College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item UNA MODERNIDAD TENSIONADA: LA PRENSA CATÓLICA DE LOS AÑOS 20 EN BUENOS AIRES(2022) Maurette, Sofia; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Según la Pew Foundation, Latinoamérica es uno de los continentes más religiosos del mundo, con más del 90% de su población identificándose como parte de una religión organizada. Sin embargo, la religión latinoamericana no ha recibido una atención equivalente a sus números. Mi investigación analiza el campo poco estudiado de la religión latinoamericana a través de la lente de su producción cultural, combinando los campos de los estudios religiosos con los estudios literarios y culturales latinoamericanos. En mi trabajo afirmo que definiciones estrechas sobre la Modernidad e ideas normativas sobre el lugar de la religión en la esfera pública moderna, uno de los postulados de la "teoría de la secularización", han resultado en una lectura sesgada de los movimientos y textos religiosos latinoamericanos, generalmente considerados incompatibles con sus aspiraciones modernas.En mi tesis me centro específicamente en las revistas católicas argentinas y su compromiso con las consecuencias del proceso de modernización del país a principios del siglo XX. Para una de estas revistas, Criterio (1928-presente), esto significó elaborar un lenguaje que adoptó la retórica de los movimientos de vanguardia para atraer a la élite intelectual a la que deseaban convertir. La revista femenina Noel (1920-1939), por otro lado, al contrastar la construcción tradicional de género dentro del catolicismo con las nuevas definiciones de feminidad adoptadas por los movimientos feministas contemporáneos, se convirtió en un espacio seguro para sus autoras en el cual construir y realizar una comprensión del género que, si bien respaldaba explícitamente una cosmovisión patriarcal, reformulaba sutilmente el papel de la mujer dentro de ella.Item GENRES OF MEMORY AND ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM(2022) Bramlett, Katie; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As human rights and racial inequality dominate public discourse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are invested in conversations of public memory. The removal of confederate monuments and demands for equity in memorialization for people of color underscore the point that who is remembered and how they are honored is important. Further, the growing awareness of violence against Asian/Americans and the hate crime against Asian/American women in Atlanta has emphasized the need to understand the history of violence against Asian/Americans, Asian/American gendered stereotypes, and the Asian/American activists who fight for equal rights. This dissertation examines three distinct memorial genres—a statue, a traveling exhibit, and a documentary—created by Asian/Americans about Asian/American women activists. My interdisciplinary research engages feminist memory studies, Asian/American studies, and cultural rhetorics to investigate how public memory activists leverage the affordances of different memorial genres to recover Asian/American women’s activism. I consider the ways Asian/American women’s memorials contest the past and navigate the politics of memorialization to influence the present. Each chapter considers how memorials not only remember past activism, but also work to reframe current conversations about Asian/American women in more just and equitable frameworks. I claim that my chosen memorials are created by memorial activists and each seek to expand U.S. memory beyond traditional gendered stereotypes that are pervasive in the United States.Item FEMINIZING THE “BANLIEUE”, AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE COMING OF AGE STORIES IN GIRLHOOD, DIVINES AND CUTIES(2021) Bichon, Clara; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Girlhood (2014) by Céline Sciamma, Divines (2016) by Houda Benyamina and Cuties (2020) by Maïmouna Doucouré denounce the multiple oppressions young women undergo in the French “banlieue” through coming of age stories. My goal is to investigate how the reappropriation of the traditional Bildungsroman structures allow a better denunciation of social seclusions. I also focus on the different representations of an intersectional “banlieue” shedding light on multiple axes of oppression. Finally, I study the alternatives offered by the three women directors for their characters as well as for their audience thanks to feminine solidarity as well as to the reappropriation of the traditional male gaze on female bodies. The consequences of these representations translate a French societal mirror to better denounce and fight against the exclusions that young women living in the “banlieue” undergo.Item Zero-Sum Game: GamerGate and the Networked Discourse of Hate(2019) Meyer, Joseph Bernard; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Zero-Sum Game utilizes GamerGate – a 2014 harassment campaign against prominent women in the video game industry – to develop a close reading of networked publics in order to understand how power manifests and is enacted online. I combine Actor Network Theory and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to first map and archive GamerGate’s participants, targets, platforms, and media followed by platform-specific feminist readings of discourse occurring across the map. Each chapter focuses on how hate and harassment transform (and are magnified) across platforms, an analysis that is further refracted through multidisciplinary, theoretical frameworks. These frameworks are 1) the gamer technicity that subsumed overt white supremacist heteropatriarchy into developing neoliberal individualism that replaces embodied identity with identity through consumption, 2) the ecology of social media and the interaction of platforms that amplify and transform digital expressive media, 3) a phenomenology of information exploring the mediation of lived experience via networked publics that challenges dominant ideology while also providing the tools for the denial of alternative subjectivities and the construction of alternative information networks, and 4) a consumer choice model of online harassment that builds on the previous three theories to provide consumption of an “apolitical” identity that allows for the abdication of responsibility for the actions of hate groups and harassment they have allied themselves with. I argue that the driving force behind GamerGate is the reactionary impulse by those who benefit from structures of power to the challenges posed by broadcast experiences and identities unfiltered by hegemonic processes of traditional media structures. GamerGate thus signifies the violent reaction by those in power to the loss of control faced in the digital age as discursive constructions of identity are challenged across platforms.Item Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures(2019) Savig, Mary Beth; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures” explores how fiber’s material specificity agitates universalizing notions of nature. The interpretive lens is inspired by the relational and iterative processes of much fiber art. Akin to patchwork quilting, the dissertation pieces together disparate practices including collage, needlepoint, paintings, photography, performance, and poetry together with readings of spaces such as museum dioramas, aquariums, sideshows, plantations, and parks. Queer and feminist theorizations of art history, material culture, and new materialisms frame the methodology. Ultimately, the dissertation reflects on how fiber advances more experiential possibilities for addressing urgent issues of social and ecological justice. Each chapter focuses on a fantastical invocation of nature. Allyson Mitchell’s installation Ladies Sasquatch (2006-2010) is a sculptural vignette of erotic and menacing lesbian sasquatches—pieced together with thrifted hobby crafts like macramé and latch hook hangings—cavorting in a utopian wilderness. Aaron McIntosh’s Invasive Queer Kudzu (2013-ongoing) facilitates quilting bees for Southern LGBTQ people to stitch their personal stories onto fabric kudzu leaves. Invasive marshals ever-growing vines of quilted kudzu to invade stereotypes of the American South. Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef (2005-ongoing) merges feminist politics with experimental mathematics to encourage an international network of volunteers to crochet the vibrant, hyperbolic shapes of coral reefs. The crocheted reefs orient their makers towards a radically empathetic perception of nature. As immersive and socially-engaged artworks, they illuminate the questions: Who defines nature and decides what is natural? Specifically, the fiber-based techniques leverage the historical denigration of the medium as a domestic and feminine hobby into a subversive and enduring tool of social activism. The artists’ stitches are like seeds. As they are sewn/sown, they fabricate new natures. These seductively artificial renderings of nature unravel the illusion that nature is actually natural, or neutral from surrounding cultural struggles. As such, the dissertation considers how the artworks entangle notions of the material, the social, and the spatial.Item "The Biggest Con in History": American Myth-Making in the Stage and Screen Adaptations of Anastasia(2018) Weyman, Jennifer Elizabeth; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The story of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova has been engrained in the American imagination for nearly a century. This tale has often been told on stage and screen, depicting Anastasia and her most famous impersonator: Anna Anderson. The adaptation of Anna and Anastasia’s tale that has made the most lasting impact is the 1951 French play, Anastasia, by Marcelle Maurette, and its 1954 English translation by Guy Bolton. Four more adaptations have followed that progenitor play: the 1956 film, Anastasia; the 1965 operetta, Anya; the 1997 animated film, Anastasia; and the 2017 musical, Anastasia. These five artistic adaptations evolved from one another, navigating their own history alongside changing American values. This thesis situates each