Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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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 THE NEW MEDUSAS: THE REWRITING OF MISOGYNISTIC MYTH IN 21ST-CENTURY FRENCH (FEMINIST) LITERATURE AND CINEMA(2020) Bruns, Jillian Irene; Baillargeon, Mercédès; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My doctoral research explores the reemergence of the Medusa as a feminist figuration in contemporary francophone autofictional and cinematic productions. While the origin of the myth of Medusa can be traced back to Greek mythology, she has reappeared throughout intellectual history in order to illustrate the unspeakable and unfavorable aspects of femininity. My project repositions the gaze upon her through her instantiations in a corpus composed of women writers and filmmakers that are participating in the rewriting and the revision of misogynistic myth. My dissertation first studies the myth of Medusa as a historical concept from Antiquity, through her appearance in modern academic works in fields such as psychoanalysis and 20th-century French feminism. My study of Medusa also engages critical theory about the practice of writing myth and mythmaking. Using this hybridized and interdisciplinary theoretical framework, I look at three instantiations of the Medusa and her gaze in contemporary French texts. My chapter “Gone Girls” studies the figure of the teenage punk heroine in Virginie Despentes’ Apocalypse bébé and Catherine Breillat’s A ma sœur !. Here the Medusa appropriates violence as a tool for achieving the aims of subversive feminism in a 21st-century context. In my next chapter “Petrified Colonial Pasts”, I reveal a destructive and colonizing female gaze in Marguerite Duras’ L’Amant de la Chine du Nord and Claire Denis’ White Material. My following chapter “(im)Mortalized Mothers” looks at demythifying revisions of the mother-daughter relationship in Christine Angot’s Un amour impossible and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie. I have named these six women writers and filmmakers the New Medusas because they revive the Medusa as a symbol of women’s power instead of an object to be scorned. Through the New Medusas’ gaze, their revisions of normative femininity permeate through our collective subconscious and become a positive symbol for women.Item Change Is Sound: Resistance and Activism in Queer Latinx Punk Rock(2019) Dowman, Sarah; Long, Ryan; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Change Is Sound explores the roles punk ethos, discourses, and collectivism play in creating resistant practices within queer US Latinx punk communities since the 1970s. My research engages critically with the fields of contemporary Latinx cultural studies and hemispheric queer studies to elucidate new perspectives on the emerging critical category of Latinx, to challenge stagnant narratives of resistance and activism in queer communities of color in the US, and to provide a framework for how resistant practices are being defined and constructed in the present. Furthermore, my study decenters the “white riot” narrative of punk that excludes and erases diversity by categorizing the subculture as a straight, white, male, suburban, middle-class, youth phenomenon. My study achieves this decentering by focusing on intersectional, transnational, and transgenerational subjectivities represented by the contributions of queer Latinx punk artists. By diversifying the perspectives and experiences represented and highlighting how these artists forge connections to larger histories of resistant practices in queer communities of color in the US and transnationally, I demonstrate how underrepresented populations expand punk’s emancipatory potential. Specifically, my research shows how resistant practices such as performative and activist interventions and the creation of online collective revisionist writings present a foundation from which queer Latinx and other marginalized communities negotiate power, hegemony, and resistance within the contemporary context of precarity and oppression under neoliberalism and capitalist globalization.Item "Cuando lleguemos": Narrativas Latinx del siglo XXI(2017) Garcia-Avello, Macarena; Rodriguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since 2015, the use of the term "Latinx" has become widespread on the Internet and other sociocultural contexts. Referring to Latinas/os or Hispanics in the United States, the term not only problematizes national categories associated with Latinidades but also suggests a more inclusive vision of gender and sexual identities that transcends heteronormative binaries. The "x" in “Latinx” deconstructs gender binarism, pointing to a more flexible and expansive spectrum of gender and sexual identities in the context of transnational cultural formations, or what have been associated with “genderqueer” practices. This doctoral dissertation examines the origins, developments, and deployments of the term “Latinx” in the Internet and in a corpus of US Latinx literary texts in the 21st century. In particular, I examine the formation of transnational “Latinx” identities, discourses, and