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Sexuality And Textuality (Fall 2014), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

"Sexuality and Textuality" serves as an introduction to gay and lesbian literary studies and queer theory. It looks at questions of sexuality and literature in ancient and early modern texts (from the Hebrew, Greek and English traditions), as well as in modern texts (from German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and English traditions). In addition to literary texts, students will work with a number of cinematic representations of queer sexuality. Besides these primary texts, students will work with important secondary literature about sexuality."

A photo of this Fall 2014 class was taken as part of Professor Bob Tobin's ongoing class photo tradition.

“All Data Is Credit Data,” Or, On Close Reading As A Reciprocal Process In Digital Knowledge Environments, John Hunter

Faculty Journal Articles

The new knowledge environments of the digital age are often described as places where we are all closely read, with our buying habits, location, and identities available to advertisers, online merchants, the government, and others through our use of the Internet. This is represented as a loss of privacy in which these entities learn about our activities and desires, using means that were unavailable in the pre-digital era. This article argues that the reciprocal nature of digital networks means 1) that the privacy issues that we face online are not radically different from those of the pre-Internet era, and 2) …

Reviews Of Thunder: A Film About Ferron, Sarabah, And The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna, Sarah Dougher

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sarah Dougher reviews three films in this issue of Films for the Feminist Classroom: Thunder: A Film about Ferron. Directed by Bitch and Billie Jo Cavallaro; Sarabah. Directed by Maria Luisa Gambale & Gloria Bremer; and The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna. Directed by Sini Anderson.

Colours Of Dementia : A Community Art Facilitation Programme For People With Dementia, Suk Mun, Sophia Law

Research Expression through Art : Visual Studies Faculty

Colours of Dementia was a trial art facilitation programme for dementia care in a community setting led by Prof. Sophia Law, Associate Professor of the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. The programme was supported by the Hong Kong Alzheimer's Disease Association (HKADA) and Art for All. The funding came from Prof. Law's Education for Service-learning Faculty Award (2013) from the Lingnan Foundation.

The programme, which ran from December 2013 to June 2014, consisted of a series of eighteen specially designed creative workshops for 14 elders, aged 59 to 94, who were suffering from mild to advanced dementia. A …

Dit Photo 14 : 2014 Ba Photography Graduate Exhibition, 2014 Ba Photography Graduates

Other

The 2014 BA Photography Graduate exhibition features the photographic projects of fourteen final year students.

In Particularity We Trust:Richard Dutcher's Mormon Quartet And A Latter-Day Saint Spiritual Film Style, Mark Sheffield Brown

Wayne State University Dissertations

Between 2000 and 2008, writer/director Richard Dutcher made four films with narratives focused primarily on members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The films are explicitly Mormon-related in their content, but I argue they are also inherently Mormon in their style. Critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader argues there is a particular style of filmmaking, a dialect of the cinematic language if you will, that enables viewers to experience an encounter with a Transcendent Divinity. The contention of this dissertation is that Schrader's views were simultaneously too general and too narrow. I draw on Clive Marsh's call for …

Troika Of Fortune Tellers, Sophia D. Kalin

Scripps Senior Theses

This film is an oral history about the intergenerational relationship between three women: my grandmother, my mother, and I. Through our connection I explore the Russian traditions that my grandmother has cultivated and shared among the three of us, in particular, the tradition of fortune telling. I also explore my grandmother's struggle with dementia. Although her memory is fading, she can still remember the practice of reading fortunes and that tradition has preserved our bond and her legacy.

Beauty And The Body: Gendered Representations Of The Digitally Altered Image, Lauren Prince

Scripps Senior Theses

This work aims to explore how normalized gender representations in images are heightened through the use of digital manipulation technologies and how that influences a spectator’s relationship both to the image and to their own body. After constructing a theoretical understanding of the ways in which images influence and create a normative beauty ideology, a critical case study analysis of the ways celebrities are photographed and digitally altered provides for a grounding of theoretical material.

Financial Markets And Online Advertising: Reevaluating The Dotcom Investment Bubble, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

While the dotcom period is often dismissed as a false start in the history of the web’s commercial development, it is better conceived of as highly generative of modern structures of online advertising. Soaring investment markets and the developing online advertising sector entered into a pattern of mutual reinforcement that began in 1995 and intensified until the bubble collapsed in 2000, transforming the character of the web in the process. This article sketches the contours of this generative capacity, focusing on the production of demand for online advertising services. Taking the approach of critical political economy, this narrative is contextualized …

Analysis Of Character Translations In Film Adaptations Of Popular Literature, Emmanuel Camarillo

CMC Senior Theses

A brief look at the history of film adaptation studies and its terminology. Character differences between a piece of literature and it's film version are compared in three separate case studies. The film adaptations of a graphic novel, a classic novel, and a play are analyzed on the basis of the changes made to specific characters within their respective stories and the effects of those changes on the overall outcome of the film.

The Rainbow Effect: Exploring The Implications Of Queer Representation In Film And Television On Social Change, Maya S. Reddy

CMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore how specific films and television shows use the preexisting structure and mechanics of narrative film in order to create queer characters and stories that defy their otherness and stereotypes, thus creating a profound cinematic experience. Not only does the manipulation of these structures and mechanics heighten the realism and depth of the narrative at hand, it also enhances audience identification by allowing queer viewers to find themselves and straight viewers to understand the “other.” In this manner, the New New Queer Cinema and television have had lasting effects on the modern gay rights movement, changing …

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone is a conversation of the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s “common sense.”

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “common sense” as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding.” It “is a collective …

The Search For Truth In The Digital Cinematic Space And Green Screen Performances, Kade Dalton

HIM 1990-2015

With the advent of the blockbuster and its visual effects, film has grown to accept these effects and the technology behind them, namely green screen mattes, as cornerstones to the post-production process. The propensity of green screen in all types of productions, especially those involving actors and their performances, raises questions about the methodology and workflow behind its common practice. Using real-life environments and people to create narrative scenes, this project explores the utilization of matte backgrounds to inform the rehearsal and performance aspects of cinematic story-telling.

"Breaking Boundaries" And Exploring Identity In Three Coen Brother Films, Lauren Carey

Senior Theses

"Audiences were first introduced to sibling filmmaking duo Joel and Ethan Coen in 1984 with their debut film Blood Simple. Since then the brothers have experienced considerable commercial and critical success with their 16 films, garnering six Academy Awards wins and more than 30 nominations. Attempts at naming a definitive style or genre or subject matter is a difficult undertaking when it comes to the Coen canon, and yet it seems to be this consistent unpredictability that continues to attract critics and audiences alike. Whatever the styles or genres they are working within or the subject matter of their story, …

Edward Steichen And Hollywood Glamour, Alisa Reynolds

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

As a word, glamour is hard to define, but is instantly recognizable. Its association with Hollywood movie stars fully emerged in the 1930s in the close-up celebrity portraits by photographers like George Hurrell. The aesthetic properties in these images that help create glamour are characterized by the Modernist style, known for sharp focus, high contrast, seductive poses, and the close-up (tight framing). My essay will explore the origins of the visual aesthetics of glamour, arguing that their roots can be found in the still life photographs of the 1910s, produced by fine art photographers such as Edward Steichen. This essay …

Disidentified Masculinities, Jacqueline Hope Freedman

Scripps Senior Theses

My capstone project is a multimedia audio and photography project that creates a conversation about the Millennial Generation’s views of individual identity and masculinity, with the hopes of deconstructing the socially constructed and exclusive notions of masculinity by defining a generation’s common sense.

My piece is inspired by the portraiture of Chad States in Masculinities (2011) as well as Loren Cameron’s work in Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996). The theoretical basis of my project relies heavily on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of common sense as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification. Common sense refers to an instinctual, uncritical and largely …

Magical Me: Self-Insertion Fanfiction As Literary Critique, Melody Strmel

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis examines the traditions of textual interaction that impact the forms of reading engaged in with fanfiction. This thesis continues by exploring how self-insertion fanfiction functions as a medium through which authors express their reading of the text primary through the emotional impact of the text through wish fulfillment, and the interaction of their cultural moment and the text. Furthermore, it argues that self-insertion fanfiction is a mode of literary critique in which the author acknowledges the effect of a mediated world on their perception of self and reality. Through this recognition of a constructed self, the author rejects …

Tasha: A Practice-Based Problematisation Of Australian Comedy Cinema’S Representation Of Gender, Family And Nationhood, Vanessa Barnett

