Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Monstrous Matrilineage In Chinese American Literature, Leina Hsu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In this paper, I explore the monstrous relationships between Chinese American mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, and Severance: A Novel by Ling Ma. I employ monsters as metaphors and motifs that illustrate the womens’ genealogical trauma and resistance. By putting Chinese American matrilineages in a monstrous context, I elevate them as alternative knowledge sources that haunt the margins of Western society. In The Joy Luck Club, ghosts reveal the invisibility and survivor mindset of Chinese American immigrant mothers. For Bone, skeletons represent the unspoken trauma that plagues Chinese American …

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 …

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Motherland Drip: Examining Performativity In Southern Black Motherhood, Daisha Huiel

Master's Projects

This capstone project explores the possibilities of the societal standards of southern Black motherhood creating oppositional experiences for Black women and their claims to freedom and bodily autonomy. I am writing about the lived experiences of southern Black women, including myself, within their communities to explore anti-respectability themes in the lives and performances of southern women and female hip hop performers through the lens of intersectionality. This creative nonfiction1 and scholarship reflect my academic exploration into the ways foundational Black feminist theory and relevant texts connect to my individual lived experiences of motherhood and identity within the post-hip-hop generations. I …

Casar (Auc Community Only) Lecture : Body Autonomy, Culture & Empowering Women In Egypt, Us & Canada: The Differences That Unite Us', The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

About the lecture: This event was CASAR’s last event opened for the AUC community only. It took place as part of the course AMST 1099 “Exploring Feminist Perspectives in Egypt and the US” taught by CASAR Assistant to Director and Adjunct Faculty Yasmeen El Ghazaly. The Panel included Ms. Malak El-Lamie from Motherbeing NGO representing Egypt, representing the United states was Ms. Alexandra Mcdougall who comes from the NGO ‘Women’s Advocates’ in Northern Minnesota, and representing Canada from the ‘London Abused Women's Centre’ in London, Ontario, is Wendy Goldsmith. Other than Ms. Malak, these guests joined the discussion via zoom, …

Us Manufacturing Readiness Assesment For Industry 4.0, Yogesh Bhutani

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Industry 4.0 is the next frontier in manufacturing evolution. Industry 4.0 is the term coined by the German government based on the research work of Henning Kaegermann. Multiple studies have been published worldwide, showing the slow or no adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies. Factors such as high costs, unproven technologies, integration, and others impacting the adoption are areas of concern. Readiness is an important factor that impacts adoption. Understanding the current readiness for Industry 4.0 to predict future adoption levels is important. It is vital to understand the readiness of manufacturing companies to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies, as this is …

“And I’M Going To Destroy You.”: Persona And Gender Performativity In Ernest Hemingway’S The Garden Of Eden, Nicole Minton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While debate of Ernest Hemingway’s authorial masculine persona in connection to The Garden of Eden has been a point of interest in literary scholarship, no single work has tied together theory of gender performativity to persona. A borderline parodic display of masculine adventure has encouraged a one-dimensional view of Hemingway, who is viewed by audiences as the pinnacle of masculinity. However, this image is complicated by the publication of Eden, which reveals an author interested in gender and sexual identity fluidity. Rarely has a single text called into question so controversially an author’s public image. Eden showcases an empathetic …

Broadcast History Gaps When Archival Material Exists: Inserting Peg Lynch And Ethel And Albert Into Sitcom History, Lauren Bratslavsky

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Lucy and Desi. Burns and Allen. Ozzie and Harriet. Ethel and Albert? The first three television couples tend to be the familiar husband-wife pairs that typify American 1950s sitcoms. These characters and their namesake programs, along with the Andersons in Father Knows Best and the Cleavers in Leave it to Beaver, are credited as templates for the domestic sitcom genre, where the narrative logic oscillates between morality lessons and outlandish plots to escape domestic life. When we study or reminisce about 1950s television, Ethel and Albert and their namesake program do not readily come to mind. However, the popularity …

Casar Public Lecture: How Far Have Women Come In The Past 120 Years In Egypt And The Us?, The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

About the lecture: In honor of the 16 days of activism set by the UN campaigning for eliminating violence against women, CASAR hosted an event to see how far women have come in the past 120 years in the United States and in Egypt, and what changes might be possible in the foreseeable future. This was CASAR’s last public event for the Fall 2023 semester, and was made special by the warm welcome from Director Mark W. Deets, and the efforts of Yasmeen El Ghazaly, who created a video compiling important figures of women throughout the decades in the United …

Lg Ms 052 Sage Hylton (-Lemons) Papers, K A. Perry

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Sage Hylton-Lemons grew up in Portland, Maine. In high school, Hylton-Lemons found sanctuary as a gay teenager in the youthdriven group Outright, where his involvement progressed from attending weekly meetings to being a member of the Board, then President of the Board. As an Outright member and activist, Hylton-Lemons spoke at schools and events, became a peer-advisor, and helped other communities organize their own Outrights. He was instrumental in conceiving and organizing Outright's first annual prom in 1998. He was profoundly influenced by Christian T. Chenard, a nurse practitioner for the City of Portland Public Health Positive Healthcare Program. …

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

In Quest Of A Mythopoetic Native American Subjectivity: Joy Harjo’S Poetry, Aya Elbably

Dentistry

In their resistance to the Anglo-American colonialism and white supremacy, Native American writers use storytelling and mythical motifs to reclaim their Indigenous cultural memory. Through these mythical narratives, they seek to emphasize their tribal cultures, political sovereignty and nationalism. In their challenge of the traditional negative stereotypes, Native women writers have correspondingly engaged in a process of decolonization and self-definition to reclaim their subjectivity. Hence, this paper examines some of Joy Harjo’s poems that are published in In Mad Love and War (1990) and She Had Some Horses (1983) volumes. Drawing on Native feminism and Gerald Vizenor’s concept of ‘survivance’ …

Sex In The Sixties: Playboy's Contradictory Contribution To Social Change In The 1960s, Emily Stucky

The Cardinal Edge

This paper summarizes the perceptions of Playboy magazine during the height of its influence, from 1955 to 1975, through the lens of social justice advocates in the 1960s. Many historical scholars characterize Playboy magazine as strictly anti-feminist, while others would cast Hugh Hefner as liberating in his ideology and political views, seen through reviews of the magazine throughout the 1960s and comments from Hefner himself. But it is more likely Playboy’s legacy is much more complicated than either of these positions allow. Playboy occupied a conflicting role in the 1960s: liberating in its post-war sex standards for both men …

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 …

Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …

Narratives In, On, And Around Contemporary Queer Film: A Study Of Adam And Its Paratexts, Jeremy Stoller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Film’s ability to present and inspire desire, and to realize alternate worlds, render it a uniquely potent medium for expressing queerness. Because of this potency, and because films are among the most prominent ways that LGBTQ+ people are represented in society, queer film can feel both deeply personal and highly political for LGBTQ+ identifying audiences. But movies do not merely offer statements about political systems, they are also made within and reflective of those systems.

Scholars have thoroughly investigated films and our relationships to them for productive ways of seeing gender, sexuality, desire, and oppression. But the conversations about how …

The Haunting Aesthetics Of Empire: Filipinx America, Us Empire, And Cultural Production, Alana J. Bock

American Studies ETDs

Throughout this dissertation, I argue that US imperial knowledge production affirms US exceptionalism by disavowing the imperial violence wrought on the Philippines and its people. This disavowal not only renders the Philippines and Filipinx bodies illegible, but also haunts the Filipinx American diaspora. I argue that the haunted logics of empire are a set of relations, rather than specters of specific times and places, in which knowledge and power work together to continually produce and reproduce a specific and limiting reality and sensorium through which to view the world. In my interrogation of empire’s haunted logics, I not only look …

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

A Speech On The Principles Of Social Freedom, Delivered In Steinway Hall, Monday, Nov. 20, 1871, Victoria C. Woodhull, Paul Royster (Editor)

Zea E-Books in American Studies

Spiritualist, stockbroker, publisher, activist for women’s suffrage, equal rights, and “free love,” Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838 –1927) was the first woman nominated to run for President of the United States. The Principles of Social Freedom was delivered to a packed New York City audience in 1871. It called for a revolution in the legal, social, and sexual situation of women, for their liberation from the “despotic” control of men, and for their social freedom to live and love as they might choose. Mrs. Woodhull based this radical reimagining of social norms on America’s own values of freedom and equality, and …

Defending The Call To Preach In Shirley Caesar’S Gospel Autobiography, Angela Nelson

Popular Culture Faculty Publications

Shirley Caesar, a celebrated, multiple award-winning gospel singer and preacher, used and retold stories about three transformative spiritual experiences to build a case for defending her call to preach. These ritualistic spiritual events included chronicling her conversion, spirit baptism, and call experiences. In this discussion, I examine the contexts of Caesar’s familial and religious backgrounds, Christian Protestant preaching culture and gender, Caesar’s “parable” and “prolegomenon” of purpose, and Caesar’s defense of her call to preach. I conclude by exploring the ways in which, as an “outsider within,” Caesar’s “defense case story” negotiated and dissented from theological narratives about the place …

Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson

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

In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity.

The Death And Rebirth Of The Feminine Muse: Edgar Allan Poe And Sylvia Plath, Noha Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

While drawing on mythology and a literary history that associated women with death as well as creativity, Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath experimented with binary oppositions such as masculine/feminine, composition/decomposition, and death/(re)birth. They gained inspiration from the same source, the dead muse, but how do they transform traditions that derive from classical and medieval literary precedent, perhaps in ways that are inherently critical of patriarchal modes of gender dynamics? Why is Poe fixated on a feminine dead muse while Plath is inspired by what she calls her “father-sea-god muse”? How do both authors represent the female body, and how …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

Lg Ms 079 Steven G. Bull Papers, Jill Piekut Roy, Jeremy Rundstrom

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Papers include correspondence, photographs, publications, and ephemera documenting the beginning of the gay liberation movement in Maine and Steve Bull's participation in the movement both in Maine and nationally, especially through his involvement with the founding of the Wilde-Stein Club at University of Maine Orono in 1973 and his chairmanship of the first Maine Gay Symposium in 1974. Letters received by Bull and his friends, both personally and as Wilde-Stein Club officials, are evidence of the attitudes of both supporters of gay liberation and its opponents in the 1970s. Bull's research papers document the University of Maine's reaction to …

Babel, Daniel Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a series of three memoiristic essays around the vortex of identity. The first is an exploration of how childhood overmedication split the continuity of the author’s self-conception. The second traces the slipperiness of Jewish and Queer identifications detailing their synthesis in the klezmer revival in New York City in late 1980s and early 90s. The third is a polyphonic narration of the recovery of a lost klezmer’s life story in the face of the silence of time and slaughter.

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

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 …