Digital Commons Network^™

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Queer-Keying: Performing Video Processes As [Trans]Gressive Resistance, Wren Tiffany

Theses and Dissertations

As part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I transformed the 'Sponge' gallery on the top floor of The Anderson, VCU’s historic thesis exhibition home, into The Green Room, a neon green, immersive video and performance space featuring mirrors, disco lights, a foam tile dance floor, makeup stations, and a functioning green-screen editing suite. This hybrid drag rehearsal and ‘Chroma-key’ green video production room deepened both my understandings of Queer performance art and process-based art making during the Spring of 2025, through two public performance activation …

Strange World, Brooklin Grantz

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis work explores the intersections of masculine and feminine labors as they relate to the structure of domestic space. I utilize materials and processes akin to craft, construction and architecture, and domicile upkeep, noting what is shared between gendered and polarized fields while exploring uses of the grid in various instances as a structure to adhere to and antagonize: a binary. Highlighting the queerness and fluidity of materials and the similarities between seemingly disparate processes, I relate to the objects I make and alter through my own gender fluidity. I do not see masculinity or femininity as autonomous: the …

A New Normal: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Gender Complexities In Los Angeles Social Justice Theatre Storytelling, Sue Hamilton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study uses autoethnography to examine the role gender plays in Los Angeles social justice theatre storytelling. Chronicling my autoethnography as a queer, nonbinary artist and social justice theatre practitioner, I will examine gender through the context of my social justice theatre company, Artists Rise Up Los Angeles (ARULA), by analyzing selections of its original, politically focused, professional stage plays performed from 2017 to 2019, utilizing ARULA’s emerging themes of gender expression and inclusion. ARULA was born out of a determination to create original social justice theatre storytelling to understand and transform reality by bringing theatrical expression to the environment …

Intersectionality And The Canon Of Romanticism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses the origins of the canon and the place it has in British Romanticism studies both past and present. This research begins unpacking what has already been done in this sector of study and takes it steps further by the use of Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” theory. The “Introduction” unpacks past scholarly work and its role in the present studies and how we must move beyond the past. “Chapter I” serves as a historical breakdown of the canon’s role and impact in both literary studies and Romanticism studies in specific. “Chapter II” provides an in depth analysis of two major …

Lady Macbeth's Maternity And Morality, Lauren Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which adaptations of Lady Macbeth from the seventeenth century to modern day have functioned to vilify or redeem Lady Macbeth based on her connection with her maternity as well as on the contextual, cultural, and political opinions surrounding both a woman’s place in society and the importance of maternity. This thesis examines William D’Avenant’s 1674 stage adaptation of Macbeth, Han Tae-Sook’s 1998 stage adaptation Lady Macbeth, and Lisa Klein’s 2009 novel adaptation Lady Macbeth’s Daughter to capture a range of cultures and the evolution of the character.

Apocalyptic Technical Communication From Clockface To Briefcase: Revealing The Spurious Coin Of Nuclear-Security Rhetoric, Ryan Cheek

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

This article the Doomsday Clock and the Nuclear Football as interconnected technical communication artifacts that function as two sides of a "spurious coin" in the securitization of nuclear deterrence. While the Clock externalizes existential risk through apocalyptic rhetoric, the Football internalizes it within exclusive military command structures—together legitimizing perpetual nuclear crisis. Drawing on technical communication scholarship and critical security studies, the analysis argues that both artifacts sustain nuclearist ideology by reinforcing deterrence as common sense. The Clock's ominous countdown and the Football's ever-present launch capability are mutually validating and together normalize nuclear brinkmanship as the price of global security.

Recasting Gender Roles: The New Woman And The New Man In Women-Centred Contemporary Malayalam Films, Roshan B. Karimpaniyil, Shashikantha Koudur

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article examines the representation of gender roles in select women-centred contemporary Malayalam films. It attempts to expand on the idea of the “new Indian woman” and develop a concept of the “new Indian man.” The new Indian woman is a byproduct of the cultural metamorphosis caused by liberalisation, while the new Indian man could be understood as the product of modern culture’s attempt to undermine traditional masculinity. By analysing the movies Biriyaani (2020), The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), Aanum Pennum (2021), and Sara’s (2021), as well as the short films Memories of a Machine (2016), Freedom @ Midnight (2021), …

Book Review: Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, And War Cinema In Bangladesh, Masrufa Nusrat

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

Exploring The Shadows: How Taylor Swift's Music Embodies Dark Sound As A Popular Music Artist, Kristyn E. Cole

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

To challenge the conceptual matter of “dark sound”, this major research paper centers around the popular music artist, Taylor Swift to demonstrate an overarching feminist wisdom in an alternative style of music to identify how Taylor Swift presents and embodies qualities of “dark sound”. Research done by D. Ferrett, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes and Paul C. Jasen are used to examine her popular music, and its intersections and influence on our culture and society. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, this research paper discusses three of Swift’s songs; “willow” (evermore, 2020) for her sound, All Too Well: The Short …

The Progressive Potential Of The Horror Arg: A Digital Ethnographic Analysis Of Instagram Account Sabrinamiller230, Matthew N. Wiebe

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are transmedia games that exist and operate utilizing a number of digital communication platforms. These games see players employing their digital literacy skills in order to solve narrative puzzles and craft theories with other ARG players – through engaging with the alternate reality fiction presented to them. sabrinamiller230 is a horror themed ARG that takes the appearance of an Instagram profile and presents players with a speculative alternate reality world featuring an alien who critiques humanity’s many injustices. This research paper seeks to address a key problem regarding the lack of digital ethnographic studies of ARG …

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 …

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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.

