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Critical and Cultural Studies Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Beauty For Ashes: Reflections On Aesthetic Experience And Suffering, Douglas Gilmour Feb 2020

Beauty For Ashes: Reflections On Aesthetic Experience And Suffering, Douglas Gilmour

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

In this essay, I examine the relationship between aesthetic experience and suffering, and I specifically explore how and why the former can potentially serve to meliorate the severity of the latter. Of course, that art and beauty can provide a certain measure of comfort and healing to the afflicted is a universally acknowledged truth; however, the reasons why this should be so could be considered an equally universal mystery. “I feel we understand too little about the psychology of loss,” writes Arthur Danto, “to understand why the creation of beauty is so fitting a way of marking it.” By exploring …


Music Therapy As A Treatment For Female Adolescents With Childhood Abuse, Janice M. Dvorkin Psy.D, Acmt, Sierra Belmares Feb 2020

Music Therapy As A Treatment For Female Adolescents With Childhood Abuse, Janice M. Dvorkin Psy.D, Acmt, Sierra Belmares

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article describes the preference to using receptive music therapy as a modality for helping an adolescent who has PTSD from childhood abuses. Adolescence is a difficult period during the life span. The second stage of separation/individuation provides challenges to almost all adolescents. This article contains a description of the adolescent behaviors of someone who is experiencing the consequences of PTSD. Along with an explanation of why receptive music therapy is an effective therapy with this population is a case study.


Medusa As Victim And Tool Of Male Aggression, William S. Duffy Feb 2020

Medusa As Victim And Tool Of Male Aggression, William S. Duffy

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

While Medusa, like many monsters from Greek Mythology, has multiple origin stories, the one arguably best known to modern audiences is the one related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4.5750-803, in which Medusa is raped by Neptune in Minerva’s temple and subsequently punished by the goddess by being turned into the monster we all know. This means that Medusa is, to use the modern parlance, a survivor. Furthermore, Medusa’s experience after her violation echoes common elements of the survivor’s experience even millennia later. This suggests that many of the institutional responses to sexual assault that bedevil survivors today existed in some form …


Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd Feb 2020

Free Battered Texas Women: Survivor-Advocates Organizing At The Crossroads Of Gendered Violence, Disability, And Incarceration, Cathy Marston Phd

Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice

This article recaps my symposium presentation, where I argue that feminist organizing strategies are central to healing our society and creating restorative justice from my perspective as a survivor of occupational injury, battering, and criminalization for self-defense. This includes the creation of Free Battered Texas Women. We prefer to think of ourselves as survivor-advocates who use a variety of tactics to empower ourselves, incarcerated battered women, and citizens. These strategies include pedagogy; poetry and other written forms; art; and legislative advocacy. I blend this grassroots activism with feminist disability theory, radical feminist theory, feminist ethnography, and feminist criminology.