American Studies Commons^™

The Crisis Of Chad: Men’S Rights Movements And Contemporary Anti-Feminism, Kendrick Zapata

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis analyzes the relationship between the modern incel and manosphere movement, and its historical legacies in anti-feminist discourses in late 20th century men's rights movements. The manosphere is a collection of online videos, forums, blogs, and websites dedicated to raising awareness or promoting masculinist philosophies. Incels in particular are individuals that understand their lack of sexual interaction as inherent, and often interact in digital spaces with others. Incel beliefs range from calling for the reversal of women’s rights, to seeking advice on self-improvement forums that offer advice to young men seeking to improve their physique through diet and exercise. …

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

From Civil Liberties To Social Contract Theory: Hobbes' And Locke's Influence On The Early American Republic, Evan A. Krasner

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………………..4

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes………...18

III. Textbook Critique……………………………...31

IV. New Textbook Entry…………………………...33

V. Bibliography………………………………….....35

Baby Boomer Female Identity In The Literature Of White Women Writers, Ashley Diedrich

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the critical conversation on American women's fiction by examining the works of American female Boomer authors and their representations of white female identity in Boomer literature. The texts included in this study range from 2004 to 2018, offering several recent years of perspective on Boomer women. Because these books are current, few, if any, scholarly articles focus on them and their contribution to American literature, allowing this dissertation to create new theories and connect to pre-existing ideas, such as ageism. In addition, this dissertation uses some of the themes prevalent in the work of scholars who …

An Arrow Against Profane And Promiscuous Dancing. Drawn Out Of The Quiver Of The Scriptures. [1686], Increase Mather, Paul Royster , Ed.

Zea E-Books Collection

"The unchast Touches and Gesticulations used by Dancers, have a palpable tendency to that which is evil."

When a dancing master arrived in Boston in 1685 and offered lessons and classes for both sexes during times normally reserved for church meetings, the Puritan ministers went to court to suppress the practice. Increase Mather (1639-1723) took the leading part, writing and publishing this tract, which compiles arguments and precedents for the prohibition of “Gynecandrical Dancing, [i.e.] Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing, viz. of Men and Women … together.” These justifications were certainly shared with the court, which found the dancing …

“Beychella:” Beyoncé’S Homecoming To A Futuristic Queer Utopian, Jolie V. Brownell

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming film set the stage for a radical Black queer reimagining. Yet, how can Beyoncé—who is straight—be located within a queer critique? In this paper, I argue that through a radical and political expansion of queer, the creative deployment of dis/identification, and the unapologetic expression of the erotic, Beyoncé performs an embodiment of queer of color critique. These creative gestures within “Beychella” invite viewers into a queer futuristic utopian and provide new creative modes to politically inhabit, resist, and reimagine interlocking systems of oppression.

Keywords: Beyoncé, queer, dis/identification, erotic, QoCC, …

Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo

Theses and Dissertations

I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …

The Living Theatre Of Horror: Examining How Centuries Of Western Theatrical Practice And Theory Inform The Modern-Day Haunted House, Scott Dittman

Theses and Dissertations

This work will discuss the growing modern phenomenon of theme park and regional haunt events in the United States. In it, we will explore the history of how horror has been presented on stage, the themes within horror that creators grapple with, and how by using traditional theatrical elements creators of modern haunt events are able to make the audience a part of the story, transforming them from passive observers of the scenarios presented to complicit participants. How does the history of horror theatre inform the production of modern haunt events (and how has a global pandemic affected them), what …

"With The Commodity In The Hand": A Practical Investigation Of The Intersection Of Material Culture With Performance Theory, Katharine M. Given

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the intersection of performance theory and material culture through the practices of garment reconstruction. In chapter 1, I examine key theorists in the fields of material culture and performance studies and articulate the connections between the two fields. In chapter 2, Using practice as research, I recount the experience of building reproduction garments from the eighteenth century using historically appropriate tools and methods, as well as the experience of wearing those garments. Finally, in Chapter 3, I walk through a possible historical examination of my encounter with these reconstructed garments, and consider the way in which feminine …

The Transcorporeal South: Bodies And Ecologies In Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Tiffany Morgan Messick

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that transcorporeality offers an alternative to Cartesian dualistic modes of embodiment in Walker Percy’s, The Moviegoer, Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright’s, Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Opposing the division between mind and body as theorized by René Descartes, transcorporeality advances the body’s porosity, maintaining that the individual is enmeshed within the material world and that this entanglement consubstantiates consciousness. Examining the works of Descartes, focusing especially on the ways that Cartesian ideas have been applied in Southern culture, I contend that a Cartesian definition of subjectivity, …

The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Midcentury American life featured a post-war economy that established a middle class in which disposable income and time for leisure were commonplace. In this socio-economic environment, consumerism flourished, ushering in the Golden Age of the automobile: from 1950 to 1960, Americans spent more time in their automobiles than ever before, and, by the end of the decade, the number of cars on the road had more than doubled. While much critical attention has been given to the role of the automobile in American novels, less has been given to its role in American short stories. The automobile has been featured …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experiences Of African American Women In Undergraduate Stem Degree Programs, Vernon H. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This applied dissertation was designed to provide a better understanding of the lived experiences of African American women in STEM undergraduate degree programs at a 4-year degree granting institution in the southernmost part of central Virginia. The central problem is that there is disparity between the number of African American women with STEM degrees and that of other races in the STEM job market. The existing literature has gaps in the research of African American women’s perception of undergraduate STEM programs. Further, the researcher posits there is a lack of consideration for diversity that is detrimental to the United States; …

Reanimator/Reflection: 
Creating Mirrors Through Time 
With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin

Theses and Dissertations

For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …

Influencing Capitalist Attitudes To Drive More Capital Towards Social Good, Leah Michelle Burton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to better understand how to influence capitalist attitudes and drive more capital towards social good. This is why we must explore the prospect of emancipating the capitalists from capitalism. This study identifies capitalism as a form of oppression that is contributing to a newly developed ethics of capital, a term introduced in this study. Emancipatory action research and general systems theory were employed as the primary approaches to engaging a group of venture capitalists and finance professionals in activities and dialogues. Value2 is the theory of action I use to influence the attitudes of …

Teachers Of Color's Perception On Identity And Academic Success: A Reflective Narrative, Lynette Suliana Sikahema Finau

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Research and scholarship in multicultural education has consistently affirmed that as a result of the long standing racial academic achievement gap and the current teaching force not reflecting the changing demographics of students in the United States, students of color continue to be deprived from having teachers who look like them and who may bring similar life, social, and cultural experiences that can increase the value they place on academics. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of teachers of color and how they perceive their identity as significant and meaningful to their profession and its …

"To Work Without Stopping": Masculinity And The Midwestern Farm Novel, Andy Oler

Publications

Ruth Suckow's Country People (1924) and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) feature hard-working young farmers who develop their land and gain the esteem of their community. As they age, however, their abilities decline and their reputation erodes, not only revealing their personal flaws but also exemplifying the harms of American masculinity on farmers and their families. By incorporating scholarship on aging farmers and farm economics, this chapter shows how, when August Kaetterhenry and Larry Cook attempt to hand over the farm to the next generation, they miss the sense of ownership and control they had as working farmers. The …

Distribution, Bars, And Arcade Stars: Joe Anthony’S Entrepreneurial Expansion In Houston’S Gay Media Industries, Finley Freibert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article develops the concept of "gay useful media" to explore a case study of gay entrepreneurship in Houston, Texas, of the 1970s. A father and son developed a gay media empire in the city, which spanned bars, bookstores, distribution, and vending. One of the pair's key establishments was Houston's legendary gay bar Mary's at 1022 Westheimer (also known as Mary's Lounge, Mary's, Naturally, and Mary's…Naturally).

Non-Indian Reservations, Joshua Matthew Rosenau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is a skeptical treatment of the logical distinctions presumed to exist between “Indian” and “non-Indian” people. Despite representing 99 percent of the U.S. population, “non-Indians” represent a legal identity which has no explicit definition. The basis for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions regarding non-Indians and Indians rests not on any objective, empirical or logical criterion or proof, but rather on the “assumption of a ‘guardian-ward’ status. This thesis investigates this assumption, and recommends that we suspend judgment on whether the difference between “Indians” and “non-Indians” can be determined either by logical argument or by legal assumption.

In/Visible, Raymond Thompson Jr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

Model Minorities: Asian Americans And The White-Black Racial Paradigm, Jason Tom

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the racial wedge driven by Whites between Blacks and Asian Americans during the Cold War on to the present. Model minorities is a term coined by whites in the 1960s to suppress Civil Rights protests and Black demands. By elevating a minority group through success stories, whites constructed a means to suppress Black people’s organizing for change against systemic racism and oppression.

Railspace: A Geocritical Study Of The Railroad Through American Literature And Culture, Michael A. Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses geocriticism to argue that the American railroad is best understood as a set of discursively constructed railspaces formed through a variety of viewpoints, a polysensorial awareness of space, and stratified social relationships and power struggles. This study takes up four railspaces, the constituent texts of which demonstrate how intertextual discourse shapes and is shaped by the railroad. The observation car, charted through California Zephyr advertisements and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign,” is an apparatus that produces perpetual spectacle. Three novels—Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith—and …

Wetland To Wasteland, Plantation To Plant: The Visual Legacy Of Plantations In The South Louisiana Landscape Of Environmental Justice, Ella Mcintire

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Southeast Louisiana landscape sits at the intersection of a number of environmental and humanitarian crises. Violence against man and land endemic to the Plantation Era development of the Lower Mississippi laid the foundation for modern issues of coastal land loss, habitat destruction, pollution, environmental racism, and displacement. Land-use patterns of the Plantation economy made the region optimal for petrochemical processing, turning wetland to wasteland, and plantation to plant. The exhibit Climates of Inequality: Standing Up On River Road uses photography, cinematography, 360-video, and soundscapes to explore the dialogic relationship between fragile natural spaces in southern Louisiana and the historically …

Dreams And Illusions Of An Antiracist Elsewhere: Blacks In Search Of A Home In France And America, Arno Pedram

Capstones

This 3-part audio documentary explores how an idea of an antiracist France was created by African Americans in France, how it actually is like for Black French people in France, and what Black French people find in exile in the US.

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.

Up In Smoke: Trouble And Tobacco In Yoknapatawpha County, Sharon Desmond Paradiso

Journal X

Reading for Pleasure (Essay Review)

The Last Iron Gate: Negotiating The Incarceral Spaces Of John Edgar Wideman's Brothers And Keepers, Michael P. Moreno

Journal X

No abstract provided.

Bordering The Subjunctive In Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Adam Lifshey

Journal X

No abstract provided.

Escrime Americana: The History Of Discrimination In American Fencing From The 1700s-1950, Alyssa J. Hirsch

Honors College Theses

This research paper will focus on the history of discrimination in American fencing from 1700-1950. The time frame covers the colonial origins of the sport in America, through segregation practices up to 1950. This project will analyze the origins of classism, sexism, and racism in American fencing, and how it connects to how racism, sexism, and classism have operated in the United States. There has been no previous research conducted into the history of discrimination in fencing exclusively, so this is new territory.

The research for this paper includes primary sources provided by the head historian of U.S. fencing, Andy …

This Time. Maybe This Time: Asynchronous Faulknerian Narrative, Confederate Elegies, And The American Iconoclastic Tradition, Timothy Sedore

Journal X

No abstract provided.