Visual Studies Commons^™

Rodcon, Program, 2024, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--- Welcome
--- Locations
--- Events Schedule
--- What's That?: Event Descriptions
--- Artist Alley
--- Food Options
--- Raffle
--- Additional Info
--- On Your Radar
--- Sponsors

Religious Iconography, Expressionist Lighting, And The Antihero's Spiritual Journey In Marvel's Daredevil, Savannah L. Pruett

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In Marvel’s Daredevil (2015), Matthew Murdock undergoes different phases of an antiheroic spiritual journey as his faith in the judicial system and his Maker is tested by evil in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. This thesis will dig deeper to reveal how the Daredevil series uses purposefully designed religious iconography and expressionist lighting to tell the story of Matthew Murdock’s antiheroic spiritual journey across three seasons. This thesis aims to prove that Daredevil is a complex and thought-provoking franchise that analyzes what it means to be an antihero, including the moral and ethical lines one is willing to cross to …

‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Rage Should Not Be A Privilege: The Potential Power Of The ‘Racial Imaginary’, Georgia Mcgovern

CMC Senior Theses

Female rage exists outside of the constructed masculine ideal of anger. To examine female rage, one must analyze the intersections between gender and race. I examine white women's privilege and access to female rage in reality and the fictional world. I explore Black Feminist poetry as a form of storage for rage at gender-based prejudice, racial injustice, and their intersection. Using Myisha Cherry’s term “Lordean Rage”, I recognize this specialized manifestation of female rage as an artistic, intergenerational source of energy for change.

I examine Claudia Rankine’s term “racial imaginary” as an imaginative space in which white people draw lines …

Visual Afrofuturism And Dieselfunk In The Works Of Tim Fielder, Justin Wigard

Third Stone

Tim Fielder is, first and foremost, a visual Afrofuturist. This distinction is significant in understanding Fielder’s corpus, who works as an illustrator, cartoonist, concept artist, and even animator. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi alongside Jim, his twin brother, Fielder has become an ardent advocate, pioneer, and creator in the 21st-century Afrofuturist movement, creating visual representations of Black people overcoming past, present, and future systems of oppression, all within fantastic and speculative settings.

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 …

“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 …

It's A Match: Shaadi.Com, Tinder, And The Fantasy Of Frictionless-Ness, Purvi Rajpuria

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In this essay I carry out case studies of Shaadi.com and Tinder to unpack the cultural principles underlying the apps that shape our interpersonal relationships today. I demonstrate that these apps are grounded in a fantasy of frictionless-ness, or the desire to shield the self from discomfort caused by external factors, and argue that this is a fraught cultural ideal. My analysis reveals that a fantasy of frictionless-ness gives birth to a cultural landscape of rampant subjectivity and tepid morality, which hampers our ability to form deep and meaningful connections with each other. Recognising the flaws of such a fantasy, …

The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism In Science Fiction Cinema., Cody Gault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines philosophical posthumanism as a means for critical analysis of the interaction between humans and nonhuman androids in select science fiction cinematic universes. The interaction is analyzed through several facets, notably the interactions between humans and nonhuman androids, particularly as interactions between the human and nonhuman are often sites of violence. Chapter one is an introduction. Chapter two describes the development of philosophical posthumanism from humanism, also including an analysis of philosophical posthumanism, and how it can be used as a critical lens. Chapter three begins an analysis of science fiction cinema by examining the Blade Runner films …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

The Owl House: Queerness And Witchcraft In Modern Media, Gray E. Takahashi

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The Owl House is a groundbreaking television series on Disney Channel created by Dana Terrace. The show follows Luz, a young human, as she makes a new home for herself in a magical realm called the Boiling Isles. (Vorrasi-Banis 102). Within the series, there are many queer elements, in terms of literal LGBTQ+ representation as well as in a more expansive and critical sense. The Owl House is unique because of its willingness to break and queer a multitude of social conventions. This paper examines the evolution of the witch as both figure and trope of patriarchal resistance as well …

Rodcon, Program, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--- Welcome
--- Locations
--- Schedule
--- What's That?: Event Descriptions
--- Artist Alley
--- Food Map
--- Sponsors

Rodcon, Flier, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon
Saturday April 1, 2023
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free & Open to the Public
Rod Library, UNI Campus

Flier used in promotion of the event.

The Iconography Of An All-American Icon: Sailors, Homoeroticism, And Mid-Century Queer Cultural Politics, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

Through a new critical reading of the relevant images found in The Young Physique and Physique Pictorial, I explore how the sailor has become a homoerotic icon and how the sailor has become an object of gay fetishization and fantasy. Through media (in this instance: magazines), I focus on the time period between World War II through Gay Liberation in the 1970s, showing how the culture of the port cities of New York City and Los Angeles helped to create this homoerotic image of the sailor. Through a reading of three images that demonstrate the homoeroticism of sailor imagery from …

Scarico: It’S Only A Movie, Most Of The Time, Thomas Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Exploitation cinema is a domain of motion picture content catering to a viewership interested in imagery that is more provocative than what mainstream audiences desire to see. These types of films are typically considered lowbrow entertainment and have been made in every era, albeit in a limited capacity proportional to the niche audience demand for them. Some time periods see a rise in exploitation film productions in response to a growing demand for such content from a larger share of the broader cinematic audience. This relationship indicates that period-specific cultural factors can cause mainstream audience members to seek out more …

