Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Some-Ness In No-When: Queer Temporalities In The Horror Genre, Melody Hope Cooper

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In my research, I question why heteronormative society is afraid of the elements of horror films that are inherently queer. My focus is on temporal understandings of horror through the concepts of queer time, as theorized by Jack Halberstam and the theory of the abject, as presented by Julia Kristeva. I examine the relationship between queer time and heteronormative time. The abject serves as the return of time without identity or defined by binaries. Queer time is the time that will destroy heteronormative time’s conception of itself. This then relates to the horror that is created by the queering of …

Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"As Deadline .com bluntly put it, 'Kevin Spacey Apologizes to Anthony Rapp for Alleged Sexual Advances; Chooses to "Live As A Gay Man."' The outraged response of progressive intellectuals, activists, and cultural critics to Spacey’s twofold tweet has demonstrated, inter alia, the resilience of old school assumptions and expectations about coming out and about gay identity and gay identifications. These outraged responses have come especially from younger generations of intellectuals, activists, and critics, but also across generations, genders, and sexual orientations. Despite decades of attacks on models of gay identity that center on teleological narratives of coming out, and critiques …

Central State Communication Top Paper Award For Different Rights (In)Different Times: Rendering The Invisible Visible Through A Comparative Iconographic Analysis Of The Women’S Suffrage Parade Of 1913 And The 2017 Women’S March On Washington, Sara Potter

Awards

CSCA Top Paper in Communication Ethics, Activism, and Social Justice
Understanding the differences between Mirzoeff’s (2012) usage of visuality and Ball’s (2016) usage of invisibility can help us understand how various women’s movements throughout history have shaped and reshaped women’s roles, identities, and power. The women’s suffrage movements at the turn of the 20^th century are a provocative place for identifying this shift. Women within the 1912 and 1913 suffrage movements understood the boundary points between (the history of) a women's place within society and the potential for a shift in the engendered power structures, from a patriarchal society …

Untangling Late-Victorian Anxieties: Hair Symbolism In Dracula, Nancy Rosenberg England

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Gender And The Apotropaic In Charles Keeping's Illustrations To Dracula, Alice Mills

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Homonormativity And The Contemporary Vampire, Christine Prevas

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

A Topography Of Darkness: Isabel Allende’S “If You Touched My Heart,” The Gothic, And Disability, Laura Alexander

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Beast(S) Of Burden: Animal Anxiety In Bram Stoker’S Dracula, Lindsey Kurz

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Why Can't They Let A Girl Marry One Man?: The Origins Of Lucy Westenra's Suitors, Leah Davydov

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Medievalism In True Blood, Natalie Grinnell

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Anatomy Of The Victorian Vampire: Bodily Imaginings In Four Pre-Stoker Texts, Jane Kubiesa

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

The Science Of Degeneration In Stoker’S Dracula And Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau, Alessandra Albano

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

In-Terracial Conversation, Cheryl Dunye, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Who Are The Stewards Of The Aids Archive?, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

How are returns to AIDS cultural production whitewashed, and how can we return, attending with care to the earlier video work of women and people of color. How can we practice decent stewardship of this vulerbale archive?

#Cut/Paste+Bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action And Production On And Offline, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

I consider my media praxis project to be labs, encounters, theory-making and scholarly output where doing and thinking in community (often the classroom and its linked spaces) in the sites or technologies under consideration is the “scholarly” product. That is to say, the doing and the process is the product, and what remains can also be shared and/or evaluated, as needed. This sharing of process is what I model now. I describe my most recent project, Ev-Ent-Anglement, engaging again critically with social media networks from inside them, share some of my lessons learned about production and action-based New Media/DH research, …

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …

Why Katniss Everdeen Is Our Favorite Feminist – An Analysis Of The Heroine Of The Hunger Games Film Saga And Her Reception By Young Female Spectators, Paula Talero Álvarez

Theses and Dissertations

THROUGH THE FIGURE OF FICTIONAL CHARACTER KATNISS EVERDEEN, THIS DISSERTATION STUDIES HOW THE FILM INDUSTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY ENTRENCHES AND DISRUPTS GENDER, SEXUAL, AND RACIAL NORMATIVITIES. THE PROJECT USES TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND PARTICIPANT RESEARCH TO ANALYZE HOW THE FILMS AND NOVELS OF THE HUNGER GAMES SAGA ENCAPSULATE BOTH DOMINANT AND ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS RELATED TO FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, WOMANHOOD, AND MOTHERHOOD. IT ALSO EXPLORES IF AND HOW THE FEMALE HEROINE CAN BE READ AS FEMINIST AND PRODUCES A SENSE OF EMPOWERMENT. I CONCLUDE THAT ALTHOUGH THE INDUSTRY IS PRODUCING NEW MODELS OF WOMANHOOD THAT CHALLENGE TRADITIONAL GENDER ROLES, IT STILL PERPETUATES ROMANTIC IDEALS AND …

Female Agency In Fantasy Films Of The 1980s., Tara C. Rowland

Liberal Studies (MA) Final Essays

"Female Agency in Fantasy Films of the 1980s"

This study looks at female character roles in six of the major fantasy films produced during the 1980s. This research draws mostly on primary resources, the films, but includes commentary from research in the same vein. The purpose of this study was to show how certain fantasy films gave more agency and power to female characters in a genre often plagued with women who needed saving. Upon examination of these films, it becomes clear that not only is representation is an important part of film, especially for young children, but that it …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

He Scores Through A Screen: Mediating Masculinities Through Hockey Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

Hockey video games highlight the ways in which the video game medium shapes and conditions the experience of producing and/or performing the sport “in real life.” Indeed, the accumulation of advanced statistics in and through the constant evaluation, measurement, and surveillance which are inherent to video games—and increasingly seen as foundational for sport—reveals important contradictions not only in the way the embodied sport is played and understood, but also in terms of the proofs of masculinity upon which the sport is built. It then becomes clear that the building of masculinity and the empowerment of the character become one and …

Reeling Backward: The Haptics Of A Medium And The Queerness Of Obsolescence, Travis L. Wagner

Student Publications

This article considers the haptics of queer activist footage shot on video, and more specifically footage shot on magnetic media. Despite ideal methods of care, magnetic media faces extreme concern from a preservation standpoint. As a format that is both subject to rampant deterioration (known colloquially as “sticky shed”) and obsolescence (with the ceasing VCR production), the queer activist videotape is an archival artefact irretrievably stuck in a liminal space. To play a tape is to contribute to its destruction, yet to not play the tape is to overlook potentially unique moments in queer history. As such, this article explores …

Rebooting Masculinity After 9/11: Male Heroism On Film From Bush To Trump, Owen R. Horton

Theses and Dissertations--English

Conceptions of masculinity on film shifted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from representations of male heroism as invulnerable, powerful, and safe to representations of male heroism as resilient, vengeful, and vulnerable. At the same time, the antagonists of these films shifted towards representations as shadowy, unknowable, and disembodied. These changing representations, I argue, are windows into the anxieties Americans faced in the aftermath of the attacks. The continuing presentation of power as linked to violence, however, illustrates the ways in which conceptions of masculinity have stayed the same.

"It Came In Little Waves": Feminist Imagery In Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle +, Staci C. Dubow

Honors Theses

Chantal Akerman writes, “she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.”[1] This thesis addresses the films of Chantal Akerman from a theoretical feminist film perspective. There are many lenses through which Akerman’s rich body of work can be viewed, and I would argue that she herself never intended for it to be understood in just one way. I wish to situate Akerman’s films, in particular her 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1h 30m), within a discourse of other feminist film theorists and makers that were further rooted in …

The Power Of Queer Representation In The Media, Jack Harris

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper examines the lack of representation of the queer community in today's film and television productions. Recent work such as The CW's The 100 and Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra are used to create an intersectional analysis of the tropes associated with queer characters and the effect that queer representation has on viewers. The intersectionality of queer rights and feminism is mapped out in an effort to understand the root of the issue and, in that discovery, find solutions for the future.

Rape, Revenge, Reclamation: An Analysis Of Female Agency In American Rape-Revenge Films, Marissa Connell

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis, I will analyze five films that have a rape-revenge narrative: Ms. 45 (1981), M.F.A. (2017), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), I Spit on Your Grave (2010), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). I will argue that the violent actions taken by the female protagonist during her revenge against her rapist(s) serve to allow her to reclaim her agency that was stolen from her during the rape(s). I will show that the rape-revenge narrative is more diverse than it might seem, as the five films I analyze deal with rape, and responses to rape, in …

Wonder Woman: A Case Study For Critical Media Literacy, Adriana N. Fehrs

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

To better grasp the messages Wonder Woman is sending to its audience, a Critical Media Literacy (CML), ideological, and feminist framework is used to examine whether, and if so how, Wonder Woman succumbs to stereotypes that are often portrayed in the media. These theories will be used in the ensuing project to build a curriculum aimed at high school students.The curriculum positions students to examine the hegemonic ideologies that are represented in pop culture, specifically Wonder Woman.

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …

Why Weight? Zines As Effective Health Communication Tools Against Fat Phobia, Evelyn Gonzalez

Scripps Senior Theses

The current models for health care hold at their core a pathologization of fat bodies informed by discriminatory methods and ideologies leading to an explicit lack of quality medical care for those who fail to meet normative standards of health and size. This project is interested in examining alternative public health models that provide interventions into those systems. Specifically, this work will seek to understand how the grassroots movement, Health at Every Size (HAES), serves to interrupt current limited understandings of health and weight. HAES individualized, weight-neutral approach to health and wellness exists in seeming opposition to contemporary ideas around …

The Futures Of Comparative Literature Envisioned By Chinese Comparatists, Sheng Meng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Futures of Comparative Literature Envisioned by Chinese Compara­tists" Sheng Meng and Yue Chen discuss the future of Comparative Literature from the perspective of Chinese comparatists. They argue that in response to the latest rhetoric around the crisis and death of Comparative Literature as a discipline, Chinese comparatists have fallen into four major repre­sentative groups. While the first one advocates restoring of international literary relations study of the French School, the second and the third camp see the future of the discipline lying in both the turn to translation and world literature respectively. However, the most ambitious …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of The "Death" Of The Discipline Of Comparative Literature, Peina Zhuang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.