Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …

A City Room Of One's Own: Elizabeth Jordan, Henry James, And The New Woman Journalist, James Hunter Plummer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis considers the portrayal of the female journalist in the works of Elizabeth Jordan and Henry James. In 1898, Jordan, a journalist and editor herself, published Tales of the City Room, a collection of interconnected short stories that depict a close and supportive community of female journalists. It is, overall, a positive portrayal of female journalists by a female journalist. James, on the other hand, uses the female journalists in The Portrait of a Lady, “Flickerbridge,” and “The Papers” to show his discomfort toward New Journalism and the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These …

On Growing Up Finnish In The Midwest: A Family Oral History Project, Ingrid Ruth Nixon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores what oral history interviews with my mother reveal about the familial and community dynamics that influenced Finnish-American children growing up on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula between 1930 and 1950. Close to four hours of oral history interviews were conducted with Viola Nixon, who is second and third-generation Finnish-American on her father’s and mother’s sides, respectively. After conducting a narrative analysis of the interviews, five themes emerged as significant to community function: family, language, education, work and church. I grouped some of these themes together to create three stories informed by materials drawn from the interviews, a cookbook, and …

The Two-Sided Coin: Madness And Laughter As Subversion In Alice’S Adventures In Wonderland And The Sandman, Tessa Starr Swehla

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mad female characters in Western literature have traditionally represented attempts by dominant patriarchal discourse to subjugate women’s discourse: these characters are usually pathologized in both their dialogue with other characters and in their physical bodies. This subjugation by representation of mad female characters in dominant discourse parallels similar attempts to portray women as lacking in humor. This thesis studies the intersections between madness and humor and the ability of female characters that embody both to challenge and subvert dominant discourse. By examining the characters of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s novel and Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman …

The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work examines representations of maternal relationships between black women in five contemporary novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Sula by Toni Morrison, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Louisiana by Erna Brodber. Rather than situating the origins of black feminist literary studies during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that Hurston’s work shapes contemporary black feminist literary studies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny provides a mothering archetype that inspires a dominant theme and practice—the black maternal, within contemporary black …

"This Aggression Will Not Stand": The Coens On Masculinity, Evan Kelly

Honors Projects

This research examines the constructions of masculinity within the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. Through textual analysis of three film, Raising Arizona (1987), Fargo (1996), and The Big Lebowski (1998), three key themes emerge: masculinity as performance, children and family as ego extensions, toxic masculinity personified, and children and redemption through rejection of hegemonic masculinity. Comprehensively, the paper seeks to prove the Coens uniquely construct masculinity as a performance which can override public policy and interpersonal prosperity. This research serves several functions. First, it recasts the Coens as cutting-edge progressive filmmakers, despite their protestations to the contrary. What we …

Private Deaths: The Impossibilities Of Home In The Modernist Novel, Ava Bindas

English Honors Projects

This project examines novels by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Nella Larsen featuring female characters who contemplate or commit suicide. Relying on a composite theoretical framework that weaves together geography theories of spaces as well as gendered theories of bodies by authors like Judith Butler, Rita Felski, and Victoria Rosner, I argue women commit suicide because their modern homes fail to accommodate their gendered bodies. Focusing less on the moment of death than on the conditions that make choosing to live impossible, this project tracks how, during a moment of supposed liberation, conceptions of gender, modernity, and domestic …

"Revealing Reality": Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize The Transnational Imaginary, Stephen Edward Spence

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation posits that four Asian filmmakers engage in “revealing reality” in unique but interconnected ways that employ innovative narrative and cinematic/visual techniques, including a direct address to the senses and an augmenting of their vision with fantasy or surrealism. My study argues that Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) mobilize this visual and narrative strategy to participate in debates about globalization and to comment on the state of their respective nations, the concept of the nation, and the transnational. The films of each artist are examined in detail; I investigate their stylistic …

Images, Speech Balloons, And Artful Representation: Comics As Visual Narratives Of Early Career Teachers, Julian Lawrence, Ching-Chiu Lin, Rita Irwin

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The ways in which teachers adjust to challenges in the process of becoming professionals are complicated. Teacher mentorship, however, is an important step to creating and sustaining a strong professional career. This article discusses new understandings from a Canadian research project: Pedagogical Assemblage: Building and Sustaining Teacher Capacity through Mentoring Programs in British Columbia. Through our use of an a/r/tography informed methodology in teacher mentorship, we have come to understand how the use of comics permits an unfolding of visual narratives as a unique way of contextualizing the complex stories of teaching and learning. Our motivation in employing comics as …

Teaching Critical Looking: Pedagogical Approaches To Using Comics As Queer Theory, Ashley Manchester

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Given the challenging depth of queer theoretical concepts, this article argues that one of the most effective ways to teach the complexities of queer theory is by utilizing comics in the classroom. I focus on how college-level instructors can use the content, form, and history of comics to teach students how to enact and do queer theory. By reading and making comics, students learn concrete and theoretical tools for combatting oppressive discourses and modes of meaning making. Teaching comics as queer theory promotes both innovative critical thinking and critical looking skills by centralizing both the rich history of queer comics …

Review Of Captain Marvel And The Art Of Nostalgia, By Brian Cremins, Sean Kleefeld

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

No abstract provided.

The Book That Made Me: A Girl, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this installment of The Book That Made Me, a series from Public Books reflecting on the books that have changed our lives, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reflects on the freedom he received—to become a whole other person, in a whole other place—from an unexpected source.

Eng 100: Social Changes Promoted On Television, Avery Hoskins

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

We Were There, We Are Here: Queer Collections And Their Repositories And Legacies, Alexandria Deters

MA Theses

Art history and history has gaps within it that are just now starting to be filled and the absences rectified. Those gaps are caused by erasure of queer art history. The way it has been rectified is through queer institutions and queer collections. This study explores how queer institutions and collections are innately political through saving queer objects and art. It is through their efforts that queer art history is finally being recognized in major institutions, collections, and exhibitions. I interview scholars and collectors to understand why they collect, which reveals the political nature and uniqueness of queer art as …

New Directions In Indigenous Women’S History, Susana D. Geliga, Margaret D. Jacobs

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Review Essay:

Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 240. IBSN: 978-1-101- 56025-9.

Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), pp. 538. ISBN: 978-0- 8032-3825-1.

Andrae M.Marak and Laura Tuennerman, At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), pp. 232. ISBN: 978-0-8165-2115-9.

Mary Jane McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), pp. 336. ISBN: 978-0-88755-738-5.

Sarah Deer, The Beginning …

The Dramatization Of Cultural Hybridity And The "In-Between" Turkey In Fazıl's Künye, Önder Çakırtaş

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Dramatization of Cultural Hybridity and the "In-Between" Turkey in Fazıl's Künye" Önder Çakırtaş addresses Turkey's historical context and exposes how political, social and cultural changes were expressed in Turkey's public sphere. Using Niyazi Berkes's theory of secularism as proceeding of modernism Çakırtaş discusses different examples of stylistic strategies of cultural hybridity in the playwright's historical-based play, Künye. He investigates how political changes in pre-Turkey times signify Turkey's national striving, and how the Ottoman-conservative past metamorphoses into Turkic-secular. The study juxtaposes the perceptions of 'introduction to Westernization' and 'departure from Islamic past' in a period …

Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama And The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Claire T. Solomon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anarcho-Feminist Melodrama and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (1929-2016)" Claire Solomon analyzes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope as an apparatus of capture (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand). More precisely, her article models how such tropes imply modes of reading anachronistically and metafictionally that decontextualize gestures of resistance and conflate female writers, performers, and characters across time and place. Solomon offers a situated formalist reading of Argentine playwright Salvadora Medina Onrubia's 1929 drama, Las descentradas, revealing an avant-garde counterpoint of melodrama and metafiction as an ambiguous alternative to capture.

Approaching The Value And The Future Of The Novel: A Book Review Article On Boxall's Scholarship, Yili Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Fat Female Bodies Of Saturday Night Live: Uncovering The Normative Cultural Power Of A Countercultural Comedy Institution, Katharine Cacace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite its reputation as one of the most countercultural and anti-establishment voices in mainstream television comedy, Saturday Night Live helps produce and reproduces cultural norms. Using weight and gender as a lens, this paper investigates Saturday Night Live’s methods of creating, imitating, and evoking the fat female body in order to limit female agency and police unruly female power. It contends that even the inclusion of nonnormative female bodies—fat bodies, queer bodies, and bodies of color—is merely a reiteration of the techniques of neoliberal multiculturalism for the television audience.

“The Monster They've Engendered In Me”: Gothic Strategies In African American And Latina/O Prison Literature, 1945-2000, Jason Baumann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent scholarship on American prison literature, such as Caleb Smith’s pivotal study The Prison in the American Imagination, has uncovered the power that the terrifying realities of the modern prison have had as an inspiration for the development of Gothic literature, as well as the ways that prison writers have in turn drawn upon these Gothic images. However, these scholars have considered prison writers as passively trapped by Gothic discourses that ultimately objectify them as monsters. In contrast, I will argue that African American and Latina/o prison writers in the post-war period have consciously transformed these Gothic themes in …

Empirical Reflections On Women Students In Usa Nonprofit Academic Programs And Realizations About Ideological Influence, Norman A. Dolch

Journal of Ideology

This research reports on the beliefs of a select sample of women and men faculty across the USA regarding women in nonprofit organization academic programs. The main differences were on professional orientation among graduate students, difficulty with quantitative oriented courses, and portrayal of women in coursework. To eliminate these differences, beliefs (ideologies) among faculty and students need to be altered. Sanberg’s book Lean In is especially informative about changing beliefs about career orientation for both men and women to what she calls a belief in sustainable and fulfilling positions. Another valuable resource for faculty concerned about these issues is Creating …

Missing Mother: The Female Protagonist's Regression To The Imaginary Order In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, The Sundial, And We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Julie Ann Baker

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines the psyches of the female protagonists from three of Shirley Jackson’s Gothic novels: Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, Aunt Fanny Halloran in The Sundial, and Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A psychoanalytic and feminist reading is applied to the texts to elucidate the characters’ rejection of the Symbolic Order and regression to the Imaginary Order, and Lacan’s theories of the Desire of the Mother and objet petit a are also applied to the texts to further delineate this regression. Julia Kristeva’s work regarding the lost object of the mother …

The Power To Overcome: The Resistance And Resiliency Of Black Motherhood, Nathan Full

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Motherhood is not a monolithic experience. The intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class are integral facets that influence and control how one practices maternity, especially in a white hegemonic state. Further, control and choice serve as contributing factors, influencing the level of control women have over entering maternity and how a mother claims ties to her offspring. With these intersectional factors and control measures combined, motherhood is a complicated matter, one that influences how women practice maternity. The practice of motherhood is influenced by race, with black women experiencing a historical struggle in their relationships with motherhood. These difficulties …

Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, Marie Buck

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Weird Propaganda: Texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements” examines texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements: the early Black Arts Movement anthology For Malcolm; the now-canonical texts Our Bodies, Ourselves; The Black Woman; and Sisterhood Is Powerful; a number of pamphlets and other small press works; and the Black Panthers’ newspaper. This project argues that writers and activists used senses of the uncanny, along with elements of science fiction and fantasy, to negotiate the day-to-day uncertainties of political organizing and, more broadly, political hope. The texts examined here convey particular political views in an explict …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 38 (2017), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Dana Fobes Bowne, Deborah Cooney, Dale Drake, Anita B. Loscalzo, Rachel May, Ronda Harrell Mcallen, Kathy Moore, Linda Welters

Uncoverings Journal

Foreword by Lynne Zacek Bassett

"Old Quilt Brought to America" by Dana Fobes Bowne

The Cushman Quilt Tops: A Tale of North and South by Rachel May and Linda Welters

Louisiana Acadian Cotonnade Quilts: Preserving the Weaving Heritage of a People by Dale Drake

Baltimore Album Quilts: New Research by Deborah Cooney and Ronda Harrell McAllen

Whence Garlands, Swags, Bowknots, and Baskets? Four Neoclassical Design Motifs Found in American Quilts by Anita Loscalzo

The Mystery of the Harlequin Star Quilts: Finding and Naming a Previously Unidentified Regional Design by Kathleen L. Moore

Contributors

Index

“There Was That In Her Face And Form Which Made Him Loathe The Sight Of Her”: Disfiguration And Deformity Of Female Characters In 19th Century American Women’S Literature, Kelsi E. Cunningham Miss

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman challenge the way that society treats and views the disabled and deformed. Through different representations of the disabled characters, the three short stories by these authors reveal the realities that women faced in the 19^th century in response to rigid beauty standards and expectations. The authors in this study address the marginalized position of the disabled characters and show how society’s attempts to “normalize” the women confine them to a fixed identity. Analyzing the texts in relation to disability studies and the authors’ perceived effectiveness of social charity will …

The Parton Paradox: A History Of Race And Gender In The Career Of Dolly Parton, Lindsey L. Hammers

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

With a career that has spanned over five decades, country music artist Dolly Parton has continually redefined her image and her music to remain relevant. By incorporating the musical and lyrical stylings of disco and other popular music genres into her songs, Parton moved beyond music’s color line to increase her popularity as an artist. This thesis shows how Parton established a distinct career that catered to different audiences as she traversed the musical color line and repackaged what feminism looked like to country music fans during the Women’s Movement of the 1960s. Placing Parton’s actions in conversation with music’s …

Female Art And Artisans In Edith Wharton’S The House Of Mirth, The Custom Of The Country, And “Roman Fever”, Julia B. Welch

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In early twentieth century old and new New York social circles, the marriage market’s commodification of women acted as the controlling factor for relationships, female power, and personal identity. When considering Wharton’s works for the first-hand viewpoint that she provided of the marriage market, it becomes clear that her interest in art plays heavily into the way women comport themselves within her novels. In order to discuss this relationship in Edith Wharton’s works, I’ve created terms that delineate the various ways female characters respond to the pressures of the marriage market. The best way to analyze Wharton’s women is by …

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …