Visual Studies Commons^™

Between The Lens And The Gaze: Reflections Of Femininity In Film, Noureen Sakr

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the male gaze’s construction of femininity through the use of glass and reflective surfaces, particularly mirrors, windows, glasses, and cameras in film. Reflections and depictions of women are recurring motifs in cinema, often symbolizing dynamics of perception and power. This thesis mobilizes related psychoanalytic and feminist conceptions to examine and compare the recurring visual motifs in the following films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954), Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), & Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). This thesis employs a qualitative, interdisciplinary methodology that integrates psychoanalytic theory, feminist film theory, literary criticism …

Performing Nefertiti: Feminist Afterlives Across Museum, Digital, And Cosmetic Cultures, Zaryab Khan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines the afterlives of Nefertiti’s bust as performances that stage the intersections of gender, empire, and visual culture. Moving beyond biographical reconstruction, it argues that the bust operates as a repertoire of performances continually re-scripted across cultural sites. Three case studies structure the analysis: the staging of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Neues Museum, which performs colonial possession and the aestheticization of feminine beauty; the digital intervention The Other Nefertiti (2015), which performs resistance through the circulation of unauthorized 3D scans; and the cosmetic “Nefertiti lift,” which performs the queen’s visage through contemporary bodies, inscribing antiquity as a template for …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

The Weight Of The Unknown: Xenophobia In Lucía Puenzo’S Xxy, Daylen Motamed

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This project examines how Lucía Puenzo’s film titled XXY critiques societal responses to unique identities (specifically intersex as an example), asking how xenophobia and normative gender expectations shape the marginalization of bodies that exist outside the binary. Situating the film within scholarship on queer adolescence and intersex representation, the analysis of this poster will argue that XXY exposes how institutions such as medicine and family reinforce harmful notions of “normalization.”

Drawing on close textual analysis of key scenes and engagement with critical sources, including Guillermo Olivera’s work on space and visibility and testimonies from intersex individuals, this study investigates how …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Film Review: Motherhood And Mathematics: Hegemonic Femininity And Deviance In Shakuntala Devi (2020), Bharat Dhiman

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

The Absence Of Female Representation In Film Bambang (2022): The Male Gaze And Lacanian Objet Petit A, Brigitta Winasis, Rias Antho Rahmi Suharjo

International Review of Humanities Studies

The discourse of the male gaze in popular culture constructs ideal standards of femininity deemed attractive based on traits and physical appearances that are desired by men. The film Bambang (2022) is an example of media that employs the male gaze as an exclusive tool to present female characters. By applying the mise-en-scène analysis method in film studies, this article explores the problem of female characters representation that is reduced to be desired objects through the concepts of Laura Mulvey's male gaze and Lacanian objet petit a. This article finds that Bambang (2022) utilizes objectifying dialogue by the two …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Seeing Her, Wanting Her: Postfeminist Desire And Its Contradictions In Zendaya’S Magazine Covers, Sophia Shelley

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

This article examines Zendaya’s modelling evolution as a case study to explore how a postfeminist critique and psychoanalysis can illuminate the contradictory nature of women’s advertising. My analysis compares Zendaya’s covers in Seventeen (2012) and Essence (2020), emphasizing the stark differences in aesthetics, where Seventeen conforms to ideals of (white) femininity, and in opposition, Essence centres around Black femininity and desire. By situating Zendaya as both a gendered and racialized ‘other,’ the intricate dynamics of femininity, race, and age in media portrayals are made visible. I argue that Zendaya’s image is sold through postfeminist ideals of empowerment, choice, and sexuality …

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

Huchum: The Legacy Of Fire Suppression, Indigenous Land Management, And Media Representation, Carolyn Coyne

Pomona Senior Theses

In my thesis, I examine how various forms of news media from the 1900s to present day in Ohlone territory have framed a particular hegemonic ideology around fire that matches early colonial journal entries – an ideology that is fueled by fear, sensationalism, and exclusion and directly commits violence against the Ohlone people. I investigate this time period because this is when modern news corporations, like The New York Times, rose into prominence. Specifically, I question how media representations of fire inform regulations over controlled burns; what are the similarities in discourse between media framing and policy? What tactics are …

Exploring The Shadows: How Taylor Swift's Music Embodies Dark Sound As A Popular Music Artist, Kristyn E. Cole

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

To challenge the conceptual matter of “dark sound”, this major research paper centers around the popular music artist, Taylor Swift to demonstrate an overarching feminist wisdom in an alternative style of music to identify how Taylor Swift presents and embodies qualities of “dark sound”. Research done by D. Ferrett, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes and Paul C. Jasen are used to examine her popular music, and its intersections and influence on our culture and society. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, this research paper discusses three of Swift’s songs; “willow” (evermore, 2020) for her sound, All Too Well: The Short …

Aging, Empathy, And Cinematic Metamorphosis: Through The Lens Of Agnès Varda, Nam Lee

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

This video essay examines Agnès Varda’s intricate portrayal of aging, resonating with Simone de Beauvoir’s call to break the silence on this subject. Composed exclusively of Varda’s film clips, it highlights her enduring engagement with aging and invites viewers to see it as a space of freedom and creative expression.

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

User Perception Of Gender Studies In Video Games, Quinn T. Gienapp

Honors Thesis

Alongside the increase in video game popularity, a subclass of games was formed that offer very unconventional gaming experiences. These games offer different stories that differ greatly from games made on multi-million-dollar budgets. Many of these types of games exist on the fringes of the industry and portray LGBTQ+ themes through their writing or gameplay. One of these games uses the medium of video games to process their trauma by relaying their own story. The game “He Fucked the Girl Out of Me” is an autobiographical video game that highlights the story of the Author and their experiences with …

Final Master's Portfolio, Savannah Packman

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio uses Marxist and feminist film theory to analyze various forms of visual media. It analyzes Mark Mylod's film The Menu (2022), Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe (2007), the historic V-J Day Kiss photograph, and popular TikTok videos. This portfolio focuses on the impact of capitalism in the political and economic sphere. It also analyzes images of women throughout history and critiques how these images have been used to formulate the American body politic.

Animating Gender: Conflicting Narrative And Character Design In Gravity Falls, Laine Marshall

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

This thesis analyzes the character designs from the Disney XD animated series Gravity Falls (Alex Hirsch, 2012-2016) through a third-wave feminist lens, arguing that these designs reflect an essentialized perception of gender that is in conflict with the themes of acceptance present in the series’ narrative. The series’ narrative pushes forth the idea that female characters are the moral center of the series and serve as an example to their peers, that they are self-assured and in control, and that men can push past any ignorance to care for the people around them, but this effort is undermined by the …

How Design Depicted In Film Contributes To The Evolution Of Cultural Narratives, Catherine Vanhoose

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

Interior Design and its trends have had significant influence on pop culture and the general public through the course of human history. Acting as a universal language, design is a tool often used to help communicate ideas. The different interpretations of these ideas are what help to create cultural narratives. This capstone explores the relationships between film and design as creative arts, how they are affected by the current times and trends throughout the history of women, and as a result how women throughout history are influenced by these relationships. Findings provide insight on how interior design is used to …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

‘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 …

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 …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Cause Branding Lizzo And The Body Positivity Movement, Natalie Pesqueira

Whittier Scholars Program

Known for her songs about self love and acceptance, Lizzo has become a body positive icon and a role model for so many people with larger bodies since her rise to fame. This paper is an analysis of Lizzo’s place in the current body positive moment as a fat, Black woman and the ways in which she has been forced to participate in fat activism and fat resistance due to her identity. This paper will also analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s shapewear brand Yitty is branded– is it positive inclusion or is it a case of cause branding?

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 …

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 …