Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …

Transgender In Neverland: Dysphoria In A Supernatural Anime, Arya Arsenault

Masters Theses

This research asks the question of why the anime Zombie Land Saga has been hailed as positive and progressive transgender representation by international fans. I examine a famous episode in which the character Lily Hoshikawa comes out as transgender in terms of its themes of gender dysphoria and identity. After considering the changing understanding about these concepts in Japan as a result of Gender Identity Disorder, those two themes are suggested as key to popularity. The impact of the “wrong body” narrative created by GID on transgender culture in Japan is considered through personal accounts and commentary on recent changes. …

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationships between capital, cultural production, and creative labor. Essay one theorizes the basis for the intensification of pop music stardom following the introduction of on-demand streaming technology. Prior to the emergence of on-demand streaming, record labels and broadcasters had a mutualistic relationship, wherein the near cost-free music provided by record labels formed the basis for radio broadcasts, which in turn formed the basis for the consumption of that music. Following the emergence of on-demand streaming the mutualistic relationship was ruptured. Broadcasters, in the form of streaming platforms, transitioned to the cost-efficient cultivation of masses of highly …

Espacios En Disputa: Crónica De Desplazamientos Y Reocupación Urbana En El Raval Y El Casc Antic De Barcelona (1964-2014), Elisabet Pallas

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes plays and documentary films that illustrate the forced displacement of urban citizens from Barcelona’s oldest neighborhoods El Raval and El Casc Antic between 1964 and 2014. Grounded on theories from Sociology and Urban and Cultural Studies, the project surveys the various political mechanisms that enforce and legitimize the territorial, cultural, and corporeal expropriations that deploy tactics such as the criminalization of poverty and the passing of local laws restricting the use of public spaces. Through a close analysis of documentaries such as Ciutat Morta (Ortega y Artigas, 2014), El forat (Peña, 2004), En construcción (Guerín, 2001), …

Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …

Bitten By The Demon Of Cinema: An Examination Of Women-Made Horror, Erica Tortolani

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving away from a discussion of horror films directed by men, “Bitten by the Demon of Cinema” those films—and, where appropriate, works across media, like on television, the Internet, and in the visual arts—created by women. As I explore in this dissertation, women-made horror has narrative, thematic, and stylistic qualities that borrow from the genre at large but are then transformed into a class of films all of their own. While seemingly diverse, they share enough commonalities to constitute a new mode of filmmaking altogether. The films and filmmakers that I have chosen in this dissertation are cases in point …

Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir

Doctoral Dissertations

The connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work …

Memory Vague: A History Of City Pop, Jeffrey Salazar

Masters Theses

This thesis gives a definition and chronology of city pop and places it within the context of Japanese history. City pop can be traced from the 1960s folk movement in Japan until its demise in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the bubble economy. This thesis also examines the mid-2010s resurgence of interest in city pop among English-speaking internet users, beginning with a nostalgic rediscovery and curation of city pop around the turn of the century by DJs in Japan known as “crate diggers.” City pop was then transmitted to the West through sampling in hip-hop and especially …

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

The Cunning Little Vixen: A Folktale Illustrated On Stage, Mikayla Reid

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Mikayla Reid to explore how color choice and application within designs can help create storybook characters off the page and onto the stage. This concept is explored through the costume designs for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a production theoretically staged at the Alice Busch Opera Theater for the Glimmerglass Festival in New York. The paper discusses Reid’s attempt to create designs that still feel like watercolor illustrations, even when realized in physical garments. It follows her process as she tests different dye techniques in search for what …

Adapting The Hellmouth In The Office Of The Dead From The Hours Of Catherine Of Cleves: An Experiment In Using A Dramaturgical Approach To Medieval Studies, Tatiana A. Godfrey

Masters Theses

This thesis is an artefact documenting the process of adapting a late medieval painting of hell into a short horror film. The process of adapting the Three Mouths of Hell, housed within the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, serves as an experiment in applying a dramaturgical approach to medieval studies. The process of adaptation and production, informed by critical research about the Hours of Catherine of Cleves and its Three Mouths of Hell, yields new frameworks for understanding the history of Catherine of Cleves, her Book of Hours, and the Three Mouths of Hell.