Comic Literature And Graphic Novel Uses In History, Literature, Math, And Science, James O. Barbre Iii, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Graphic novels and comics have a rich history and have long served as a medium for both education and entertainment. Although we live in an increasingly technology-rich era which offers abundant visual stimulation to compete with comics, graphic literature is arguably a more immediate and robust resource than ever before. The following paper highlights specific applications of graphic literature to pedagogical purposes, including implications for the use of comics in teaching history, world languages, English as a new language, science, and mathematics. Across these areas, a wide degree of application exists for teachers, in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. In …

Masculinity In American Movie-Musical Films, Christopher Sparks

Fall Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

My presentation explores the relation between American masculinity and film musicals. I demonstrate how the dominance of the musical at the box office in the middle of the 20^th century reflects historical events and technological change. Drawing on both scholarly and popular criticism, I show how the images of masculinity that Americans once encountered on the silver screen have transformed as musicals became marginal to popular culture in the United States. My research considers both classic 20^th century musicals, such as Wizard of Oz (1939) and 42^nd Street (1933), and more recent experiments with the genre, including …

The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines The Gutter In Boxers & Saints To Tell A Transnational Tale, David Lucas Jr

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

Fragmentation And Fabulation: Reflexivity And The New Black Documentary, Joanna Lehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis concerns the photographic representation of Black bodies in new, reflexive documentary forms that have been increasingly produced and exhibited in the midst of America’s renewed discourse on race. Approaching this argument categorically, focused on the themes of fabulation and fragmentation, my task here is to uncover the gaps and overlaps between earlier critiques of the documentary image and more recent discourse on photography and race by exploring the specific methods through which select recent documentary projects embed and expand these critiques.

Fragmentation is a category of production I use to frame a movement of Black photographic artists …

Because Potato, Candice Evers

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis project explores the phenomenological qualities of the internet; asking, since the internet is difficult to grasp, what other modes of investigation might we have available? Using an investigative framework set forth by Jack Halberstam, this thesis declines to come to knowledge solely through understanding the formal, the structural, the highly visible and mainstream. The literature that I have gathered provides a range of modes for interrogating the simultaneously central and inconsequential subject of my thesis itself: the potato. Juxtaposing the physical, political and material conditions of the potato the internet’s least academic mode of knowing: the meme. Analyzing …

Rodcon, Flier, 2022, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Rodcon
Saturday April 9, 2022
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free and open to the public

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …

Rodcon, Program, 2022, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--Welcome to RodCon
--Location
--Schedule
--What's That?
--Artists
--Food
--Sponsors
--Autographs

Afroam: A Virtual Film Production Group, Bill Taylor Jr.

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Because of the gatekeeping practices of the Hollywood film industry, and the high cost of both filmmaking and distribution in general, Afro-American filmmakers have struggled to produce films with “global reach.” This study visits the possibility of Afro-American filmmakers using alternative technologies and infrastructures to produce high-quality films, thereby bypassing the high cost and exclusionary practices of Hollywood studios. Using new 21st-century digital technology, this study involved the creation of a small geographically dispersed virtual film production team. The study’s foundational framework was a constructivist qualitative research paradigm, using Action Research, and supported by 24 months of triangulated data from …

Frederick Wiseman's Essene (1972): The Duality Of Mary And Martha, Nilita Vachani

Journal of Religion & Film

America’s legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman shot Essene 50 years ago at the height of the commune movement in the United States. Unlike his previous institutional films which showcase an insane asylum, a public high school, an inner city police force, a hospital, and a military training school, Essene's canvas is the far less turbulent terrain of a serene and austere Benedictine monastery devoted to the love and service of God and the divine spirit. This paper undertakes a close textual and hermeneutic analysis of Essene alongside an appraisal of Wiseman’s working methodology, his cinematic portrayals of character and dramaturgy, …

Empirical Drawings: Utilizing Comic Essays In The Social Studies Classroom To Teach Citizenship, Angelo Letizia

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article posits that the comic medium, wedded with traditional essay assignments, may be a powerful tool for social studies teachers, those who prepare social studies teachers at the collegiate level and other teachers and professors who desire to teach about citizenship in an era of "fake news" and alternative facts.

"Knowing It's Real Means You Gotta Make A Decision": Depictions Of Post-Traumatic Disorders And Coping Mechanisms In The Punisher And Jessica Jones, Megan M. Rutter

English Department Masters Theses

Post-traumatic disorders have been included in some of the most popular narratives in mainstream culture. Though the early decades of movies included 1948’s The Best Days of Our Lives is an award-winning movie that follows three veterans home from World War II and depicts their struggles with reacclimating to society it became more popular after Vietnam veterans and their allies fought and protested for an appropriate diagnosis for PTSD after decades of it not being seen as a legitimate psychological disorder. Since then, post-traumatic disorders have been included in media as popular as the series finale of M*A*S*H in 1983, …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio