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Articles 1 - 30 of 158
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Art In An Apocalypse: Aids, Activism, And Abolition In Work Of Essex Hemphill And Alternative Video Production, Sydney E. Guntharp
Art In An Apocalypse: Aids, Activism, And Abolition In Work Of Essex Hemphill And Alternative Video Production, Sydney E. Guntharp
Honors Theses
This thesis is an exploration of Black, POC, feminist, and queer art in the late twentieth century, examining both the AIDS crisis and the increasing privatization of the prison industrial complex as key factors in the development of Essex Hemphill’s poetic, expressive works and the filmmaking activism of various videotape collectives. Through employing the lens of critical prison studies, this work seeks to understand how Black and POC art emerged as a site of political resistance to a carceral state as well as the broader social punishment doctrine that influenced the public health response to AIDS in the United States. …
‘“We Was Girls Together”’: Black Girlhood And Homoeroticism In Toni Morrison’S Sula, Summer A. Still
‘“We Was Girls Together”’: Black Girlhood And Homoeroticism In Toni Morrison’S Sula, Summer A. Still
Caroliniana Undergraduate Research Journal
This paper examines Toni Morrison’s Sula through the intertwined frameworks of Black girlhood and homoeroticism, with a focus on the friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright. By analyzing moments of intimacy, dreams, and kinship terminology, I argue that Morrison portrays their bond as both a survival mechanism against oppressive social structures and as a site where homoerotic desire emerges. Concepts such as “fictive kin,” “chosen kin,” and “quare” are used to show how Morrison complicates traditional categories of friendship and queerness in American literature. Ultimately, the novel positions Sula and Nel’s relationship as one of enduring love that exceeds …
Queer Hope And Asexual Desire In Nella Larsen's Passing And Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Jeremy Buckner
Queer Hope And Asexual Desire In Nella Larsen's Passing And Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Jeremy Buckner
Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)
This project examines Nella Larsen’s Passing and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse together as queer artifacts in hopes of shedding new light on how race and sexuality can be reexamined across national modes of thinking. Although these writers’ backgrounds provide them with different bodies of knowledge, Larsen’s Irene and Woolf’s Lily have much more in common than might first appear. For one, even if racialization is more explicit—and presents more of an obstacle—for Irene, race is an important factor for both characters. Additionally, Irene and Lily both express profound discontent with marriage, Irene in her marriage to Brian and Lily …
Queen's Pride: A Queer Reading Of Star Wars Character Padmé Amidala, Madeleine Loewen
Queen's Pride: A Queer Reading Of Star Wars Character Padmé Amidala, Madeleine Loewen
Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings
Ever since Luke Skywalker and Han Solo first appeared onscreen together in 1977, LGBTQ+ Star Wars fans have harnessed the power of queer reading to write themselves back into a galaxy far, far away, despite Lucasfilm’s long-term disapproval of such practices. Nonetheless, there exists little scholarly literature on queerness in the franchise, and even less on the potentially sapphic characters. Queen Padmé Amidala, first introduced onscreen in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, proves a surprising—but no less salient—queer figure in Star Wars. From her intimate relationships with her handmaidens, to her experimentation with gender performativity, to her quiet yet …
No Hope?: Queer Negativity, Afropessimism, And The Limits Of Futurity, Colton Barton
No Hope?: Queer Negativity, Afropessimism, And The Limits Of Futurity, Colton Barton
Theses and Dissertations--English
Since their inceptions, black and queer studies have sought to articulate the positions of “black” and “queer” within American social life—often converging on the goal of liberation. This thesis examines the intersection of two “negative” theoretical frameworks—Afropessimism and anti-social queer theory (or “queer negativity”)—to interrogate both the limits and generative potential of radical negativity. Though emerging from distinct intellectual traditions, these frameworks conceptualize blackness and queerness as constitutive negations—gaps within the dominant social order that render those so marked inassimilable to normative notions of humanity. While the convergences of these theories can be illuminating, their shared pessimism risks obscuring alternative …
Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant
Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant
Honors Undergraduate Theses
This project analyzes In the Dream House (2019) alongside “The Husband Stitch” and “Eight Bites” from the collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado. The first, a memoir, details Machado’s personal experience with domestic abuse between partners who share a female gender identity; the latter is a collection of short stories outlining everyday violations made against women. Scholars have discussed these works with specifications including female domestic horror, Machado’s use of retellings, and domestic violence and abuse. This project fills a gap in the discourse by intersecting and connecting queer theory with archival studies to support …
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …
The Post-Closet Home: Queer Domesticity, Enclosure, And Queer Southern Gothicism In Lee Mandelo's "Summer Sons", Andrew Dylan Dampier
The Post-Closet Home: Queer Domesticity, Enclosure, And Queer Southern Gothicism In Lee Mandelo's "Summer Sons", Andrew Dylan Dampier
Master's Theses
In current discussions of queer theory, terms such as “post-gay” leave room for misrepresentation. The premise behind this term serves a primarily cisgenderheterosexual agenda by promising the assimilation of queer individuals into the dominant society. For this reason, I prefer to align the term “post-closet” with the queer person’s journey towards, and past, such societal barriers while maintaining the significance of foundational queer theories. In his novel Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo depicts Andrew Blur’s journey through the grief-ridden confines of the closet as he seeks a new identity following the death of his best friend. Mandelo accomplishes this by juxtaposing …
Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick
Shared Shame And Affect In Nella Larsen's Passing, Claudia Ludwick
All Theses