Aloha Media: Negotiating Kānaka Maoli Representation And Identity In Television, Film, And Music, Colby Y. Miyose

Doctoral Dissertations

In her work on research and Indigenous communities, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) points out that academic research is a site of contestation, struggle, and negotiation between the West and Indigenous people, and lays the groundwork for Indigenous researchers to write from a cultural perspective that serves their home community. Hawaiian cultural protocols serve as guidelines for my research. This dissertation, then, is simultaneously a critique of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and on screen, and as Foucault (1980) puts it, “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” (p.81)—an act of decolonial, Indigenous, and anticolonial thought. In this dissertation I argue that …

Reconstructing The Present/Past: Antimodernism And Early Film Reenactments, Alex W. Bordino

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the cultural history surrounding early film reenactments and elucidates their relationship with modernity. Beginning in the 1890s, motion pictures became part of modern unreality. In a world that seemed increasingly more abstracted from reality, antimodernism emerged in a variety of sectors as a quest toward authenticity. Early film reenactments, despite being ancillary fabrications of real events, aligned with this antimodern sensibility, which would ultimately, and somewhat paradoxically, inform modern culture. The motion picture’s appearance of reality at a cultural moment of modern disillusion, or in some cases outright discontent, formulated a simulated version of reality distinct from …

War Of The Moon, Bibiana Medkova

Masters Theses

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current …

Letting The Body Lead, Amanda Boggs

Masters Theses

Letting the Body Lead is an exhibition and workshop series that focuses on embodiment in social context and invites attendees to engage with the work, both as viewers and active participants. Embodiment in social context refers to the understanding of lived experiences in the body. Within my creative practice, I explore the body's creativity, knowledge, and agency while bridging and brining together the fields of fine arts, movement-based and socially just art making. I believe in the transformative potential of how movement and contemplative practices can support a more liberated way of being both within an individual and, by extension, …

Surrogate Histories: (De)Mythifying The Franco-Female In Transitionary Spain, Christina Beaubien

Doctoral Dissertations

Within the context of Franco Spain, academic scholarship has proven that the regime manipulated collective history via both active remembering and active forgetting in order to construct legitimacy and a national identity. Moreover, much of the regime’s mythology was based on predetermined concepts of gender difference that was exacerbated by the influence of the Catholic church. In this way, what it meant to be female during the Franco dictatorship was a large part of what came to be the nationalized-gender-mythology of the regime, or rather – myths that constructed the Franco-female. On the one hand, the regime constructed mythology …

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Dramaturgical Concerns): Re-Centering Dramaturgy And Comedy As Feminist Tools For Social Change, Shaila Schmidt

Masters Theses

Titled as a play on Mindy Kaling’s 2011 book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), this thesis highlights the obstacles women, the genre of comedy, and dramaturgs face in order to be taken seriously in the arts. Using the work of Mindy Kaling, I explore how she uses comedy as a means of defying the expectations put upon her as an Indian American woman in order to provide context for the ways in which the marginal statuses of women of color and comedy overlap.

In an effort to demonstrate the ways in which comedy can be …

Cinema "Turns": Catalan Creative Documentary, Celia Sainz Delgado

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on four women-directed films as a way to illustrate some characteristics shared by the new Catalan creative documentary: El cielo gira ( The Sky Turns, dir. Mercedes Álvarez, 2004), Nedar (Swim, dir. Carla Subirana, 2008), La plaga (The Plague, dir. Neus Ballús, 2013), and Penèlope (Penelope, dir. Eva Vila, 2018). My aim is to highlight their alternative cinematographic strategies, which stray from the hegemonic discourses of documentary filmmaking. In so doing, I analyze these films from three different angles: the relationship between the filmmaker and the material world; the alternative modalities …

Shopping For Vibrators With My Abuela… #Space #Representation And #Latinidad In @Janethevirgin, Maria Guarino

Masters Theses

Jane the Virgin debuted on the CW in 2014 at a time when anti-immigrant, particularly anti-Mexican and anti-Latinx, sentiment in the U.S. felt very prevalent. This TV show was the latest to offer representations of Latin@s at the forefront and advanced a distinct political stance on immigration by calling for #immigrationreform. The series has not only been a ratings hit amongst the Latinx community, but has garnered wide acclaim from other races, ethnicities, and gender identities across the United States. This thesis explores the representation of the character of Alba (Ivonne Coll), through an investigation of the various physical and …

The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam ( …

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study …

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …

Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses And Star Culture In East Germany, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that multiple stakeholders in East Germany (GDR)—the fans, artists, and state— adapted the star phenomenon to help validate GDR socialist culture at home and abroad, and to bridge seemingly contradictory elements within the dualistic context of the global Cold War: the individual and collective, the ordinary and extraordinary, idealism and reality, the past and present, tradition and progress, East and West. As public figures, GDR stars offered audiences multiple points of identification and helped the enlarged working class navigate its new dominant social position in GDR social life. Officially, stars offered an engaging performance of …

Die Bedeutung Der Defa Film Library Im Ostdeutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs, Konstanze Schiller

Masters Theses

The relation between memory and identity is significant, particularly if an identity-establishing entity such as a state has vanished. In the context of GDR memory, this pertains to the type of memory discourse: what is remembered, how, and by whom? What are the differences in the discourse about East German memory between the US and Germany?

Based on approaches of the Aleida Assmann’s approaches to individual, collective, and cultural memory this thesis seeks to examine the notion and impact of archives in collective memory processes and to analyze the extent to which the medium of film as a concrete and …

Bodies Under Siege: Intersections Of Warfare And Hiv/Aids, Daniel Nevarez Araujo

Doctoral Dissertations

Analyzing works by Juan Goytisolo, Rabih Alameddine, and Derek Jarman, this dissertation studies the similarities of war and AIDS as sensorial experiences socially located and complexly embodied. This study looks at the ways bodies engage with, are affected by, and respond to both war and AIDS, specifically within the AIDS/War Narrative; that is, narrative spaces that foreground both experiences simultaneously. Influenced by Mark Paterson’s notion of felt phenomenology and positioned at the nexus of Comparative Literature, Disability Studies, and Husserlian phenomenology, this dissertation studies texts that exhibit an awareness of the phenomenal characteristics governing the experiences of AIDS and war, …

Brooklyn Bedroom: An Ethnodrama On Female Sexuality, Third World Feminism And Performance Ethnography, Ayshia Stephenson

Doctoral Dissertations

Brooklyn Bedroom is a performance that interrogates societal perceptions of race and sexuality. I have utilized the writing of the performance as my method; the performance is an act of Third World feminist resistance and liberation. Storytelling is the type of research preferred by many black female playwrights. A type of qualitative inquiry, ethnodramatic work forms a bridge between individual stories and social issues affecting society with the goal of socio-political change. The source of reality for this ethnodrama is the Rose family, their history was a catalyst for the writing of Brooklyn Bedroom. I have explored their stories to …

A Multi-Method Analysis Of The Berlin International Film Festival And The World Cinema Fund, Eren Odabasi

Doctoral Dissertations

The functions festivals fulfill within contemporary film culture extend beyond the exhibition and circulation of completed films; many festivals around the world have gradually attained the role of a film producer in the past two decades. This dissertation investigates the relationship between a major film festival and a European program that provides financial support for film production in developing countries. With a particular focus on the World Cinema Fund, associated with the Berlin International Film Festival, this study traces the common stylistic and thematic preoccupations observed across a wide range of Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian films partially financed …

Documental Autoetnográfico De Posmemoria. Una Aproximación Al Pasado Franquista Desde La Perspectiva De Género, Maribel Rams

Doctoral Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation analyzes two autoethnographic documentaries recently produced in the Iberian Peninsula, Inner Memory (2002) by María Ruido and Swimming (2008) by Carla Subirana, where the quest for origins and familial truth constitutes a trope to deal with issues of collective historical memory and national identity. Both authors narrate an unsolved family history within the context of the Spain’s traumatic past: 1) María Ruido’s estrangement from her parents, Galician economic exiles during the years of development; 2) the ghostly presence in Carla Subirana’s family of her grandfather, who was executed in 1940 for being an anti-Francoist guerrilla fighter. My …

I Look To The Ground Beneath My Feet: An Insurgent Performance (Auto)Ethnography, Timothy M. L. Sutton

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a methodological dissertation written as a performance text within a performance paradigm. I use performance (auto)ethnography to turn the researchers’ gaze back on Western systems of knowledge creation. My approach is based on Diversi & Moreira’s (2009, 2016) betweener autoethnographies. While drawing on performance theory, I employ performance principally as my method (Spry, 2011). Within this performance paradigm, (auto)ethnography is a critically reflexive methodology that demands a commitment to embodiment in an ethical symbiosis with representation. This work is located at the intersection of the political, the performative and the pedagogical (Denzin, 2003a). From this center, I turn …