English Language and Literature Commons^™

Course Design As Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, And Demographic Approaches To Teaching Asian American Literatures, Thomas X. Sarmiento

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay offers a theoretical and reflective exploration of critically informed acts of creativity expressed in my course design for and teaching of Asian American literatures at a predominantly white, public land-grant, Midwestern university. I argue that teaching is both a creative and critical activity as it generates new ways of knowing and being through an assessment and curation of extant literary texts and scholarly discourses. Given my geographic, scholarly, and personal orientations, my course features intersectional, regional, and ethnically diverse perspectives that aim to queer what “Asian America/n” signifies. I hope my situated pedagogical insights inspire other scholar-teachers to …

The Whale, Ahab, And The Transgender Human Condition, Catherine Simpson

Masters Theses

What could possibly be the relationship between Moby-Dick and the transgender experience? Where lies Moby-Dick’s utility in the context of literary queer theory? Does Moby-Dick have something useful to say to a transgender person? A possible answer is that Moby-Dick may lay a foundation to a specific intellectual process that parallels the transgender human condition. Realizing oneself as transgender necessitates an understanding of gendered norms, applying those norms to oneself, recognizing a dissatisfaction toward that application, and then navigating these norms in a more suitable way. It requires an unavoidable drive to subvert gender constructs despite its consequences. While Ishmael …

"Concealing The Excess Of Her Pleasure": A Queer Reading Of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Josie Anne Blubaugh

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This queer reading of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey uses critical frameworks from queer theory, feminist theory, trans theory, and Black Romanticism to analyze female-female relationships between the characters in the novel as a product of the social norms, conventions, and discourses of Romantic-era Britain. By using literary analysis and close reading, I study the many ways in which Northanger Abbey can be read queerly, specifically where gender and sexuality intersect with race and ethnicity.

Though queer readings of this novel have been done in the past, my own analysis focuses on female-female relationships and takes race into consideration when I …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

Pursuit Of Happiness In Alternate Realities: The Intersection Of Queerness And The Metaphysical In Haruki Murakami’S Sputnik Sweetheart, Katelyn Morris

Kean Quest

This research aims to examine the intersection of queerness and the metaphysical in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. I intend to accomplish this by focusing on the instances of magical realism as they are presented throughout the narrative and deconstruct them through the escapades of the explicitly queer protagonist Sumire. Sumire is an individual who has never felt sexual desire until she encounters an older woman named Miu. However, Miu underwent a bizarre, fantastical encounter many years ago that “split her in two” as the text puts it, and her ability to feel sexual desire joined her other half on …

Review Of The Man Who Thought Himself A Woman, Ed Christopher Looby, Carrie D. Shanafelt

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

'As Vivid As Blood In A Sink': (Re)Reading Queerness And Repression In Teju Cole's Open City, Jack Hoda

Master's Theses

Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is an exemplar work of contemporary fiction. For its complex representation of subjectivity, hypnotic narrative tone, and global political scope, the novel has been praised by readers and critics alike. Julius, the text’s first-person narrator, guides us along seemingly innocent wanderings throughout New York City, ruminating on history, art, and politics while presenting himself as the enlightened, cosmopolitan ideal. However, the shocking penultimate revelation that Julius raped a young woman from his past alters our encounter with the text and its narrator. We come to realize that this meandering novel is, in reality, a carefully …

Queer Outings In Imaginary Spaces, Nicole Cosentino

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Picture this: Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Djuna Barnes walk into a book. And stay there.

Kids, Culture, And Queerness: The Progression Of Lgbtq+ Representation In Children's Media, Sarah Stevens

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Historically, popular media has functioned as a window into society’s ever evolving idea of normalcy. Children’s popular media, which contains elements of both entertainment and didacticism, is further burdened with the responsibility of influencing the perspectives of upcoming generations. This truth is particularly salient for the LGBTQ+ community, who have faced consistent misrepresentation or utter erasure from children’s media in the recent past. While there have been marked improvements in both the quality and quantity of queer representation in children’s media since 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges case, there is still a significant need to acknowledge intersectional queerness and queer gender …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Wwa Reflection: Losing Sight, Making Scholarship, Sabrina M. Durso

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

In This Harsh World, We Continue To Draw Breath: Queer Persistence In Shakespeare And Hamlet, Beck O. Adelante

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most often (mis-)quoted works. The central and titular character has likewise been an endless source of academic and artistic inquiry and exploration since nearly the creation of the work itself. However, this paper argues that a crucial and enlightening piece of the puzzle has, until recently, been left unexplored for the most part, considered a frivolous or non-serious pursuit: Hamlet’s and Hamlet’s queerness. Using historical research and evidence, close readings of the text, and examples of recent productions that have taken this element seriously, this paper argues that to fully understand the …

"I Want To Melt Into Her Body": Sexual Empowerment And A Feminist Recentering Of The Female Characters In Dracula By Bram Stoker, Carmilla By J. Sheridan Lefanu, And Villette By Charlotte Bronte, Carson Leigh Pender

Graduate Theses

Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, “The normal sexual act [of intercourse] effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he–as for most animals– who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. . . coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result” (385). Essentially, de Beauvoir argues that the act of sex cannot exist without the presence of man, but particularly for heterosexual women, the act of sex is dependent on the presence of, responsibility of, and response of men. However, despite the …

Big Community In Little Chinatown: How Asian Americans (Re)Present Their Community Today, Meghan Morrison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper looks at a series of modern Asian American pieces of media in order to analyze how women and LGBT+ depict and create their community, especially in relation to another marginalized ethnic group. By examining the relationship between these groups within popular media, we can uncover how Asian Americans choose to represent themselves and gain a deeper understanding on how marginalized groups choose to portray themselves.

Keats And Shelley: A Pursuit Towards Progressivism, Serenah Minasian

Theses and Dissertations

An analyzation of the poems, letters, and works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a perspective focusing on the history of sexuality, breaking gender binaries, and pushing towards progressivism. This thesis proves how John Keats is both an effeminate man who displays exemplary ways of breaking gender expectations but also a man who possess misogynistic tendencies. Also, this thesis analyzes Percy Shelley’s use of gender expectations and how he breaks them with the use of his characters. Studying these two British Romantics shows how these two cisgender, straight, white men provide an ability to push back on their …

The Car Ride Home, Jonathan Rivera

English Honors Theses

The Car Ride Home explores the coming of age of a young boy into a queer man, searching and sifting through the trauma of home life, and realizing his mother’s addiction affects more than just herself, but an entire family. This realization coincides with views of masculinity, as he carefully watches the men around him. He internalizes these depictions of masculinity when exploring his own confusion and investigation of his own sexual identity and queerness. The poetry collection is broken up into two connected parts. Part one explores the illusion of childhood and nostalgia while introducing subtle glimpses and secrets …

Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The archive of Irish writer Kate O’Brien is a notable example of how queerness haunts the mainstream of feminist literary spaces. The 2019 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) exhibition Kate O’Brien: Arrow to the Heart, which set out to restore this censored novelist’s place in the archive of twentieth-century Irish writing, provides a case study of these dynamics. Queer and feminist perspectives on the archive, with a focus on affect, hauntings and Sara Ahmed’s “queer use,” illuminate the conflicting epistemologies regulating the O’Brien archive. Reading this exhibition as an Irish queer, affective experience collides with entrenched structures of power …

A Sailor's Intimacy: Homosocial Labor In Nineteenth-Century Oceanic Narratives By Dana And Melville, Adrian R. Salgado

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the male sailor community in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and how they are portrayed in terms of homosociality and intimacy. The presence of a homosocial community on board a sailing vessel provided a means of forming a group of men that cultivated relationships and communications through the production of labor with one another. Both Melville and Dana engaged readers in the workings of a sailor’s life and how those interactions on board a ship with fellow sailors formed a premise for the evaluation of maritime labor in nineteenth-century oceanic …

Exploring The Marginalized Voice: Queering Form In Contemporary Short Fiction, Madalyn M. Jackson

Honors College

Feminist and queer narrative theory calls into question the systemic way of thinking about categorizations such as genre conventions, form, and length. The short story subverts all of these, flipping common love plots or hero arcs, denying readers whole pictures, and privileging plot over character development. Through the application of feminist and queer narrative theory, this study evaluates Lambda Literary Awardwinning texts from authors Chinelo Okparanta, Krystal Smith, and Carmen Maria Machado on how the function, form, and common conventions of the short story are subversive in nature and lend themselves to the functions, forms, and conventions of the queer …

Disrupting An(Other): Sexuality As Political Resistance, Emma C. Downey

Master’s Theses

If sexual knowledge can threaten social and political institutions and their control, how do the contents and subjects of literature and publications in the interwar period make that legible? Moreover, if female sexuality–represented or real–was seen as something disruptive to the normal functioning of society, did sexuality offer a useful entry point for social, political, or ideological critiques of the interwar period? My project responds to these questions by analyzing the lives and writings of two female authors of the interwar period: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) and Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963). In my analysis, I focus on two major points of connection. …

Write It Slant: Queerness And Form In The Argonauts And Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through, Eleanor Linafelt

