Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2017 - 201912020 - 20211

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Author: search.filters.author.Walker, JonelleSubject: search.filters.subject.Women's studies

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    Women in White: Performing White Femininity from 1865-Present
    (2021) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores how white woman character tropes on stage, page, and screen are both haunted by histories of post-Civil War racial terror and themselves haunt white women’s everyday embodiment. This spectral framework is undergirded by a less traditionally academic approach: a self-reflexive interrogation of a compulsion to endangerment, peril, fear, and self-destruction the author observes in representations of white women and in herself. The study of white femininity represented in theatre, literature, film, and social media is narrowed to focus on this predilection for danger and its political implications for racialized-gender embodiment. The dissertation attributes this phenomenon to a dialectic central to white femininity in an Anglophone context: being in/the danger, that is simultaneously being victim and instigator of violence, tragedy, and destruction. The project pursues being in/the danger within the context of theatre and performance studies by asking: How has the white woman been made and continuously remade through staging white woman character tropes? Which gestures, affects, and self-fashionings from these tropes haunt everyday white womanhood? Each chapter examines one trope and its implications in detail, including the damsel in distress, the girl crime victim, the suicidal authoress, the anorexic waif, among others. The dissertation examines how characterizations of melancholy, endangerment, and frailty in these characters shaped common and highly racialized understandings of white womanhood during the period studied. To illustrate this broad cultural phenomenon, the dissertation studies an appropriately broad set of objects including plays; films; literature; artist biographies; and social media communities.
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    THE IRRECONCILABLE VOLATILITY OF BLOODY BETTY & THE ONLINE ARCHIVE
    (2017) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project investigates volatile portrayals of rape and sexualized violence in gorelesque performances by Vancouver-based troupe Bloody Betty and the Deadly Sins, as well as the digital YouTube archive that preserves those performances. Through examining how both the work of Bloody Betty and the manner in which that work is preserved maintain mutually exclusive contradictions, this project offers performance scholars a feminist theoretical framework for approaching similarly volatile contradictions in Fourth Wave feminist aesthetics and the online archive. This project proposes that both those objects of study require a feminist reconsideration of the gaze (live and online) that does not neutralize the volatility of sexual objectification, but rather accepts its inevitability in service of more effective feminist praxis.