Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

From Terrorism To Feminism: Live-Action Superhero Films As Reflections Of American Social Problems Post 9/11, Lindsey Poe

English MA Theses

Superheroes have always been used as tools of escapism. From their insurgence into popular culture in the 1930s, to their animation in television programs, and appearance in films in the late 1970s until now, superheroes have allowed audiences an avenue through which they could imagine an alternate, utopian reality. Through the analyses of modern superhero films, audiences are able to connect how the genre reflects larger social and political fears in the wake of such unexpected realities: fear of annihilation after the 9/11 attacks and existing in a potentially unsafe America following the election of Donald Trump. The superhero film …

Politicized Identity In Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl And The Fortunes, Savanna S. Batson

English Department Theses

This thesis explores the effects of politicized identities on the basis of particular aspects of an individual’s being, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality in Peter Ho Davies’s novels The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016). By carefully studying each of his protagonists within the context of the particular time and place in which they have come of age, and are now living, this thesis demonstrates how Davies engages with themes of identity, community, and alienation relative to the specific socio-cultural matrix that informs the politicization of identities at their time. It explores how Davies’s characters undergo the process …

On The Shoulders Of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation And Scholarly Perception Of Edith Tolkien, Nicole M. Duplessis

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In his obituary for Carpenter, Douglas A. Anderson reviews Carpenter’s “long and complex” involvement with the subject of his 1977 authorized biography, indicating that “with [Carpenter’s] passing it is time to begin to assess his changing perspectives on Tolkien and on his own Tolkien-related work.” Since its publication, Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, which Anderson calls “an excellent book. . . unusually accurate more than a quarter of a century after it was written, despite many advances in Tolkien scholarship” remains a largely unquestioned authority, its influence so entrenched as to be virtually invisible. As a result, scholarship on Tolkien, from …

Tolkien, Self And Other: "This Queer Creature." By Jane Chance And Tolkien And Alterity Eds. Christopher Vaccaro And Yvette Kisor, Jason Fisher

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

“Happiest Delineation:” Literature, Reading Habits, And Characterization In Austen’S "Northanger Abbey", Emily Crider

Undergraduate Research Conference

In response to the strictly gendered society of Regency England, Jane Austen’s 1817 Gothic parody novel Northanger Abbey offers insight to the nuances of gender disparities. As such, the use of a gendered and historical critical approach throughout the project allows for a more comprehensive view of the societal expectations and taboos of 18th-century reading.

Subverting The Patriarchy And Its Ties To Feminism: Du Maurier And Her Adaptations, Samantha Koller

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

This paper describes the common (mis)reading of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca as upholding Victorian patriarchal values and attempts to demonstrate that the novel is indeed feminist and acts as a critique and subversion of those patriarchal standards; it then examines the film and stage adaptations of Rebecca, demonstrating via comparison to the original medium that feminism has begun to affect other cultural interpretations and depictions of the narrator, Mrs. Danvers, and Rebecca herself.

“‘Hel-Heime!’: The Daring Love Between Men In Dome Karukoski’S Tolkien”, Christopher Vaccaro

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article briefly summarizes the homo-amorous connections between members of the T.C.B.S. in the Karukoski's film, Tolkien.

Eng 100: How Would You Feel If You Were One Of Them?, Judit Gonzalez

English 100-200-300 Conference

No abstract provided.

Ivy Leaves, Volume 94, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2019 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Jacob Cavett, Caleb Flachman, Lucy Kirkpatrick, Logan Carrolll, Aleisse Buck, Alli Kennedy, Matthew Jarrett, Emma Morris, Jessica Jeter, Jayne Small, Lauren Swathwood, Megan Adams, Terra Baughn, Logan Chapman, Allie Thompson, Lizzie Todd, Austin Rusher, Blaire Bellaire, Ashley Stone, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker.

In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …

Familiar Forms, Strange Uses: Paratexts, Narrative Interventions, And The Queering Of Possible Worlds In Illicit Narratives Of Nineteenth-Century Britain, Jessica Saxon

English Theses & Dissertations

“Losing” one’s self in a story is one of the great pleasures of reading. Key to this act is the “transport” of the reader into the storyworld. Nineteenth-century British narratives offered various transport modes, including prefaces and footnotes designed to orient the reader to the storyworld and narrative interventions designed to align the reader with the values of that world. Yet this act of transport was fraught with tensions and anxieties in the nineteenth century. Worries about the dangers of reading, especially the dangers for women and the lower classes, abounded; much of the worry stemmed from fears that these …

On The Wind, Wyatt Georgeson

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

N/A

2019 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2019 IGGAD Conference: Tracing the African Diaspora: Places of Suffering, Resilience, and Reinvention.

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, "Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies," Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is …

Trauma, Ethics, And The Body At War In Brittain, Borden And Bagnold, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of …

Subverting Transnormativity: Rage And Resilience In Kim Fu’S For Today I Am A Boy, Andrea Ruthven

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyzes the affective politics of rage and resilience in the novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014) by Kim Fu. The novel explores the dis-identification (Muñoz 1999) of gender identity through the protagonist, focusing on the rage, sadness, fear, and secrecy that function as the glue holding the body together, but that also work to constrain the process of self-identification. The novel is not the celebration of self-realization, nor is it the lamentation of a traumatized protagonist. Instead, the narrative pays attention to the various ways in which non-binary, or non-normative gender identities are marginalized, and to …

Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …

Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …

Carceral Dreams: Punishment In Contemporary Utopian Fiction, Amandine Faucheux

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the representation of legal violence—punishment—is an essential definitional axis to utopian literature. Utopian scholarship tends to position the political or economic system that a text imagines as the key determinant of that text’s identity as a Utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-Utopia. I propose instead that the propensity of the imaginary society to inflict violence in a legal or official context defines its utopian or dystopian quality. Through an analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone utopian novels and stories by George Orwell, Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Adam Roberts, and Kelley Eskridge, …

The Unruly Womb In Early Modern English Drama: Plotting Women's Biology On The Stage, Ursula Potter

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She illuminates how playwrights both satirized and perpetuated the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite.

The Pedagogies Of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, And Neoliberalism In Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

Amnesty International’s 2015-16 push for the decriminalization of sex work sparked yet another international debate on sex trafficking, with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), together with a long list of celebrities and iconic feminists such as Gloria Steinem, claiming that such measure will only worsen sex trafficking, among other problems, and myriad pro-sex work feminists vouch-ing exactly the opposite.1 This dispute is by no means new-as of 2018, it remains at an impasse-but, interestingly, while sociologists and women’s studies scholars have been discussing sex trafficking issues for decades now, and despite its intimate relation to postcolonialism and globalization, …

Surviving The Alamo, Violence Vengeance, And Women’S Solidarity In Emma Pérez’S Forgetting The Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, Adrianna M. Santos

English Faculty Publications (Archived)

This article analyzes Chicana feminist texts to frame a discussion of survival as a theoretical concept. Using Emma Pérez’s historical novel Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I introduce the concept of survival narrative as a framework for analysis of Chicana literature, and briefly review Chicana feminist theory to support the argument. Examples from Perez’s novel illustrate the power of the survival narrative to advance a decolonial perspective. The novel reinscribes mainstream representations of gender violence that characterize the traditional Western by focusing on the empowerment that comes from solidarity amongst women and …

Reputation And Rurality: Using A Montana-Authored Text To Talk About Agency And Language In The Secondary English Classroom, Catherine Dorian

The Montana English Journal

This article offers curriculum as well as rationale for teaching Debra Magpie Earling’s Montana-based novel, Perma Red. I begin with my own experience teaching the novel as it stumbled into my lap as and meandered its way into my rural classroom, where Earling’s language challenges students to deconstruct and further understand issues in agency pertaining to sexual assault and consent. Then, I explain methods and strategies I use to teach language and close-reading to my twelfth grade students while they read this novel, my aim being to make teaching this unit as accessible as possible for all Montana teachers. …

Sylvia Plath And "The Bigger Things": War, History, And Modernism At Midcentury, Reagan Lothes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sylvia Plath and “the bigger things” explores the ways in which Plath’s “confessionalism”—so often read as antithetical to T. S. Eliot’s notion of “impersonality”—constituted not a break from modernism but rather a negotiation of its transatlantic legacy. In doing so, it works against a long-standing critical tradition that has defined Plath, who was living in England as she composed her Ariel poems, as nonetheless a distinctly American poet and one focused uniquely—and, as some have claimed, even pathologically—on the self. An examination of Plath’s published work, including interviews, statements of poetics, journal entries, and letters, in the context of a …

An Incurable Malady? Representations Of Female Madness In Nineteenth Century-Twenty-First Century Literature, Kimberly Sooklall

Theses and Dissertations

From the mad heroines of classic Victorian literature to the depictions of female insanity in modern Western writing, women suffering from mental instability have been a common recurrence at the center of plotlines. This thesis will explore the historical context of madness as a gendered concept by examining several literary works published in different centuries.

Virginia Woolf And Gertrude Stein’S Repurposing Of Feminine Domestic Language Through The Lens Of Bakhtinian Heteroglossia And Dialogic Theory, Samantha Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This essay examines the ways that Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and “The Good Anna” recapture feminine domestic language in order to produce a new form of feminist heteroglossia, a reworking of Bakhtinian heteroglossia and dialogic theory.

Multicultural Women Writers, Nashieli Marcano, Jennifer Jacobs

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez

Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.

Acknowledging The "Forgotten" Contributions Of Black Female Authors: A Review Of _Women Of The Harlem Renaissance_ By Cheryl Wall, Emily M. Allmond

The Corinthian

This review critiques Cheryl Wall's book, Women of the Harlem Renaissance. In this book, Wall addresses the contributions black female authors and artists made to the Harlem Renaissance. The life stories of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston are examined and analyzed by Wall to show the obstacles these female authors faced, and the ways in which the subject matter of their works was affected by their circumstances and cultural upbringing. For many years, these contributions were largely overlooked by both critics and popular culture. Wall's narrative illuminates the significance of these contributions, provides some context for …