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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"I Want To Know What I'M Looking At": Surveilling Gender As A Response To Cultural Anxieties In Halloween, Sleepaway Camp, And Scream, Jennifer Jacinda Mclawhorn
"I Want To Know What I'M Looking At": Surveilling Gender As A Response To Cultural Anxieties In Halloween, Sleepaway Camp, And Scream, Jennifer Jacinda Mclawhorn
Institute for the Humanities Theses
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate slasher films and how they use gendered tropes to respond to and perpetuate cultural anxieties. The methodology primarily uses textual analysis that includes close attention to content, context, and discourse. The study reveals structural patterns and problems that emerge within slasher films, specifically within the Final Girl trope and the behaviors that govern it. In surveilling the Final Girl’s gender performativity, it is apparent that abjection, or a gut reaction to something that exists between two distinct boundaries or categories, is provoked when the Final Girl crosses a socially established gender boundary. …
He Had Two Women To Die For, Ireland And The Missus”: Mothers As Abject And Sons As Scapegoats In Edna O’Brien’S House Of Splendid Isolation And In The Forest, Emily Nix
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
This thesis examines the protagonists in Edna O’Brien’s In the Forest and House of Splendid Isolation and applies Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. In doing so, I attempt to give a richer understanding of O’Brien’s masculine and feminine characters and how their constructed identities are based on their cultural circumstances and positions in their societies. I use Kristeva’s theory of abjection to analyze the single women in these novels, Eily and Josie, who become metaphorical single mothers by the invasions of young men into their homes. Then, I apply Girard’s theory of the …
"His Head Rolled Forth Onto The Floor:" Women, The Abject, And The Male Gaze In Old English Poetry, Jaime Michelle Myers
"His Head Rolled Forth Onto The Floor:" Women, The Abject, And The Male Gaze In Old English Poetry, Jaime Michelle Myers
Masters Theses
Old English poetry features several female characters who challenge androcentric authority by violently killing men. I argue in this thesis that three of these women—Modthryth, Grendel’s mother, and Judith—are linked together by their rejection or reversal of the male gaze. In their forceful refusal to be visually objectified, each character is portrayed as abject—outside of normal and outcast from community. They cause disorder, illustrate the fragility of androcentric control, and force a confrontation with death. In so doing, they create ambiguity and, at times, reverse the subject/object and masculine/feminine gender binaries.