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project analyzes two books of contemporary creative nonfiction: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (2015) and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (2019). Both writers centrally deal with queerness in their texts as a concept that is ineffable, or unable to be fully explained in words. I explain how to think about queerness as ineffable through the work of queer theorists Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz. In their books, Nelson and Fleischmann recognize that language is insufficient or even harmful in maintaining the ineffability of queerness, which poses a significant paradox for their works …

Undiagnosing Iphis: How The Lack Of Trauma In John Gower’S “Iphis And Iante” Reinforces A Subversive Trans Narrative, C Janecek

Accessus

Trauma has long played a role in queer narratives, including Ovid’s “Iphis and Ianthe”, which many scholars have interpreted as reinforcing heteronormativity through Iphis’s transformation into a man in order to marry Ianthe. However, I argue that John Gower’s rendition of this tale reframes Iphis as a trans man and allows us to understand the poem as a subversive trans narrative that revolts against cisnormative conceptions of gender. Utilizing Judith Butler’s writing on the medicalization of gender, I explore the relationship between trauma, performance, and gender within the Ovidian and Gowerian versions of Iphis.

'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.

The Notions Of The "Closet" And The "Secret" In Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Jessica Maria Oliveira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the notions of the “closet” and “secret” within Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as offer a clear and precise definition of queer theory to assist in elucidating many of the concepts being discussed. Close reading techniques will be utilized to further uncover the metaphoric, symbolic, and otherwise figurative importance of certain aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray and supporting texts. Through Judith Butler’s conceptualization of sex and gender, as well as Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the “secret”, this paper will explicate the intricacies of Wilde’s work and unveil queered aspects …

The Queer Literature Club, Olivia Behm

Honors Projects

The Queer Literature Club was established August 30, 2018 with the purpose of distributing young adult literature with LGBTQ+ characters and themes as well as providing a space space for LGBTQ+ students. The QLC spent the 2018-2019 academic year establishing itself as a thriving community and has gained standing as an officially recognized campus organization. The club is open to students who want to see themselves reflected in the literature they read - literature meant for an age that is particularly difficult for LGBTQ+ youth - and allies. Through the progression of the year, it was found that the QLC …

Eighteenth-Century Camp Introduction, Ula Lukszo Klein, Emily Mn Kugler

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A blend of the silly and the extravagant that puts the serious into conversation with the ridiculous, camp today is often signified by elements of eighteenth-century Europe with its elaborate hairstyles, exaggerated silhouettes, affected courtiers, and a rise in the consumption of exotic goods, candelabras, masks, and other markers of elite excess (often with a nod to the era’s demise in the form of either the French Revolution or subsequent Victorian strictures). Camp’s relation to queer modes of performance and its prioritization of style over (or in conjunction with) substance offers a queer aesthetic lens to re-evaluate the eighteenth century …

Provocations From The Field - Derangement And Resistance: Reflections From Under The Glare Of An Angry Emu, Pattrice Jones

Animal Studies Journal

The situations of emus may illuminate the maladies of human societies. From the colonialism that led Europeans to tamper with Australian ecosystems through the militarism that mandated the Great Emu War of 1932 to the consumer capitalism that sparked a global market for ‘exotic’ emus and their products, habits of belief and behaviour that hurt humans have wreaked havoc on emus. Literally de-ranged, emus abroad today endure all of the estrangements of émigrés in addition to the frustrations and sorrows of captivity. In Australia, free emus struggle to survive as climate change parches already diminished and polluted habitats. We have …

Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias In Queer American Literature From Walt Whitman To Willa Cather, Benjamin Meiners

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In “Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias in Queer American Literature from Walt Whitman to Willa Cather,” I argue that the colonial discourse of primitivism played a central role in the queer literary imaginaries of both canonical and non-canonical U.S. authors. Building on the work of historians of sexuality who trace the complex development of the twentieth-century homo-/hetero- binary, I show how literary works produced in this historical moment—roughly 1860 to 1925—explored and in some instances even advocated alternative queer modes of citizenship and erotic imagination and practice. Focusing on the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willa …

“Dyrne Langað”: Secret Longing And Homo-Amory In Beowulf And J.R.R. Tolkien’S The Lord Of The Rings, Christopher Vaccaro

Journal of Tolkien Research

“‘Dyrne Langað’: Secret Longing and Homo-amory in Beowulf and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” investigates the close “homoamorous” relationship between Frodo and Samwise, employing a close reading of select passages from the eighth-century English poem, Beowulf. The argument begins with a clarification of terms. Afterwards, it focuses upon the cruces related to a key scene involving Beowulf’s departure and compares the intensity of the unspoken love Hroðgar has for Beowulf to the love Sam has for Frodo at the Grey Havens. Ultimately, the essay argues for a new way of reading both departure scenes.