This thesis examines the internet phenomenon of the “Sad Girl,” a name given to young women who identify and present themselves as inherently melancholic people online. I position the internet community of the Sad Girl, which spans across three social media platforms, Tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram, within a larger history...
This thesis explores the roles of scripts in shaping minoritarian subjectivity through Kim Jee-woon’s film The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), Kim Fu’s novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014), and R. Zamora Linmark’s novel Rolling the R’s (1995). In all three works, diasporic characters of Asian descent...
Contrary to critics and scholars interested in the series’ therapeutic value, Harry Potter encourages post-9/11 subjects to neither heal nor mourn. Instead of taking up the potential pain and transformation in realizing and coming to terms with the deaths of his parents, Harry’s reattachment to the institution precludes his abilities...
In this thesis I examine the ideological mechanisms that work to constitute, construct, and maintain subject identity. Such mechanisms include repetition, performativity, identification, and interpellation. I incorporate structuralist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic theories as a means to discuss the ways in which gender, sexuality, and identity are performative masquerades. Furthermore, these...
As digital video pushes celluloid film further into obsolescence, many artists and viewers mourn the loss of what they consider a more organic medium. Photochemical film is subject to decay due to variables of care and the inevitability of time, and film’s embodied vulnerabilities are similar to those of the...
There is probably no article of diet of animal
origin more commonly eaten in all countries or served
in a greater variety of ways than eggs. Milk is the
nearest rival and it resembles eggs in that both are
intended by nature for food for the young. Although
not a...
This thesis offers a theory of queer materiality as a way of understanding the interconnectedness of freaks, ghosts, and madness in Victorian culture, and how these elements coalesce in Victorian literature to destabilize the knowable materiality of normative social structures and forms of embodiment, leading to the production of queer...
This dissertation develops a framework for Curandera feminism, informed by familial healing practices, women of color feminisms, and institutional critique. My research centers my family’s generational Curandera practices. As I honor the call to be critical of the master’s tools, I seek possibilities for institutional change through Curandera feminism. Institutions...
Grief--the reaction to a significant loss--is a near-universal human experience, from which a subset of grievers (10%-15%) have difficulty recovering, placing them at high risk for negative health and mental health outcomes (Marks, Jun, & Song, 2007). For those showing substantial distress, counseling has been shown to be an effective...