Visual Studies Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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?

L’Italia, L’Altrove Luoghi, Spazi E Attraversamenti Nel Cinema E Nella Letteratura Sulla Migrazione, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

This monograph is a meditation on how transnational migrations have influenced how the sense of place and the politics of space are represented in literature and film about migration to, from and within Italy. It examines work produced in Italian and English, and it emphasizes how culture and national identity can be reconsidered in a more inclusive way within a world marked by increased mobility. The text is divided into three main sections – “Places”, “Spaces” and “Crossings” – each of which contains two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that bridges, as they are represented in literature, movies and paintings about …

Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, And Method, Amber Jamilla Musser

Publications and Research

Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing …

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

Antioch University Full-Text 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 …

She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power: An Intersectional Analysis Of A Modern Reboot, Laine Marshall

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Children’s animation offers the viewer a unique window into the nuances of current societal norms. Because children’s animation is made for the young, sensitive, and impressionable, it is carefully controlled and often heavily censored. Any statements made regarding the protagonist’s heroism or the villain’s malignity are meant to be accepted as universal truths for the growing minds of our youth. The recent 2018 Netflix and DreamWorks Animation animated reboot of the classic 1980's series "She-Ra: Princess of Power," now titled "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power," shook the animation industry with its groundbreaking representation and astounding visuals. Following its predecessor’s …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

The Video Camera Spoiled My Ethnography: A Critical Approach, Katherine Gregory

Publications and Research

As videography and other media technologies are normalized in the field of qualitative methods for the purpose of data collection, there is a growing need to discuss the benefits and limitations of these data collection tools. This article chronicles an ethnographic video study focused on the experiences of Muslim adults living in the Netherlands, and why the author opted to end the project. Issues focus on reckoning with the imperial gaze of the camera, performative behavior of participants before the camera and interdisciplinary tensions the researcher faced from conflicting trainings as a qualitative methodologist and media practitioner.

Here To Win, Not Here To Settle, Sarah Kaino

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Ethnic representation goes beyond color blind casting, the diversity of actors, or non-stereotypical casting choices. It is not just a matter of minorities being included in mainstream storylines, but minorities being able to tell their own stories as well. The relevance and relatability of storytelling in film and theatre transcends culture, which is in part the beauty of these mediums. But the impact of Asian Americans seeing stories from their own culture cannot be exchanged for anything less because there is no substitute for visibility. Movies are the source of inspiration for many. Movies can also reinforce a transparent ceiling …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Kill Your Darlings: The Afterlives Of Pepe The Frog, Sherlock Holmes, And Jim Crow, Allison E. Sardinas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis works to establish a literary theory and cultural studies as a theoretical lens with which we can view harmful emerging pop culture phenomena like the so-called alt right. The premise is supposed in three parts, with the first being a simple introduction to the Pepe character and how he is grounded in literary studies through a comparison of Sherlock Holmes and his early fandom. The second part is a survey of the legacy of Jim Crow and I present the evidence that Pepe is very much Crow’s spiritual successor in their shared preoccupation with white anxiety. The third …

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

A Recipe For Black Girl Magic: A Critical Study Of The Mise-En-Scene In Beyoncé’S Visual Album Lemonade As A Radical Representation Of Black Women, Tatiyana Jenkins

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Lemonade, a visual album released by pop icon Beyoncé Knowles Carter in 2016, crafts a mise-en-scene that redefines the way that black women are allowed to feel and exist in media culture. Contrary to the negative stereotypes and misrepresentations perpetuated in media, Lemonade is a radical attempt to provide audiences with an alternative representation of the experiences of black women. For this honors project, I address the controversy surrounding the visual album’s radical representations of black womanhood. To inform my understanding of the visual album I examine the various creative contributions such as the film Daughters of the Dust directed …

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

The Prison System And The Media: How “Orange Is The New Black” Engages With The Prison As A Normalizing Agent, Eunice Louis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees.

From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some …

Introduction To "On The Sleeve Of The Visual: Race As Face Value", Alessandra Raengo

Communication Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

Identidades Por Negociar: La Presentación De La Piel Humana En La Fotografía De René Peña., Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes several works by Cuban photographer René Peña from the point of view of his depiction of the human skin. Peña, one of Cuba’s most renowned photographers, with an impressive list of exhibits in Cuba, the US, and Europe, became known as an artist of sharp and formalistic black and white photographs, mostly focusing on the human body. Through his idiosyncratic staging and estranging juxtapositions on the photographic paper, Peña’s work is never solely artistic: it challenges for instance the binary opposition between black and white, the concept of fixed sexualities, or the process of aging.

In many …

"Whether Beast Or Human": The Cultural Legacies Of Dread, Locks, And Dystopia., Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Analyzing the ongoing problem of Caribbean racial exploitation, particularly fear signified through one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks, Kevin Frank offers a paradigm shift in arguing that Medusa's alterity is altered by Rastafarians' snake-like hair, but the transformative power of Rasta dreadlocks is contested through certain cinematic depictions of dread.

Female Agency And Oppression In Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, And Dancehall, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank discerningly analyzes agency and gender in public sexual performances emanating out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture, Jamaican dancehall (dancehall reggae/ dancehall queens).