Photo-Feminists: The Inter-Textual Discussion Of Eighteenth-Century Periodical Frontispieces, Karenza Sutton-Bennett

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The visual afterlife of the two frontispieces from the first volume of Eliza Haywood’s periodical, The Female Spectator (1744-46) promotes the argument that middling women should be allowed to learn the same proto-disciplinary topics that men studied by representing how women could include both amusements and informal learning in between their duties as wives and mothers. The Female Spectator’s frontispiece, the emblem to Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-56), the frontispiece to Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) and the 1789 frontispiece to The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1847) have the common element of the image of Minerva to visually continue the …

The Sounds Of Madame Geoffrin’S Salon, Melanie Conroy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Salons were core institutions of the eighteenth-century European social calendar, especially in Paris. Literary performances and philosophical conversation were the core activities of many of these gatherings. What did conversation and literary readings actually sound like at these events? To what extent were voices audible to everyone in the room, or too muffled or far away to be heard? What was the impact of the ambiance or of ephemeral sound on the reading or reception of the hearing? Using textual descriptions, paintings, and architectural information, I reconstruct two legendary readings of eighteenth-century texts, Voltaire’s L’Orphélin de la Chine and Marmontel's …

Simulating An Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Salon: Embodied Experience And Scholarly Investigation, Jennifer M. Jones

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This paper reflects on my experience simulating an 18th-century French salon for an academic conference and in an undergraduate classroom. I argue that simulating a salon is heuristically as well as pedagogically useful and allows historians to test hypotheses about the nature of the salon and the role of the salonnière proposed by scholars such as Dena Goodman and Antoine Lilti. The essay also engages with some of the important insights gained from feminist and performance theory regarding historical reenactment. Thus I caution against naive attempts to reenact the past and instead suggest practices that foster open-ended conversations about the …

Compulsory Heterosexuality And Regulatory Hegemony In English Textbooks, Angelika Mae N. Balingasa

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Gender representations are crucial in textbooks given that these instructional materials are integral and widely-acknowledged in the field of education. However, despite various efforts to circumvent gender inequalities, textbooks still remain as conduits for proliferating gender biases and heteronormativity. In this study, secondary English textbooks were examined and sequential explanatory research design was used to investigate how genders were demonstrated in the textbooks through the lens of gender performativity theory. The findings revealed that the textbooks adhered to historical gender conventions, as opposed to genders’ fluid and contingent nature. Additionally, all of the textbooks promote hegemonic masculinity with men dominating …

Good For Her: Catharsis And Empowerment In Contemporary Literature, Jessica Lynn Vaught

Online Theses and Dissertations

A recent trend in readership within online discourse communities is the emergence of the genre called “Good for Her,” which contains themes of transgression beyond traditional expectations of socially acceptable feminine behavior by situating revenge arcs to celebrate actions that otherwise would have been perceived as reprehensible. The emergence and popularity of the genre in the post-2016 sociopolitical climate in the United States reflects the demand for marginalized communities to see versions of themselves represented in texts in which the protagonist avenges herself in the face of patriarchal oppression. The genre stems from canonical literary tropes also created in the …

Ballroom: An Exploration Of Queer Survival And Self-Sufficiency, Jet Mezini

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

The AIDs epidemic and its disinformation alienated queer people from U.S culture. As a result, queer people, especially queer people of color, began meeting together to express their self-made culture, a series of competitions among themselves, the underground scene of “ballroom.” Ballroom reveled in self-awareness and bordered on satire, being inspired by Western standards that were unable to be applied to a queer populous. This essay will analyze these cultural norms, understanding how they served as methods of reclamation for queer people, and how ballroom evolved to reflect social progression.

Women’S Employment In Croatia From A Historical Perspective, Ljubica Kordic, Višnja Lachner, Dubravka Papa

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article analyzes the employment of women in the city of Osijek, the fourth biggest city in the Republic of Croatia, using a diachronic approach. The paper’s main goal is to analyze the social position of women in Croatia in relation to employment and their right to work and to examine whether that position has changed in the last two centuries. As exact and reliable historical data are limited, the authors analyzed job announcements and employment offers relating to women in two local newspapers in Osijek. The newspapers were printed from 1870 to the 1930s in the German language, which …

Diverse Possibilities Of Shakespeare: Teaching Twelfth Night Through A Queer Lens, Julia Ritzler

Honors Projects

This project seeks to understand the ways in which Queer Theory can be applied to secondary language arts education to enhance students' understanding of identity and gender in literature. For the purposes of this project, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is being used as a case study text. This project includes a thorough analysis of Twelfth Night through a queer lens, a literature review of Queer Theory and educational pedagogy, a block plan and related instructional and assessment materials, a rationale for the block plan, and project limitations and implications for future research. By analyzing scholarly texts and applying the theories within …

Challenging The Glass Ceiling: Gender And Identity In Kanan Devi’S My Homage To All (2013), Raju Rana, Lipika Kankaria, Sutanuka Banerjee

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper deals with the Bengali stage and screen actor Kanan Devi’s autobiography titled Shobarey Aami Nomi (originally published in 1973) which was translated as My Homage to All (2013) and tries to analyse the concept of glass ceiling in terms of her myriad experiences over the course of her career. The paper situates the transitions taking place in the 1920s and 1930s in the cinematic space and the emergence of female actors in the public sphere. Against this background, the paper attempts to examine how Kanan Devi defied the prevalent patriarchal set up of the theatres and studios and …