Feminist Philosophy Commons^™

Thomas Mann’S Unbound Bodies: A Formal Analysis Of Disease In The Magic Mountain, Julia Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

My senior thesis argues that disease is a formal element in Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, through the lens of a newly theorized genre: the “Bindungsroman” (“binding-novel”). The scholar Jonas Rosenbrück proposed the Bindungsroman as the successor genre to the Bildungsroman after the latter fell out of public favor after World War I.  Whereas the Bildungsroman narrates its hero’s maturation as a process of integration into society, the Bindungsroman’s hero is ontologically unstable and does not achieve normative resolution. This paper examines The Magic Mountain’s protagonist’s development as defined by the doubled play of binding and …

Parodic Attunement: Contesting Gender Categories Through Kierkegaard’S Knight Of Faith And Butler’S Allegorical Usage Of Drag, Abraham James A. Mata

Undergraduate Honors Theses

What does it mean to appear under a gender identity that fails to convey who you really are? Is it possible to truly be free from prevailing identities even as one contests them? Søren Kierkegaard’s knight of faith and Judith Butler’s allegorical usage of drag may offer clues to re-thinking how our self-conceptions undergo crisis even as they get reproduced. Instead of being entrapped within a particular identity category, the knight of faith and the drag performer show us ways to negotiate established ethical or gender categories through a “parodic attunement”. Is Kierkegaard attempting to bring us into harmony with …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

Single, Unwed, And Pregnant In Victorian London: Narratives Of Working Class Agency And Negotiation, Virginia L. Grimaldi

Madison Historical Review

Unmarried working women who got pregnant in Victorian London and were abandoned by the fathers were in a sticky situation. If a woman kept the baby, she would unlikely be able to provide for it, especially under the ‘Bastardly Act’ of the 1834 Poor Law, which deemed all illegitimate children under the sole responsibility of the mother. If she concealed her pregnancy and abandoned the child, or risked her life by having an illegal abortion, she would at best be held liable for infanticide, at worst, dead. One institutional option available to these vulnerable mothers was the London Foundling Hospital …

The Public Vs. The Private, Elise "Alice" G. Roberson

Audre Lorde Prize

No abstract provided.

Burn The Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics, Simone Roberts

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Prologue]

The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a symbolist philosopher. Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie …