Arts and Humanities Commons^™

False Spring, Tobias Wray

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores queer kinship and masculinity in an extended poetic sequence. The speakers of these poems attempt to understand the ways that family shapes our sense of gendered identity, particularly how masculinity is constructed and perpetuated through a history of gendered violence in western culture. Investigating the shame of failed masculinity and unsanctioned identity through a range of aesthetic positions, these poems interrogate the tradition of English language poetry as a space where masculinity is both blurred and reinscribed.

In three sections, the collection considers the relationship between paternity and patriarchy, and how queer identity offers alternative aesthetic positions …

Shame, Darwin, And Other Victorian Writers, Aaron Khai Han Ho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation explores shame and how shame shapes identities in the nineteenth century. While many scholars examine Darwin in terms of narrativity, how he attempts to counter the theological language in Victorian evolutionary discourses, and the influences he has on his contemporary writers, I argue that his writing on shame, which is part of his long argument on evolution, secularizes the concept of shame, opposing the notions of many Victorians that shame is God-given. Both God-given shame and secular shame are rooted in sexuality, as this dissertation will show, and thus shame, sexuality, and identity are interconnected. Using Darwin as …

Charlotte Charke’S Gun: Queering Material Culture And Gender Performance, Jade Higa

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

This essay juxtaposes readings of material culture and gender performance in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). It argues that the transient relationship Charke has to the objects in her life mirrors the fluidity of her gender. The essay ultimately uses Charke’s narrative as a case study in a questioning of a binarized gender matrix. The thesis suggest that, though we lack language to fully describe it, characters and historical figures like Charke move beyond and explode gender binaries.

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Considering The Body: Sexual Agency And Material Selfhood In Alex As Well, Karlie Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the tensions between intersex embodiment and trans* identity, intersex children and their parents, and the intimacies that come out of these relationships – which, I argue, are ultimately queer. Using queer, trans*, and intersex theory, as well as feminist new materialisms, I highlight the ways in which the imbrications of the material and the symbolic are presented in Alyssa Brugman’s contemporary Young Adult novel, Alex as Well. The goal of this analysis is to encourage a separation from binary thinking and explore the possibility of nonbinary identifications in literature – more specifically, literature with intersex …

Transcendence Of Familial Expectations In Alison Bechdel’S Graphic Novels, Anna Priore

Honors Projects

This thesis focuses on the graphic novels "Are You My Mother?" and "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel. I discuss the ways in which Bechdel highlights her own family’s atypical structure and how the ambiguous presentation of familial roles causes readers to see that being in a “queer” family is actually ordinary, just as being in an “ordinary” family is queer.

Queer Affect In T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry, Michael Houle

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.