micro-resistances in Days of Awe (2001) by Achy Obejas, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2004) by Felicia Luna Lemus, Rosas de abolengo (2011) by Sonia Rivera-Valdés, The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014) by Maya Chinchilla, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir (2014) by Daisy Hernandez, and Juliet Takes a Breath (2015) by Gabby Rivera as well as these writers’ interventions on the Web 2.0, including their websites, blogs and social media. Each of my chapters studies the production of a transnational literary space, the rejection of gender binarisms, and the resistances enacted in US Latinx literature and the Web. The convergence of these three elements in the 21st century evinces a paradigmatic shift in US Latina/o literature. While the US Latina “literary boom” and borderlands literature might have sought synthesis or resolution, or the creation of a third space associated with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “consciousness of the borderlands,” the US Latinx literary texts examined here reject narrative resolution. Instead, US Latinx texts display what Michel Foucault has called micro-resistances, an endless process that challenges and deconstructs literary conventions and social norms. Resisting resolutions, US Latinx writers further extend their work onto the Internet, using social media as tools of resistances in the Latinx community. As a way of understanding the on-going micro-resistances in US Latinx literature and social media, I read José Esteban Muñoz´s idea of "futurity" and Juana María Rodriguez´s theories on "gestures" in relation to Giorgio Agamben´s theory on potentialities.Item Representations of "female" madness in German-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries(2015) Volkhausen, Petra; Frederiksen, Elke P.; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation examines the intersection of “womanhood” and madness in German-language literature and culture. While scholars have studied the “madwoman” of the previous centuries extensively, my dissertation presents the first comprehensive study of representations of “female” madness from 1894 onward. Since the late 19th century, female authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have been appropriating discourses of madness in order to critique the contradictory ramifications of mandatory adherence to the construct of “femininity”. Employing theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, I argue that the madness discourse represents a key site where writers negotiate the ongoing hegemony of societal ideologies defining the special status of the female psyche, body and sexuality as entities which need to be monitored, shaped or optimized. My research thus redeploys “female” madness as a research category. While previously applied almost exclusively to the realities of white middle-class women, I argue for an intersectional conception of critical madness studies which takes account of gender, race, and religion to offer culturally specific insights into the lives of German women from diverse backgrounds. My study addresses texts by well-known authors, such as Hedwig Dohm, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as lesser known writers, such as May Ayim and Christine Lavant.Item Between Resistance and Silence: The Making of the Child Murderess in German Literature and Culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries(2015) Sammler, Ina; Koser, Julie; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Infanticide emerged as a major topic of public concern in Germany during the Storm and Stress period. Goethe and Schiller took up this issue and altered its social and historical reality by focusing solely on the bourgeois mother as perpetrator of infanticide. By concentrating on the figure of the bourgeois woman seduced by a nobleman and by criminalizing her actions and condemning her to death, many authors denounced interclass relationships and asserted traditional, rigid class divisions. In my dissertation, I show how competing discourses sought to demonize or even convict the mother while perpetuating patriarchal and social systems of power in order to regulate behavior. My project confronts the issues of power, gender, and class as underlying components of the construct of the child murderess in German literature and culture. My work contributes new and critical insights as I analyze texts outside the traditional literary canon by Therese Huber, Benedikte Naubert, Marianne Ehrmann, Friedrich Maler-Müller and August Gottlieb Meißner and bring them into dialogue with conservative contemporaries. By describing the social misery and depicting the severity of the laws to which these women were subjected, the works demonstrate that infanticide impacted the discussion of the death penalty and provided a more complex and nuanced view of the woman as child murderess in her social, political, and legal contexts. Drawing on the poststructuralist theories of the philosopher and critic Michel Foucault, my dissertation demonstrates that these female criminals were not transgressing some “natural” condition, as the works of Goethe and Schiller insinuated; rather, these women were made into criminals by competing social and political agendas. Thus, my research focuses on how power structures stigmatized women who acted on their sexual desires, thereby violating social morals, as outcasts and deviants. My study of literary works reveals that authors commonly depicted their fictional female murderers as driven to crime by forces beyond their control, such as factors of class, financial standing, and psychological impairment. My work provides a more refined and holistic understanding of the competing interests throughout history and in literature, which sought to construct and define the child murderess.Item Exotik, Erotik und Haremkultur: Zur Gender-Problematik im deutschen Orientalismus des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts(2014) Baysal Walsh, Melda Ina; Frederiksen, Elke P.; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Arabian nights, oriental women, the harem, exoticism, and eroticism: what else comes to mind when thinking of the colorful world of the Orient? In order to challenge these Western stereotypes, which have been abundant since the Middle Ages and reflect only a few of the many prejudices contained in the Western understanding of "Orientalism" , my study examines cultural representations of oriental, African and occidental women in literary texts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German and Austrian writers (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Peter Altenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler) as well as in the visual arts. Stereotypical images of oriental women are based on assumptions and claims made by eighteenth-century Western philosophers and travellers (e.g. Kant, Herder, Forster), creating misinterpretations of the Orient which appeared to be the perfect place to act out "male" fantasies. While using cultural studies approaches including oriental, post-colonial, and gender studies, this dissertation establishes a new theoretical framework on Gender and Orientalism, and aims to contribute significantly to a new understanding of the Orientalism debate within the German and European contexts. An in-depth discussion of the "harem" as cultural text and multifaceted metaphor discloses this realm as a space for cross-cultural female encounter where hybrid identity formations of culturally diverse women arise.Item Shades of Gay: Representations of Male Same-Sex Desire in French Literature, Culture, and Ideology from 1789-1926(2014) Gomolka, Carl Joseph; Orlando, Valérie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Shades of Gay: Representations of Male Same-Sex Desire in French Literature, Culture, and Ideology from 1789-1926," provides a critical overview of ways of representing homosexuality in France from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. More specifically, I contend that the emergent nineteenth-century gay subculture influenced not only the way socio-political and medico-juridical sources represented and defined sexual and gender identity but that nineteenth and early twentieth century authors followed suit, contributing to the construction and deconstruction of social definitions of sexual and gender identity through literature. The first chapter of my thesis, titled "Preparing the Palette: Gay Male Literature from 1792-1910," surveys the works of nineteenth century authors who created the framework for a homosexual epistemology that would structure representations of homosexuality during and after the nineteenth century. In the second chapter, entitled "Through the Looking-Glass: Representations of Fin-de-Siècle Homosexuality in the Works of Jean Lorrain," I explore the influence of science on representations of homosexuality, especially with regard to criminal and degenerate images of the homosexual in the works of Jean Lorrain. My third chapter, entitled "Scandalous Sexualities: the Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and the World of Apologetic Impropriety," addresses the relationship between scandal, journalism, and literature in the works of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. This chapter also questions whether Akadémos, the journal orchestrated by Fersen, can be considered France's first gay journal. The fourth chapter, entitled, "For the Love of Boys: Ephemeral (Homo)sexuality and Platonic Politics in the Works of Achille Essebac" pioneers an analysis of the works of Achille Essebac, the first such study in English. The final chapter, titled "The Trouble with Normal: the Politics of the Closet in the Works of André Gide," analyzes the dichotomies silence/disclosure and desire/restraint in the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century works of André Gide, contradictory notions that are of particular interest in the context of sexual and gender identity study. Ultimately, I contend that the authors examined in my dissertation pull from social, ideological, cultural, as well as political representations of sexuality and gender to create an antagonistic and pugnacious literature that contributes to the contemporary definition of homosexuality.