production within American sociopolitics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing how each production is far more indicative of American ideals than Russian history, particularly with regards to immigration, foreign policy, and feminism.Item "Nothing About the Rape:" Generative Silencing in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber(2014) Webb, Calvin Allan; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, explores the relationship between storytelling, witnessing, and lived experience. By interrogating the intersection of black feminism, speculative fiction, and slave narratives in the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Hopkinson's work shows that some silencing can be constructive, even essential, for survival.Item Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought(2014) Judd, Bettina A.; Barkley Brown, Elsa; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contends that the systems of racism, (hetero)sexism, and classism are felt in the body, mind, and spirit and that resistance to these systems must be felt as well. Feelin, a term rooted in U.S. Black culture and derived from Black speech (as in "I'm feelin that!"), is deployed as a way of knowing through which Black women engage and create life-affirming art. I argue for understanding black women's creative production as a site of Black feminist thought, one that continuously negotiates, shares and acknowledges emotion as a form of knowledge that, in Audre Lorde's terms, galvanizes radical thought into "more tangible action." In this project I negotiate these issues through close reading and analysis of the work of three artists: photographer Renee Cox, poet Lucille Clifton, musician Avery*Sunshine. In Cox's photography I examine the ways in which she re-imagines racial shaming and Black motherhood through her own body and mothering practice as represented in her work. Through Clifton's words, poetry, and spiritual and creative practice, I trace a theology of joy. And, I analyze expressions of sacro-sexual ecstasy in Avery*Sunshine's genre ambivalent music. These themes of shame, joy, and ecstasy are prominent not only in the work itself, but also in the artists' experiences of creating that work and in the artists' discussions of their work and worldview. Feminist scholarship and affect theory frame my engagements with feelings and emotions as knowledge. Finally, I propose a methodology for engaging Black women's knowledge production that mandates that we take Black women's anger seriously and interrogate from there. This project practices the modes of knowledge production that it presents. Furthering its argument that Black women's art is a site of feminist knowledge production, research is conducted and presented through poetry, mixed media, and personal narrative in addition to academic research methods and prose.Item "Nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer": Portrayals of Masculinity and Ideal Citizenship in World War II Combat Films, 1989-2001(2013) Cerullo, Michelle; Giovacchini, Saverio; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional platoons of World War II combat films were visualizations of an America that could be, rather than a reflection of the America that was. One might assume that, had the trend toward inclusive representation continued, the World War II combat platoons of the films of the 1990s might have included women or homosexuals, since the military of the 1990s was fully integrated on a racial front. Instead platoons' compositions remained unchanged. And in this new context, rather than acting out of a desire to expand the terms of citizenship, these movies represent a closing off of the terms of citizenship. In the face of demands for a change in the terms of civic participation from women, from homosexuals, from disabled citizens, these movies represent a vision of a shared past that is easier than the one currently inhabited by viewers. What does it mean that this period, out of all the periods in the history of the United States is the one that is deemed most worthy of celebration?Item Let it Flo! Theatrical Process and Production(2013) Clay, Caroline Stefanie; Smiley, Leigh W; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Let It Flo! is a theatricalized imagining based on the real life of the late attorney, and feminist Florynce "Flo" Kennedy. It was borne out of my deep artistic need to understand the intersections between activism and identity. Kennedy's audacity, flamboyance, sharp tongue, and intellect were her currency in the world of 1970's racial and gender politics. In later years, Flo faces increasing anonymity among the very generation of women who benefitted most from her willingness to fight for their rights. This scholarly query is measured through the lens of Kennedy's life choice to walk the road less travelled as a free woman. Hers was a trajectory marked by verbal radicalism, personal triumph, contradiction, and ascension. As Flo faces her final transition, she fights to spur into action the current generation into a life of advocacy, equality, and authenticity.