English Language and Literature Commons^™

Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, And Cringe, Katherine Anne Schell

Theses and Dissertations

Cringe, the negative reflexive reaction we experience when we witness something embarrassing or awkward, has a bad reputation in the queer community. In online and physical queer spaces, there is a pervading belief that “cringe culture” must be antithetical to queerness, that no queer community could possibly achieve liberation until it has eradicated the threat of cringe. This thesis revises that cringe vs. queer positioning by reimagining cringe as its own rhythm of queerness and examining the productive aspects of cringe through engagement with thinkers like Karen Barad and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The thesis, formatted as a response to a …

Dismembering Monstrous Metaphors In Latinx Speculative Fiction, Danielle Garcia-Karr

Theses and Dissertations

U.S. public discourse and popular media are rife with monstrous metaphors of Latinxs. This thesis argues that these gothic monstrous metaphors construct an affective economy of fear, which results in material violence and the devastation of Latinx lives. I further argue that to intervene within this affective economy, Latinx authors write speculative fiction, employing critical race methodologies, to negotiate monstrosity in relation to citizenship. In other words, speculative Latinx authors disidentify with monsters and enact epistemic disobedience, problematizing the known and naturalized and delinking Latinx people from monstrous metaphors to interrupt cycles of fear and violence. In exploring this metaphoric …

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.

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 …

“Power And The Orientations Of Resistance In Twentieth-Century American Literature”, Victoria Eleanor Chandler

Theses and Dissertations

"Power and the Orientations of Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Literature” analyzes the intersections of space, power, and the possibility for alternatives to power structures. I argue that social power circumscribes the spatial possibilities of normative and non-normative subjectivities. In particular, power curtails the ability of marginalized subjects (such as women, queer people, and people of color) to forge alternatives to the current social order. In dialogue with recent scholars of race studies, feminism, and queer theory, this project reveals how dominated subjects employ their quotidian spaces as sites of resistance and survival. The literature I examine in this dissertation identifies …

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

The Ghosts Of Lucy Snowe: Queer Temporality In Villette, Lauren Schuldt

Theses and Dissertations

Though Lucy Snowe has been read as an agent of queer nonconformity and as a master of ambiguity, queer interpretations of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette have remained relatively scarce and limited in scope. This essay examines Lucy Snow’s unique model of queer experience that manifests not only in moments of openly subversive gender performance, homoerotic desire, or sexual identity, but also as an oppositional mode of organizing and articulating her life in terms of time. Using the temporally queer metaphor of the ghost, this essay explores Lucy’s resistance to frameworks of time which structure life narratives through logics of heterosexual development …

False Spring, Tobias Wray

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores queer kinship and masculinity in an extended poetic sequence. The speakers of these poems attempt to understand the ways that family shapes our sense of gendered identity, particularly how masculinity is constructed and perpetuated through a history of gendered violence in western culture. Investigating the shame of failed masculinity and unsanctioned identity through a range of aesthetic positions, these poems interrogate the tradition of English language poetry as a space where masculinity is both blurred and reinscribed.

In three sections, the collection considers the relationship between paternity and patriarchy, and how queer identity offers alternative aesthetic positions …

Considering The Body: Sexual Agency And Material Selfhood In Alex As Well, Karlie Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the tensions between intersex embodiment and trans* identity, intersex children and their parents, and the intimacies that come out of these relationships – which, I argue, are ultimately queer. Using queer, trans*, and intersex theory, as well as feminist new materialisms, I highlight the ways in which the imbrications of the material and the symbolic are presented in Alyssa Brugman’s contemporary Young Adult novel, Alex as Well. The goal of this analysis is to encourage a separation from binary thinking and explore the possibility of nonbinary identifications in literature – more specifically, literature with intersex …