Krista Anara Cibis
Of Garmentology: Reading Between the Labels
Thesis Mentor: Sara Bernstein
I have photographed over 500 different garment brand labels in thrift and secondhand stores. The images were categorized by the way they were divided in the stores by women’s and men’s sections. I have modeled my approach on Material Cultural Theory and object-based research methods. Drawing from that archive of images, I use the brand labels as an intersection point for different fields like linguistics, fashion theory, history, material and consumer culture to analyze as an artifact. In that volume of material texts, not much larger than the paper in a fortune cookie, themes emerged, for example, themes of aspirations (Dreamer), identity (Expert), nihilism (Garbage), body (Petit Sophisticate), gender (Total Girl), nationalism (Faded Glory) even racialized purity (Lily White.) The labels act as value statements that are physically connected to the garment. These statements go largely unnoticed, and unseen worn inside a garment. When they are read separately from the garment and read in relation to it, as in this project, the labels are more than fashion identifiers but form a social grammar of identity and aspiration.
Kyle Cohlmia
Traveling through Space: Finding a Borderless Bayt in the Poetry and Paintings of Etel Adnan
Thesis Mentor: Dana Ghazi
This thesis explores the idea of space, both physical and mental, within Lebanese writer and artist, Etel Adnan’s literary and artistic endeavors, The Arab Apocalypse and her most recent series of paintings, Planètes. I examine The Arab Apocalypse and its place within the speculative fiction genre, Adnan’s use of color throughout the poems and its connection to her Planètes series which depicts both earthly and planetary objects in the same frame. The inspiration for this research is founded in my Lebanese identity. Years ago, my father told me that, while born Syrian, one day as a child, he woke up and was now considered Lebanese. The ambiguity and control of borders, such as that between Syria and Lebanon, sparked my interest in critical theory and the ways in which Southwest Asian North African (SWANA) identifying people are responding to these issues through writing and artwork. In the same way my father’s nationality switched in a single day, this paper explores the effects of borders on identity; and while Adnan has outwardly condemned the idea of using activism or theory to define her work, through this paper I, myself, attempt to theorize Adnan’s beliefs on the confinement of space and, further, her representation of home, or what is known in Arabic as bayt.
Ashley Couch
Proving Grounds
Thesis Mentor: Raechel Anne Jolie
Though the speakers’ accents in bootstrap mythologies may differ slightly, common elements such as addiction, abandonment, “hillbilly justice,’’ trauma, poverty and a deep appreciation of “home” lace whitewashed perspectives that typically fail to critically consider race, gender, disability, power, oppression or the patchworks of cultures and critters inhabiting our hollers. Combining memoir, creative nonfiction, critical theory, popular culture, legal history and history of place, this autotheoretical thesis serves as a rebuttal to, and indictment of, typical bootstrap mythologies, interrogating systems to disrupt assumed beliefs. Beginning with a Preface and Introduction framing the content and providing personal and theoretical grounding, the work next considers the Blues Highway, a stretch of space connecting Nashville past Memphis deep into the Mississippi Delta. Next, Tobacco Road describes the area of North Carolina around Chapel Hill and Duke, a hotbed of race-related protests from the Civil War era to modern times. Questioning notions of justice, /ˈpro͞oviNG ˌɡround[s]/ transports its readers to the scenes of the crimes to consider their own complicity and accomplice liabilities, compelling discovery along the ride.
Kristin Derryberry
By Her Own Hands: A Newfound Agency for the Final Girl in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Thesis Mentor: Angela Catalano
Contemporary horror films have been turning generic conventions on their head, including the slasher staple, the Final Girl. This thesis applies feminist film scholarship analyzing the Final Girl throughout horror film history to contemporary folk horror directed by men. Unlike the films that came before them, Midsommar (2019) and The VVitch (2017) give a new type of agency to the Final Girl. These films can be read as a reconciliation of the violent treatment of women throughout the history of horror. Instead of the women being subjected to violence, these films show how the Final Girl takes up agency and space in a way that she is not only allowed to save herself, but to choose her own fate. This critical look at the horror genre and the trope of the Final Girl demonstrates a more sophisticated engagement with issues of gender, patriarchy, and questions of agency, subjectivity, and spectatorship in contemporary horror cinema.
Effy Garside Mitchell
Navigating Chaos: Dirty Kid Subculture and Surviving the Apocalypse
Thesis Mentor: Margaret Killjoy
Dirty Kids are a subculture of transient punks who survive by hacking into a country's infrastructure through urban camping, dumpster diving, squatting, hitchhiking, lock picking, shoplifting, and riding freight trains, allowing them to live as autonomously as possible. These are partially conditions of poverty and austerity, but they are also modes of refusal, reflecting a constant grappling with living anywhere and belonging nowhere. Dirty Kids live in a space between fraught freedom and societal exile. Dirty Kids use counterknowledge to help us imagine an alternative way of moving through life outside of capitalist confinement, balancing exterior struggles imposed upon them like societal exile and poverty with interior struggles such as mental illness and addiction. These are both prerequisites and after-effects of living a transient life that is ultimately a struggle for freedom, survival and autonomy.
Madison Hames
The Intelligence of Things: Twenty-first-century Omens, Time-eating Matter, and the Subtle Call of Plastic
Thesis Mentor: Sloane McNulty
This thesis gives philosophical expression to the knowledge, intelligence, and agency of objects as a means of making non-human collaborators to think with as we combat the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. Drawing from the chemical philosophies of Isabelle Stengers and Gay Hawkins, it considers the ways in which intelligence is encoded into the molecular composition of materials, giving rise to a sort of ontological intelligence and agential capacity of things. Influenced by Deleuze, Mathew Fuller, Olga Guironova, and Harold Bloom, this thesis explores how this intelligence is interlocked with ethico-aesthetics, wherein the object uses aesthetics as a communication technology, typically by initiating embodied sensations and feeling in what/whoever is encountering it. As a framework for this thingly communication, this thesis suggests a reimagination and revitalization of the historical human practice of interpreting omens, wherein the omen is desacralized and reframed as an ontologically intelligent thing. Finally, this thesis suggests that plastic, one of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene, is an apt material to interpret for its inherent ability to perform spatio-tempophagy, or space-time compression.
Alex Hebler
Laying Down Arms: Metaphor and Phenomenology in Illness and Disability Studies
Thesis Mentor: Cole Cohen
This thesis draws critical attention to the role of metaphor when describing illness, disease, and disability. While the primary focus is on military metaphors in medicine, disability as metaphor is also considered throughout, revealing the impact metaphor has on how we conceptualize embodied experiences. Shorter sections on cognitive metaphor theory and phenomenology provide context for what North American and UK medical professionals, literary and disability scholars, and critical medical humanities scholars argue about the use of metaphor when describing illness and disease. It is evident that the language we use is commonly rooted in the idea of a universal, normative phenomenology, even when describing nonnormative experiences (eg, illness and/or disability). Ultimately, this paper takes up the frameworks of critical disability studies and critical medical humanities and calls for two things: 1) a more integrated approach to language and medicine, especially surrounding diagnosis conversations, and 2) a more individualized perspective to illness narratives, allowing personal experience to play a larger role than compulsive military metaphors allow for.
Justin Lizik
"Mont Blanc" and the Secular Sublime
Thesis Mentor: Jay Ponteri
This thesis examines the poem “Mont Blanc” by Percy Shelley through investigation of Shelley’s religious and political views. Analysis provides a clear understanding of the text and what an interested reader can encounter through engagement with the text. Although early analysis of the poem has led to discussions focused on Shelley’s theory of mind, my analysis will move beyond early scholarship toward a reading of “Mont Blanc” that is more wholly invested in Shelley. While analysis is historically focused within the text and Shelley’s philosophy, this paper will argue that Shelley’s politics and experiences are also useful tools for analyzing his poetry. By engaging Shelley’s intentions more fully, I read “Mont Blanc” to be a political poem, one that is asking the reader to reexamine their own feelings and politics.
Laura Nash
Crips Claim Space: Disabled Writers Resist Eugenicist Ideology Through Science Fiction
Thesis Mentor: Sloane McNulty
Science fiction presents a powerful tool for imagining and shaping the future. Problematically, most American science fiction reinforces eugenicist ideology, imagining futures in which humans have eradicated disability or disabled characters develop compensatory superpowers. These narratives cause real harm to disabled people by bolstering ableist beliefs that devalue any disabled person who can’t meet the demands of neoliberal capitalism. Fortunately, counterstories written by disabled authors have the potential to overturn these damaging master narratives. In this thesis, I examine the short stories “Hollow” by Mia Mingus and “Deep End” by Nisi Shawl, along with the novel Kea’s Flight by Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker, all three of which confront eugenicist realities and envision bright crip futures. These authors depict ordinary disabled people surviving and thriving on spaceships and in space colonies, creating accessible and caring communities built on crip kinship, brilliance, and interdependence. We need more science fiction stories like these to liberate our minds and illuminate paths forward.
Carly Naughton
Eugenic Assemblages: Race, Disability, and Reconceptualizing Eugenics Through Assemblage Theory
Thesis Mentor: Sloane McNulty
Drawing on disability studies, critical race theory, biopolitical thought, and eugenic historiography, this thesis details the interdisciplinary struggle of defining “eugenics” and proposes eugenics is best understood through assemblage theory. Though this essay jumps through time, space, and disciplines, it foregrounds historiography on eugenics in the United States from the mid-19th to early 20th century, paying particular attention to the imposed dichotomies that negate the complexity and persistence of eugenics in American society. Rather than a singular ideology or movement, eugenics is an ongoing, multiplicitous, shifting, and incomplete project which requires ongoing, multiplicitous, shifting, and (implicitly) incomplete analysis. To demonstrate the utility of eugenic assemblages as a crip analytic, I explore the re/deterritorializing relationship between race and disability through an analysis of 19th century racialized diagnostics in order to problematize the emphasis on inclusion, valorization of plasticity, and neoliberal attempts to cast disability as desirable in disability studies and the notion of “race-neutral” disability history.
Elizabeth Simins
Ghosts of Queerness Yet-to-Come: The Horrors of Heterosexuality in a Decade of Made-for-TV Christmas Movies
Thesis Mentor: Sara Bernstein
This thesis broadly examines 140 made-for-TV Christmas movies released between 2005 and 2020 alongside a variety of scholarly texts on subject matter including popular romance readership, queer interpretations of horror, cultural studies, and critical heterosexuality studies to argue that the pleasure experienced by queer viewers in the made-for-TV Christmas romcom audience may be more akin to that traditionally generated by horror than romance. Christmas movies paint a bleak view of the world for presumed-heterosexual women—all women according to the genre’s internal logic—one in which only a once-a-year force known as Christmas Magic can save them from the misery of the magic-free heterosexual dating pool. The largely generically consistent narrative structure of Christmas movies, intended to be watched in bulk during annual marathons, uniquely qualifies them to expose the horrific and uncanny aspects of a world in which anything other than heterosexual marriage is perceived as a tragic failure. For queer viewers, a truly happy ending might entail the heroine’s realization that heterosexual marriage isn’t the only valid relationship model, and that her near-universal dissatisfaction with men may suggest something that can’t simply be solved by the timely arrival of “the one.” That she never does, thanks always to the timely intervention of Christmas Magic, is a chilling and constant reminder to queer viewers of the impossibility of their own existence in the Christmas movie’s supposedly charmed world. However, like horror viewers whose terror is confined to a movie’s running time, queer viewers may breathe a sigh of relief as each Christmas movie comes to a close, secure in their knowledge that Christmas Magic has no purchase in the world off screen.