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Between 2007 and 2012, 140 fictional feature films were financed with the assistance of Australian film funding bodies. Of these 140 films, only 31 featured female protagonists and of these 31 films, only 8 were comedies (see Appendix B). These figures show statistically, Tasha, the creative film component of this research project, is not a typical Australian comedy film; it is the story of Tasha, an unemployed girl from Girrawheen in her early twenties, who has lost her sense of identity. As Australian films such as Little Fish¸ Candy, Jedda and Muriel’s Wedding would suggest, this is certainly …

Noir Westerns After World War Ii, Kenneth Estes Hall, Chritian Krug

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: Towards the end of Ethan and Joel Coen's Academy-Award winning No Country for Old Men (2007), Carla Jean Moss's life depends on the toss of a coin. Heads or tails will decide whether she lives or dies.

Women At Work: Working Girl, Disclosure And The Evolution Of Professional Female Stereotypes, Hayley A. Strickland

Scripps Senior Theses

In this analysis, I examine how stereotypes of working women function in some of the most popular film and television shows made in past thirty years. A study of films such as Working Girl and Disclosure and television shows such Ally McBeal and Sex and the City within a second-wave and postfeminist framework ultimately reveals that Hollywood stereotypes of working women have evolved very little and simply become more creatively disguised.

Subscribing To Governmental Rationality: Hbo And The Aids Epidemic, Shayne Pepper

Communication, Media and Theatre Faculty Publications

Between 1987 and 2013, HBO produced or distributed over twenty HIV/AIDS programs. These films trace a cultural shift from an early focus on AIDS as a public health issue to be dealt with through individual “safe-sex” practices and ethical citizenship to a later focus on AIDS as a global pandemic where the explicit strategy becomes a reliance on non-state actors to combat AIDS. This article argues that HBO's HIV/AIDS films are embedded within a cultural approach to AIDS that relies on governmental logics and neoliberal solutions – not direct action, but directing action.

Staying Alive: Dynamic Equivalence Theory And Film Adaptation, Sarah Welch

Honors Projects

Translation is a task that must be done every day in order for the world to function. A perfect translation is impossible, because there is no way to provide exact equivalents of meaning in different languages. However, methods such as dynamic equivalence focus on conveying the message of a text in terms that a new recipient audience can understand. Dynamic equivalence could apply to all textual translations, not just Bible translation. If this is the case, then dynamic equivalence may be applied to adaptations of different types of text, such as book to film adaptations. Film adaptations are popular, largely …

Counter-Narrating The Nation: Homi K. Bhabha's Theory Of Hybridity In Five Broken Cameras, Rachel Evers

Honors Projects

This paper examines the theories of Homi K. Bhabha, a major figure in contemporary post-colonial study. His work on hybridity, mimicry, and counter-narrative helps to illuminate the documentary film Five Broken Cameras, which shows five years in the life of Palestinian farmer, Emad Burnat, under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. The film is shown to be a performative counter-narrative representing Palestinian national becoming.

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

Louisiana-Style Naturalism? Science, Fiction, And Commerce In Duck Dynasty And Swamp People, Elizabeth Emery

Department of World Languages and Cultures Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Learning To Read (Gender): Children’S Animation And The New Heterosexism, Kaelyn Flowerday

Anthós

This paper examines and compares two American animated productions targeting elementary and middle school children, and in doing so aims to elucidate the handling of gender in similar television programs and feature films of the past three decades. These animated works are treated here as a Foucauldian apparatus, one predicated on the force of systematically structured observation, which functions to manipulate power relations in the favor of hetero- and cis-male order. The Disney feature Beauty and the Beast supplies a case for investigating the heterosexist discourses of these contemporary animated media. However, as will be shown, comparatively feminist animated works …

Pathos, Winter 2014, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Kate Marshall

Volume 8 No.2

Knowing And Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, And Adolescent Girlhood In Midcentury American Film, Michael Todd Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Birth Of A Nation's "Story In The Public Square", Regent Nicholas, Arlene J. Nicholas

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

Released in 1915, when the Civil War still occupied a significant portion of the American populace's living memory, The Birth of a Nation is ironically a reconstruction era film that aims to deconstruct the memory of any advances and achievements of that period immediately following the war. Griffith framed the rise of the black person toward equality as being what led to the fall of the white man, specifically the southern white man, in America. In the movie there are baseless depictions of black politicians alternately drinking, sleeping, and putting their bare feet on tables in houses of government.