English Language and Literature Commons^™

Radical Antiracism And Anti-Queerphobia In Politicised Education Environments Through Critical Race Theory And Queer Theory, Mina Aubrey Weeks

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

In 2023, the Utah legislature passed bills that alter how secondary education teachers can talk about “divisive topics,” usually referring to topics of race, LGBTQ, or other systemic topics like classism and nationalism. Many teachers committed to anti-racism and anti-queerphobia do not want to water down topics of race and LGBTQ, but they also do not want to lose their jobs for teaching race and LGBTQ in a way that the law restricts. Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory have typically been framed as anti-White, anti-cishet, or overall divisive by State critics due to their radical ideologies, but this comes …

Read This Book!: Defending Multicultural Literature From Recent Censorship, Chloe Devine

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The aim of this research is to highlight the importance of multicultural children’s literature in the field of education as it relates to the call for a more multicultural approach to education, as well as through the consideration of the recent uptick in book censorship across the country. Specifically, I will turn my attention towards children’s literature that features Black characters and experiences, which are often featured within the multicultural realm. Despite the fact that research has consistently shown that multicultural children’s literature has benefits for Black children as well as creating an engaging reading experience for all readers, efforts …

Final Master's Portfolio, Michael Cullen

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio represents the best of the author's work in the MA program in English (individualized track) at Bowling Green State University. Included are an analysis of two Ray Bradbury short stories via eco-criticism and poststructuralism; a creative writing course unit on dystopian fiction; an analysis of several Black films through critical race theory; and an original short story.

My Favorite Thing Is Monster Theory: Horror Comics And Demonstrating Difference In Emil Ferris’S "My Favorite Thing Is Monsters", Jennifer Rossberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017) by Emil Ferris opens with the same etymological analysis of the word monster as Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s landmark disability studies article, “From Wonder to Error: A Discourse on Freak Genealogy” (1991). The protagonist of Ferris’s swirling, sketchbook-style thriller, Karen Reyes, is a mixed-race queer adolescent growing up in noirish 1960’s Chicago who longs to be a werewolf so she can bite and save her cancer-afflicted mother. After fleeing an imaginary, pitchfork-wielding M.O.B.—an acronym for “mean, ordinary, & boring” people—Karen explains that, “The dictionary says the word monster comes from the Latin word ‘monstrum’ which …

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, …

Decentering White Space In The Two-Year College English Classroom: A Perspective Through Crt, Tribalcrit, And Latcrit, Kassandra Angela Ramirez Buck

English Dissertations

White space in the educational system is an attitude, environment, ideology dominated by the white dominant voice and creed. This white space intimidates and oppresses Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students, not only physically but mentally and emotionally. This research provides solutions to help instructors decenter white space. In order to begin to decenter white space, instructors need to modify their curriculum and classroom policies, presence and environment, and execution. Using Latina/o Critical Theory, Tribal Critical Race Theory, and Critical Race Theory in Education, this research addresses structural facets of systemic racism BIPOC students in the two-year college English …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Four Stories Featuring Multi/Mixed Identities, Sierra Sweeney , '21, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Sierra Sweeney, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Fiction as a genre is well known for its ability to discuss a wide range of topics in a way that is both entertaining and empathetic. But while fictional pieces, especially the short story, are famous for creating narratives that help readers understand experiences unlike their own and characters unlike themselves, I would argue that fiction can also serve as a medium of self- reflection. As someone who identifies as multi-ethnic …

How Queer Came To Be: Deconstructing White Queerness In Melville's "Bartleby," Ginsberg's Howl, And Morrison's A Mercy, Sara Elizabeth Parnell Wilcox

Graduate Theses

In American LGBTQ+ communities, questions continually arise about what it means to live in a post-gay marriage world. Is there still a need for a division between LGBTQ+ and heteronormative spaces, such as nightclubs or parades? What purpose does the ideological signification of a queer identity serve if, ostensibly, queer communities are now equal with their heteronormative counterparts? Rather than accepting the homonormative, post-gay marriage premise that underlies frequent, current representations of “queerness” in terms of white, male, gay bodies, I plan to explore the convergence of aesthetics and politics as a method of freeing queer theory from some of …

Whiteness As Cursed Property: An Interdisciplinary Intervention With Joyce Carol Oates’S Bellefleur And Cheryl Harris’S “Whiteness As Property”, Karen Gaffney

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article begins with the assertion that now more than ever, in the aftermath of Ferguson and in a time when many believe our society to be post-racial, we need to bring together scholars and activists who care about racial justice, regardless of discipline, and build interdisciplinary tools for fighting racism. Furthermore, we need to understand and reveal how whiteness has been socially constructed because the power of whiteness lies in its invisibility, and that fuels the perpetuation of systemic racism. In making whiteness visible, we can see how it has been wielded as a weapon, which in turn will …

An Oblique Blackness: Reading Racial Formation In The Aesthetics Of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, And Wayde Compton, Jeremy D. Haynes B.A.H.

Jeremy D Haynes B.A.H.

This thesis examines how the poetics of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand and Wayde Compton articulate unique aesthetic voices that are representative of a range of ethnic communities that collectively make-up blackness in Canada. Despite the different backgrounds, geographies, and ethnicities of these authors, blackness in Canada is regularly viewed as a homogeneous community that is most closely tied to the cultural histories of the American South and the Atlantic slave trade. Black Canadians have historically been excluded from the official narratives of the nation, disassociating blackness from Canadian-ness. Epithets such as “African-Canadian” are indicative of the way race distances …

A Law And Literature Approach To Stumped By Debora Threedy, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this response, I will begin by identifying questions and issues about Stumped that might present themselves from law in literature and law as literature perspectives. This analysis will be followed by a discussion of the play from a particular law and narrative approach, one that ideologically is allied with feminist jurisprudence and critical race studies. Finally, I will conclude by examining the play in connection with scholarship on the cultural study of law, specifically emphasizing ways in which law and literature mutually constitute one another as opposed to being distinct categories of knowledge.