Visual Studies Commons^™

Going The Distance: How The Disney Renaissance Illustrated The Social And Cultural Changes In America During The 1990s, Deborah A. Bates

Graduate Masters Theses

The cultural and social history of America in the 90s is examined in this thesis by looking at the Disney Renaissance, a period of ten films made by the Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). This thesis illustrates how the animators were able to seamlessly incorporate important societal trends of the 90s into their films, portraying a changing world within their films. As they were creating a new style of the animated movie musical, they were creating works that connected to the audiences watching in new ways, by putting up a reflection of society within their films. The way that the …

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 …

Temporal Ubiquity, Brittni Mosby

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis examines looking as a sacred and relational practice rooted in familial memory, storytelling, and the photographic archive. Drawing from early experiences of engaging family photographs alongside my mother and great-grandmother, I conceptualize these encounters as the formation of “temporal altars”: living vessels that activate space, memory, and multiplicity. These intimate acts of looking and listening position the home as a critical site where Black subjectivity is held with care and complexity.

By casting these modes of perception into domestic spaces, my thesis not only resists reductive external gazes but interrogates the archive as a colonial apparatus structured by …

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

Roaming Pixels: Clipping The Operative Close-Up, Vanessa Gravenor

Artl@s Bulletin

Abstract: This essay examines the disseminated war image as it takes off at the speed of light. It seeks to challenge the legacy of the post-structuralist spectator who watches war by complicating this figure with post-colonial perspectives where the distanced, global war dissemination collapses into the intimate, subjective gaze. Focusing on artist–theorist perspectives, it traces strategies for working with the digital broadcast of war, specifically from the 2000s and 2010s, and artists who peer into uncertain pixels and the cruelty of the close-up.

Zusammenfassung: In diesem Essay wird das verbreitete Kriegsbild untersucht, das mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit abhebt. Er versucht, das Erbe …

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 …

A Queer Feminist Response To The Racist Reception Of Halle Bailey’S The Little Mermaid: Misogynoir And Anti-Fan Facebook Users In Vietnam, Trung M. Nguyen

Journal of International Women's Studies

This essay examines the ways anti-Blackness is manifested in Vietnam through Facebook anti-fans’ reactions to Disney’s The Little Mermaid (2023) starring Halle Bailey, a Black American actress, in the role of Ariel. Analyzing the racist and colorist remarks within Facebook users’ comments and posts about the movie and utilizing misogynoir as the main concept of critique, the author demonstrates the phenomenon of anti-Black misogyny in Vietnam and focuses on the “I’m not racist, but…” trope. Uncovering the queer history of Hans Christian Andersen’s work, this essay adopts a queer feminist lens to defend the filmmakers’ choice to depict Ariel as …

Intersectional Realities, Multi-Dimensional Films: Reading Julie Dash's Illusions As An Activist Text, Amelia Morrison

University Honors Theses

This paper reads Julie Dash's 1982 film Illusions as an activist text, which challenges dominant cinematic and historical narratives through its Black feminist perspective. It explores the cinematic and narrative devices that Dash uses--including the weaving of fantasy and history, the strategic use of period aesthetics, and masking--to expose and subvert the mechanisms of white supremacist and patriarchal hegemony within Hollywood. Drawing on intersectional feminist theory from scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks, alongside cinematic theory, this analysis demonstrates how Illusions critiques the historical erasure of people of color from United States cinema and history. By …

Cultural Of Authenticity And Commodification: Analyzing The Aesthetic Waves And Collective Culture In The 2010s And 2020s, Stefanny Leung Yu

Student Theses

The “authentic self” is curated, aestheticized, and most notably, commodified. Digital algorithms, likes, views, and engagement are more than just digital metrics, they are the management of performance. For millions of other users — including the author herself — social media is the locus of personal expression. Most notably, sites like Tumblr, where users in the 2010s posted hazy images or overly filtered graphics along with melancholic song lyrics that match the vibe of the moment, expression was earnest and idealized. Today, social media in the 2020s, new creators like Hannah Neelaman, better known as Ballerina Farm, dress in pastoral …

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.

“Time Is Our Only Ally!”: Indigenous Heroism And Native Slipstream In Turok, Son Of Stone, Justin Wigard

Heroism Science

In this article, I draw on Frederick Luis Aldama’s framework of Graphic Indigeneity to revisit the long history of an Indigenous hero figure in comics: Turok, a pre-Columbian Mandan warrior lost in a prehistoric space known as the Lost Valley. First appearing in Dell’s Four Color Comics #596 (1954), Turok has appeared throughout comics history for nearly 70 years, primarily written and drawn by white creative teams, yet a visually, narratively prominent Indigenous hero in the comics page, one who has periodically been a top-selling popular character in the comics industry. To this end, I argue that Turok is a …

What's The Art In Artificial Intelligence?, Emily Verla Bovino

Open Educational Resources

This workbook learns from Black and Indigenous artists working with Artificial Intelligence to confront issues of ethics and aesthetics in its technologies. It features guided learning activities with links to publicly available video lectures and online articles, and includes options for experiential learning through both a tutorial in Midjourney and a visit to the public art collection at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Featured artists include: American Artist, Rizvana Bradley, Beth Coleman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Kite, Sondra Perry, Mimi Onuoha and Alisha B. Wormsley. Works by Martin Puryear and Maren Hassinger are explored in the Midjourney exercise.

About …

Towards The Non-Spectacle: Responses To Necropolitics In The Artwork Of Teresa Margolles And Maya Watanabe, Leslie Anne Condon

Masters Theses

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of …

Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power, Rorie Johnson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," …

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 …

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 …

Creating An Ofrenda, Sara Hinojos

Open Educational Resources

You do not need to be Mexican to celebrate Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). What you need however is a deep and thoughtful cultural understanding of the practice. This lesson plan teaches students what Dia de los Muertos is, the influence of colonialism (past and present), how mainstream media understands the celebration in the U.S., and how local communities honor the celebration. This approach is from a media studies perspective and a particular focus on art, specifically altar making or making an ofrenda. Writer, philosopher, tejana Gloria E. Anzaldúa details that altars are “‘the sanctuary of the …

Liner Notes On Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music As A Praxis Of Self-Fashioning, Shawn J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Liner Notes on Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music as a Praxis of Self-Fashioning interprets Black musical performance in identity-making, with a focus on how music and Black trans identity intersect and informs Black trans girlhood. As such, Black trans girls render ourselves legible, i.e. understood without shame or judgment, by constructing our identities through the music by Black women we listen and dance to, or watch and sing. These musical connections affirm the possibilities of Black femme expression. This expression of Black femininity is due to what I call an Afrofuturist affect, by which I refer …

Ways Of Decoloniality By The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’S Katara Demonstrates How To Revive A Community In Ecological Distress Brought By The Colonial Expansion Of The Fire Nation, Jose Santos P. Ardivilla

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, the “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as …

Visuality Of Race In Popular Culture: Teaching Racial Histories And Iconography In Media, Joni Boyd Acuff, Amelia M. Kraehe

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The repetition of racist imagery from historical to contemporary popular culture is indicative of a lack of visual culture education among artists, designers, and other creative cultural producers working today. This paper addresses the dearth of resources for teaching visual codes and conventions of racial iconography that are recycled in popular media and contribute to the fabrication of racial differences, maintenance of racial hierarchies, and normalization of white supremacist ideology. Inspired by Critical Race Theory in art and visual culture education, the essay proposes teaching tactics and sites/sights that can support students in developing visual understandings of race in popular …

Myth And Monument In Old Town Albuquerque: Southwest Pietà And The War Of Presiding Histories, Eric Castillo

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

Luis Jiménez’s Southwest Pietà (1984) intended to combat cultural amnesia that obscured Native Americans’ and Mexicans’ contributions to the state. Jiménez’s Pietà sought to counter the iconography that shaped New Mexico’s colonialist heritage. But Old Town Albuquerque shrouds Native American and Mexican contributions to the region. Albuquerque’s public art has often been deployed as a wedge to write and rewrite narratives about land inhabitants, but the city’s public art tells a powerful story about race and place in New Mexico. This essay explores the socio-historical battle of land memorialization in Old Town Albuquerque and provides a geo-racial perspective about the …

America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah

Masters Theses

There is a version

of America

that exists

only in dreams,

a kind of folklore,

shrouded in images,

technicolor interiors,

wrapped in plastic,

ghosts of recent past

to haunt and guide;

a constant reminder.

Wishful thinking

a constructed imaginary,

one I can hold in my hand.

Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …

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 …

Moonshine Babies, Arghavan Heydareslam

Theses and Dissertations

Moonshine Babies is a two-screen film made of collage/cut-out stop-motion and live-action. It is a visual poem based on my journals from when I recently started living in the US as an outsider. The experience left me feeling divided between the empty present and memories of the past. suggesting that there are collective memories among a group of interconnected individuals that unite them within a single narrative.

There was a moment when I asked, "If you are your memories, what does it mean to be somewhere you have no memories of and no one has memories of you there?"

Memories …

‘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 …

From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Sinan Çetin’s blockbuster Berlin in Berlin (1993) is a Turkish-German co-production. In contrast to certain representational tendencies with German orientalism or Turkish occidentalism, it deconstructs the intersectional structures of migration, religion, and gender. The portrayal of religion in films about Turkish-German labour migration is a kind of cultural narcissism often projected into national cinema by denigrating the faith of the other and glorifying one’s own religion. However, perspectives at such intersections are critical and require sensitivity in filmmaking, as films can create prejudice or help build peaceful relationships around these sensitive issues. The paper employs discourse analysis in linking Derrida’s …

Military Women In World Cinema: A 20th Century History And Filmography, Introduction, Deborah A. Deacon, Stacy Fowler

Faculty Articles

From British soldier Flora Sandes to the fame World War II Night Witches of the Soviet Air Force, women across the globe stepped up to defend their countries during every major and minor conflict of the twentieth century, and filmmakers have long attempted to capture their stories.

This book analyzes real and fictional military women's portrayals in world cinema, including movies from Israel, the United Kingdom, Italy, China, France, the Soviet Union, and others. It includes theatrical releases, direct-to-video productions, and made-for-television films.

Chapters, organized by decade, address topics including the women's sexuality, maternal and marital status, leadership skills, actual …

“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 …

Towards An Experimental Bibliography Of Hemispheric Reconstruction Newspapers, Joshua Ortiz Baco, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Jim Casey, Sarah H. Salter

Criticism

Digital collections of newspapers have drawn broader attention to the fragmented and scattered print histories of minoritized communities. Attempts to survey these histories through bibliography, however, quickly meet with a fundamental problem: the practice of bibliographic description calls for creating a static record of social affiliations. Given the overwhelming scholarly consensus that categories such as race, ethnicity, and language are socially constructed, this article introduces an experimental bibliographic method for mapping the vast landscape of historical newspapers. This method extends the machine learning affordances of a recent project called Newspaper Navigator to enumerate the newspapers in Chronicling America according to …

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?