This project focuses on the negative affect of shame in Nella Larsen’s 1920s American novel, Passing. While shame is a universal feeling everyone feels, the project argues that Larsen’s two main characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, feel a specific type of invisible shame that pulls on them differently. For Irene, this shame is reactive and aggressive, but for Clare, this shame is passive and often ignored. The project details where and how the shame manifests for each character, particularly focusing on how shame can be seen visibly and invisibly in and on the body. Because no other character recognizes …
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca
Bad Becomings: Autobiographical Writing, Queer/Trans Theory, Melancholia, Jacob Elias Aplaca
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bad Becomings surveys queer autobiographical works published over the last 30+ years to better understand the animosities and complicities of the queer and the so-called normative. While the limited scholarship on queer autobiographical writing has characterized this corpus of texts based on an edginess, a radicality, and a rejection of the liberal individual that both flies in the face of “traditional autobiography” and indulges queer theory’s persistent idealization of queer culture as radical and antinormative, this dissertation asks that we suspend our desire for so absolute a differentiation. Rather than assume that “queer” automatically makes “autobiography” radical and antinormative, I …
Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica
Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica
Open Educational Resources
An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.
Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan
Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan
English Faculty Scholarship
Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …
The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson
The Personal And The Planetal: Essaying The Ecological, Eric Dean Wilson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological …
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Student Theses and Dissertations
Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …
Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis
Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis
Honors Undergraduate Theses
The intent of this thesis is to explore writing during the start of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. States. This time period encompasses the early 1980s to mid-1990s before Protease Inhibitors were FDA approved which was the medical breakthrough drug that helped turn an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a chronic condition. This thesis will be an examination of three themes: “Gay White Cis Male Experience of HIV/AIDS”,” Marginalized Identity Experience of HIV/AIDS” and an exploration of two plays written during the height of the AIDS epidemic that were later turned into HBO productions: The Normal Heart …
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …
Color And Descriptors To See A Deeper Meaning In "Passing", Dani Szafran
Color And Descriptors To See A Deeper Meaning In "Passing", Dani Szafran
Anthós
A small glimpse into the novel “Passing” by Nella Larsen. A fictional story of Irene Redfield, a black woman living in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and her unraveling life brought on by a chance meeting of an old friend. This is a look at the latent lesbian feelings as shown by the use of descriptive words to paint a picture of a desire that was forbidden during those times.
Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono
Scenes Of Subversion: How Monstrous Subjectivities Affect Futurity In Gothic Horror, Salvatore S. Dibono
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen begins his conclusory section of his influential essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” stating, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return” (52). Yet, Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive makes a statement which complicates the idea of the monster being “our child” when discussing that the normative (conservative) movement will “recurrently frame their political struggle…as a ‘fight for our children—for our daughters and our …
Impression, Storm, Victoria Rego, Victoria Anne Rego
Impression, Storm, Victoria Rego, Victoria Anne Rego
All NMU Master's Theses
This novel, set in a cypress swamp near Charleston, South Carolina, explores issues in gender, sexuality, the body, and place. An experiment in form, the novel is structured to replicate the passing of a hurricane over land. This model allows the narrative to expand its scope to encompass the swamp as a larger entity amidst the ecosystem of the coastal south. By weaving together the narratives of the plant, animal, human, ghost, and mythic members of the swamp, the narrative seeks to interrogate the ways that these different levels of an ecosystem intercede upon, assist, and redirect each other in …
Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler
Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler
Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence
No abstract provided.
The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella
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 …
Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman
Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman
College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations
Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.
Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan
Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Curious Natures: Constructing Queer Ecologies In Early America, Richard Lee Parmer Jr.
Theses and Dissertations--English
This dissertation argues that early American writers often constructed queer ecologies in order to naturalize Anglo-American civilization and justify its expansion into Native American territories. Since there is so little textual evidence on the subject, the major challenge to studying sexuality in early America is approaching sexuality studies creatively—to broaden both our understanding of what counts as sexual discourse and our frameworks for analyzing it. My dissertation addresses this challenge through what many ecocritical scholars of sexuality call queer ecology. In their groundbreaking anthology on the topic, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson remind us that, historically and in the present, …
Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown
Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …
Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova
Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research
This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon
English (MA) Theses
Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …