Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Imagining Gender Euphorias, Willow Wind

Honors College

Our society needs to talk about gender, but we aren’t very good at it. Avoiding these discussions has harmful impacts on body image and various health disparities (The Trevor Project, 2020). What if we have better and regular conversations about ways we can positively experience gender? This study’s model of negotiating gender can be used by families and educators seeking affirming exploratory learning opportunities. Insights into meanings of gender euphoria help validate diverse sets of experiences, informing a broader cultural discourse that increasingly questions gender binarism (Griffin, 2020).

This study explores conceptualizations and enactment of gender euphoria across demographics and …

Speak For Yourself: Examining Subjectivity And Trauma In American Literary Journalism, Nathaniel Poole

Honors College

Due to their relevance and emotional draw for readers, stories of tragedy and suffering are a nearly inescapable aspect of journalism. However, the routine reporting and formulaic styles associated with coverage of these events has contributed to audience compassion fatigue. Studies have been done on the success of some journalists who have historically pushed the boundaries of style and deployed literary strategies to elicit emotion and subvert compassion fatigue in their reporting. However, there is more room in the scholarship on this subject for studies of the specific strategies that contemporary literary journalism writers use and how they adapt them …

An Examination Of Pervasive Language Around Sexual Harassment Through The Lens Of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, And #Metoo, Elizabeth Theriault

Honors College

This thesis explores the hypothesis that the #MeToo Movement and Twitter have contributed to the changes in language used by individuals to describe sexual harassment and the survivors that come forward with their stories. To do so, this thesis identified common themes derived from language used in New York Times articles published during the Hill and Thomas hearings of 1991, as well as Tweets published between the dates surrounded the Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh hearings, September 25, 2018 and September 29, 2018, to create a comparable platform for language used in similar settings 27 years apart. It contains a literature …

“Things Are Going To Get A Lot Worse Before They Get Worse”: Humor In The Face Of Disaster, Politics, And Pain, Sierra Semmel

Honors College

From the Holocaust and slavery victims to medical professionals to firefighters, coping humor has been used throughout history even in the darkest of times. While it is common among victims of unfavorable situations, it is also utilized by late-night television shows to package the news of the day in a format that both addresses the issues and eases the emotions surrounding them. This thesis critically analyzes selected clips from late night shows and sketch comedy surrounding three different news events: Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Confirmation Hearings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and Hurricane Sandy. By studying a political event, a domestic terrorist …

Inanna: A Modern Interpretation, Erin Butts

Honors College

Sumer has a culture lost to history. Currently, the University of Maine offers no courses about ancient Mesopotamia, one of the first civilizations. Over the years, historians have been translating the cuneiform tablets containing their religion and history. There has been one adaptation of those translations, by Diane Wolkstein in 1983 to bring the stories to a wider audience through a collection of stories around the goddess Inanna. Wolkstein’s Inanna is a second wave feminist icon but reliant on an essentialist idea of womanhood. This thesis seeks to broaden her audience, analyze the context in which Wolkstein produced her adaptation, …

Ideologies Of Empire: Perpetuating Imperial Culture Through Definitive British Literature Of The Congo, Shelby Lynne Hartin

Honors College

The Congo reform campaign in Britain was the largest humanitarian movement in British Imperial politics during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The texts used in this analysis emerged from the conflict and attempted to make sense of the atrocities committed against the people of the Congo Free State.

This analysis examines the impact of imperial ideology on the subjects of empire. It uses the texts of three authors, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, and E.D. Morel, analyzing the literary underpinnings of imperial culture. It utilizes theoretical frameworks through which this literature can be understood and considers three manifestations of …

Fan-Funded Film: How Audience Participation Is Shaping The Future Of Motion Pictures, Renee E. Moody

Honors College

A look at intellectual property rights in the Internet Age. Fan-Funded Film examines the omnipresent issue of piracy and the financial strategy of crowdfunding. Both have existed in film for decades, but have increased dramatically in recent years. Through the use of several theories and real life examples, I explore the problem of piracy's popularity and how audience participation through crowdfunding could be the answer.