Jane Jacobs, and others in order to investigate the relationship between cinema and the urban experience. As the films in the study are mostly set in cities that are not discussed by the theorists, the analysis entails testing their theories against the realities of these other settings, as …

Camp Is Undead(?): Queer Vampire Becoming In The Age Of Nonconformity, Maelcom Thayer

Periclean Honors Forum Scholar Award Winners

Beginning from their establishment in Gothic literature, vampires have always represented the Other: people of color, Jews, sex workers, and queers have always inhabited the illegibility of the vampire. By taking on this label through identifying with representations of the vampire in film, there’s a potential for the transformation of a subject that allows for retooling kinship, embracing non-normative forms of being, and existing beyond thresholds of static identity. Employing the philosophy of becoming posited by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I argue that analyzing the figure of the queer vampire through its transformative, ‘becoming’ potential both problematizes and reinforces …

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

De Médée À La Sorcière : Reconstruction D’Un Mythe Par Michelet, Caroline Strobbe

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

In La Sorcière, Jules Michelet uses the strength and the myth of the Medea character, which had already fascinated Corneille. In the second part of his work, Michelet creates nominative witches after authentic texts. In the first part, he creates an allegoric witch on the Medea model: the Woman, a victim of arbitrariness, injustice and repression, rises up against her oppressors, figuring the march of Humanity towards Enlightenment and Liberty. The analogies between the Witch and Medea are therefore numerous and necessary, since they help to render the defense of the oppressed against the oppressor. Would the somber Medea, …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

It's A Match: Shaadi.Com, Tinder, And The Fantasy Of Frictionless-Ness, Purvi Rajpuria

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In this essay I carry out case studies of Shaadi.com and Tinder to unpack the cultural principles underlying the apps that shape our interpersonal relationships today. I demonstrate that these apps are grounded in a fantasy of frictionless-ness, or the desire to shield the self from discomfort caused by external factors, and argue that this is a fraught cultural ideal. My analysis reveals that a fantasy of frictionless-ness gives birth to a cultural landscape of rampant subjectivity and tepid morality, which hampers our ability to form deep and meaningful connections with each other. Recognising the flaws of such a fantasy, …

Prosthetic Traveling Companions, Carrie Keasler

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the potential for narrative art (film, literature, comics) to be a transformative experience in the life of the consumer (viewer, reader) through a sensuous, embodied interaction with that work of narrative art. Drawing from film, narrative and comics theory as well as primary sources, I show that there is potential for consumers to engage in reading and viewing in an embodied way that allows them to take on these experiences as new memories, highlighting the ability of art to engage our senses in a manner that is similar to everyday lived experiences. In contrast with some theories …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Nnuba 0h47min/Couleur. Réalisatrice : Sonia At Qasi-Kessi, Farida Aït Ferroukh

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, School of Art, Art History and Design

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

The Wolves' Teeth, Abigail Moore

Honors College Theses

This is a Neo-Noir screenplay examining the femme fatale, mental illness, and the Noir male protagonist.

Playing Through Life, Death, And Grief In Fortnite And Elden Ring, Jasper Lynn

Self-Determined Majors Final Projects

This paper analyzes the cultural processes of grief and death practiced in Fortnite and Elden Ring in relation to the military history of the countries in which these games were produced. This close reading utilizes a methodology of media archaeology, visual studies, and liveness theory to analyze the affordances and regional practices present in these games and argue their design and consumption is haunted by the military histories of the United States and Japan respectively. As a result, Fortnite and Elden Ring are demonstrated to function as local sites of grief and mourning in relation to the opposing relationships with …

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Cause Branding Lizzo And The Body Positivity Movement, Natalie Pesqueira

Whittier Scholars Program

Known for her songs about self love and acceptance, Lizzo has become a body positive icon and a role model for so many people with larger bodies since her rise to fame. This paper is an analysis of Lizzo’s place in the current body positive moment as a fat, Black woman and the ways in which she has been forced to participate in fat activism and fat resistance due to her identity. This paper will also analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s shapewear brand Yitty is branded– is it positive inclusion or is it a case of cause branding?

Review Of Tolkien (Movie), Kutter Callaway

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of Tolkien, by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, directed by Dome Karukoski, starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins. Century City, California: Fox Searchlight, 2019.

Review Of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story Of C. S. Lewis (Movie), James A. Motter

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C. S. Lewis, by Max MacLean, directed by Norman Stone, starring Max MacLean and Nicholas Ralph. New York City, NY: Fellowship for Performing Arts, 2021, 1 hr., 13 min.

Balancing Multiple Worlds: The Multiverse And The Fractured Asian American Experience In Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Austin Kang

Film Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) employs the philosophical ideas concomitant with the multiverse hypothesis in order to narrate an emotionally poignant, yet somewhat typical story about a multi-generational Asian American family. This thesis argues that the film uses its characters as vehicles to not only illustrate the multilayered nature of Asian American realities through the allegory of “auto verse-jumping” across the multiverse, but also to philosophically contemplate and respond to the existence of the multiverse via its presentation of conceptual parallels. The film employs the hypothetical existence of the …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

The Rape-Revenge Genre In The Digital Age Of Heightened Visibility: The Rise Of Female Storytellers And Fourth-Wave Feminism, Marynell Dethero

Film Studies (MA) Theses

The rape-revenge cinema genre has continued to evolve since its initial emergence in the 1970s. Many of the most popular films belonging to the genre produced in the 1970s, like Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or Wes Craven’s directorial debut The Last House on the Left (1972), have been criticized heavily by film critics and scholars for their exploitative tropes. However, I argue that regardless of the production value of the films, the rape-revenge genre is inherently feminist because sexual violence is and always has been an inherent issue to the feminist movement and because the genre …

The Gray Area: Sexuality And Gender In Wartime Reevaluated, Natalie Pendergraft

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

These three works, two academic papers and one screenplay, challenge traditional notions of gender and sexuality during wartime. Queer Vietnam service members did not all experience oppression, all the time, but rather carved out a space for themselves amongst their peers. Female nurses in the early cold war could keep their careers in the medical field due to its unique gendered history despite demobilization efforts across the country in different industries. Finally, through the medium of historical fiction, a Civil War soldier’s fears and desires are questioned as he experiences the phenomenon of the Angel’s Glow, a blue light that …