Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
English Language and Literature Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
City University of New York (CUNY)
- Keyword
-
- Affect theory (1)
- African American women (1)
- Audience (1)
- Bell hooks (1)
- Black Feminism (1)
-
- Clowning (1)
- Comedy (1)
- Critical race theory (1)
- Disability (1)
- Disability studies (1)
- Drag (1)
- Gender (1)
- Gender Studies (1)
- Gender and sexuality studies (1)
- Literature (1)
- Lou Reed (1)
- Narratology (1)
- Performance (1)
- Play (1)
- Queer (1)
- Rock 'n' Roll (1)
- Sexuality (1)
- Therapeutic culture (1)
- Twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural studies (1)
- Velvet Underground (1)
- Victorian (1)
- Women's History (1)
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis
Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation theorizes a new mode of reading, narrative side-stepping, that reveals how disabled characters provide a unique opportunity for non-normative narratives. In insisting on the narratological innovations that disability affords, I revise both Lennard Davis’s notion that the novel form valorizes normalcy and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which claims that disability is a crutch, and that disabled characters are merely metaphors and/or plot devices. I move beyond these theories to focus instead on the more complicated ways that authors represented disability and used disabled characters to critique societal and narrative norms. I think about …
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …
"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 …
Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein
Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …
Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan
Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …