Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

A Century In Uniform: Military Women In American Films, Introduction, Stacy Fowler, Deborah A. Deacon

Faculty Articles

From silents of the early American motion picture era through 21st century films, this book offers a decade-by-decade examination of portrayals of women in the military. The full range of genres is explored, along with films created by today's military women about their experiences.

Laws regarding women in the service are analyzed, along with discussion of the challenges they have faced in the push for full participation and of the changing societal attitudes through the years.

Through Her Eyes: The Gendering Of Female First-Person Shooters, Elizabeth Renshaw

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

While the video game industry has attempted to address their years of mistreatment towards women, within games and how they are produced, by hiring more women and including more female characters as playable options, these fixes have been superficial at best. Not only are there still few females as main characters in video games, but that there are so few female video games. By this I refer to the fact that video games told through the eyes of female characters often do not feature a gendered narrative, unlike multiple games with male POVs in which the storyline directly reflects their …

The Evolution Of Revenge: Genre, Feminist Theory And Jennifer’S Body, Sophia Birks

Capstone Showcase

The representation and proliferation of violence against women in media, when applying genre theory, reflects the social climate of rape culture and the social response to sexual violence. Looking at the Rape-Revenge genre through the scope of Feminist Theory, the only way to reintroduce female agency into a trauma led narrative is to reclaim the tropes used to perpetuation female exploitation and a popular culture ambivalent to male on female violence. Within this subversion and deconstruction, a genre benefiting from female trauma finally includes an honest artistic retelling of that female experience. With the intention of the creator in line …

Enduring The Unendurable: Examining Cultural Trauma In Postwar Japanese Film, Joseph Worstall

Capstone Showcase

WWII and its aftermath fundamentally changed the collective consciousness of the Japanese people. For the first time in history, and at a tremendous cost, the country was vanquished. By the end of the war, sixty-seven cities had been firebombed, three million people had been killed, and millions more found themselves suffering from poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Most controversially, the USAAF dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—two acts which have been so universally condemned that they’ve never been repeated. For the next seven years, the U.S. armed forces occupied the country and charted its course, effectively operating …

Habermas, The Public Sphere, And Wikileaks: The Public Sphere And The Right To Know, Mary Murray

Capstone Showcase

Jürgen Habermas, a German theorist, coined the public sphere as a place where citizens could interact, study, and debate issues together outside the realm of the home or family, which was defined as the private sphere. The public sphere can also be seen as a “manifestation of citizen sovereignty”. At its core, Habermas centered the public sphere around feudalism and the shift of one all-powerful individual reigning and representing the public to those citizens under the control of the state. Some critics argue voices encouraging the minorities were actually private voices leaking into the public sphere, while others argue the …

Race Book, Robert Dejesus

Theses and Dissertations

Race Book is a satiric animated short film about how social media influenced people during the 2020 presidential election.

Hear For You: Engaging With Vocal Authority And Vulnerability Through Podcasting, Rowen Light-Wills

Scripps Senior Theses

Through applications of literary and film theory, cultural analysis, and historical context this thesis project will deconstruct the text of the physical and metaphorical gendered voice. The podcast medium allows for exploration of the physical voice in a spontaneous format, which makes it the ideal platform for hosting conversations between college-aged students that examine cultural conceptions of the voice. Focusing primarily on the feminized[1] voice as a site of cultural tension, participants can tell the story of their voices, talking about experiences that have shaped their auditory self-perception. The work of this project is to demonstrate that the medium …

"A Performing Artist's Journey...Begins" (Senior Showcase), Jennifer Boswell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

As a Theatre major, my sponsor and I decided that my Honors Research Project would be a one-person, twenty-minute performance. Originally, this showcase was going to be a live theatre event. Due to coronavirus and social distancing, I had to adjust and adapt as I transformed my piece into a virtual performance.

In choosing the content that would be performed, I carefully selected pieces that represented my journey as a performing artist the past four years. I wanted to showcase my growth and range as a performer. I chose one monologue from each of the six MainStage Theatre productions I …

Brothers, Sing On: The Story Of Nuance, Kyle Reynolds

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For this project, I have elected to create a documentary detailing the chronological history of the University of Akron’s all-male contemporary pop a Cappella group, Nuance. The Documentary is titled: “Brothers, Sing On: the Story of Nuance” as a reference to the song “Brothers, Sing On!” by Edvard Grieg, and was named such because of the theme of brotherhood I have showcased in the documentary. I have been a member of Nuance since the Spring Semester of 2018 and have served as the president of the group since Spring Semester 2019. Nuance was founded in 2004, making it one of …

The Reel Truth: The Importance Of Historical Accuracy In Film, Kyle A. Jenkins

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

The first goal of this project is to build a case that historical accuracy in film is an especially important criteria when teaching using film, and that educators and their students should be able to discuss any historical inaccuracies in a way that does not diminish enjoyment of the film. Aside from students, there should also be an expectation from the general populous that when a film claims to be historically accurate its inaccuracies should not be harmful to the overall conversation. Secondly, this project will attempt to build criteria for critiquing and analyzing a film based on balanced criteria …

Hear Me Roar, Abigail R. Seethoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.

Boutique Branding: Televisually Signifying The Feminine Business-Owner, Payton Blakney

Masters Theses

While women-owned businesses continue to grow, increasing 58 percent from 2007 to 2018 (Guidant Financial, 2019),producing on-brand communication content remains a challenge. Adding to the challenge, this branded communication must combat the societal narrative that women are less capable of running a business than men and utilize the complex mode of televisual storytelling. The purpose of this creative thesis was to incorporate the work of woman television producers and writers from the comedy-drama genre with semiotics theory to create five webisodes of branded entertainment that married the contradictory sign systems of woman and business owner. By analyzing and implementing the …

Minority Representations In Crime Drama: An Examination Of Roles, Identity, And Power, Megan E. Chatelain

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The storytelling ability of television can be observed in any genre. Crime drama offers a unique perspective because victims and offenders change every episode increasing stereotypes with each new character. In other words, the more victims and criminals observed by the audience, the more likely the show creates the perception of a mean world. Based on previous literature, three questions emerged which this study focused on by asking the extent of Criminal Minds’ ability to portray crime accurately compared to the Federal Bureau of Investigations Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the Behavioral Analysis Unit’s (BAU-4) report on serial murderers and …

Internalizing Data Collection: Personal Analytics As An Investigation Of The Self, Neal R. Swisher

Theses and Dissertations

Personal analytics, aka self-tracking, is the practice of using a digital device to track aspects of behavior, such as exercise habits, heart rate, sleep patterns, location, diet, and a host of other data points. This dissertation is an exploration of “self” in self-tracking, informed by theories of subjectivity, autonomy, power and knowledge. As a technological intervention, self-tracking devices change how we experience our own body and behavior. They also serve as methods to digitize human behavior. This data is combined with other data and processed using computational methods. Self-tracking devices are both personal and bureaucratic. They are devices used for …

‘Not Shap’D For Sportive Tricks:’ Representations Of Disability In Film And Digital Broadcast Cinema Adaptations Of Early Modern Drama, Grace Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In films that feature disability, we see the recursive and discussion-limiting impulse to say “this representation is negative. Therefore, the representation should not be seen,” based on critical theories and methodologies outside the purview of film studies. Unfortunately, the overlay of an English, narratological, sociological, or medical methodology and terminology onto a film representation of disability is ultimately recursive and self-limiting; critical and advocate calls for accuracy to the lived experience of people with disabilities in on-screen representations decline to engage with the visual construction of cinematic representations of disability and the often fascinating cinematographic and thematic patterns that emerge …

Traumatized Characters In Traumatized Environments: A Look At Repression And Horror, Rebecca L. Goldman

Scripps Senior Theses

Using Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘return of the repressed’ as a theoretical basis, this paper takes a case study approach using three critically acclaimed horror films. These films include Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1974), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). With use of each film, the interaction between the repressed trauma of the protagonists’ and the film environment is explored, utilizing the notion that repressed trauma will always manifest itself as a symptom of the unconscious mind. Supporting theories include Slavoj Zizek’s notion that dreams must be read in terms of their form, stemming from …

Film Review: Operation Finale, Melanie O'Brien

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, undertook an operation in Argentina to capture the architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, and bring him to Israel to stand trial. Operation Finale [Chris Weitz, 2018] tells the story of this intelligence operation: the actions of and challenges for the agents involved, in a way that captures the banality of Eichmann’s personality before it was put on show for the world to see in his televised trial. Operation Finale is available on Netflix, rendering it a Holocaust film with an extraordinarily large reach.

Shared Resources (Contractual Obligations), Jordan Lord

Theses and Dissertations

Shared Resources (Contractual Obligations) is a feature-length documentary that seeks to understand how various kinds of debt––emotional, historical, moral, social and financial––are entangled in my family. After my dad was fired from his job as a debt collector, my parents declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy––a 5-year debt repayment plan. The film follows my parents over the course of their bankruptcy, joining observational footage of their day-to-day lives with essayistic voiceover narration, my parents’ reactions to an early edit of the film, my family members’ and my own audio descriptions of what is visible in the film, and open captions of the …

The Barriers Of Reporting Wage Theft, Jose Cardoso

Capstones

Undocumented immigrants are often victims of wage theft. There are many owners who take advantage of this because they know they won't speak up out of the fear of retaliation. However, there have been moments when immigrants have spoken up and received justice. Unfortunately, that's not the case for many as the process to report wage theft can take time and sometimes for nothing. New York City is home to 3.2 million immigrants or 37.1 percent of the population and the undocumented community stands at 5.3 percent.

https://medium.com/@cardoso.jose17/the-barriers-of-reporting-wage-theft-for-undocumented-immigrants-38aafb937215

Maternidad, Denise Cervantes

Capstones

It was a hot summer day in 1985 when my mother, Ada Reyes, left El Salvador and crossed the border into the United States. Behind her, she left her one-year-old son and a war-stricken country. I sat down with her and she told me the story of how she built a life in the United States and raised my brother and me alone as a single mother.

Link: https://denisecervantes.com/capstone