This project investigates the ways in which conceptions of women and gender in Islam are articulated within discourses of modernity, freedom, and justice. Considering the ways in which third-world literature and scholarship interacts with, and creates, multiculturalist discourse, this paper examines representation, spokesmanship, and the role of the cosmopolitan humanities...
This thesis examines the discursive seeds of the European endeavor to supremacy and dominance by tracing the germination of Eurocentrism and European exceptionalism in two different eras. Through close attention to textuality, I suggest a rhetorical continuity between the medieval and the early modern eras by focusing not directly on...
Many queer scholars have made the turn away from orientations that treat Victorian queerness as either “lost” or “hidden.” Adding more complexity to literary theories which center practices of “revealing” queer artifacts, Sharon Marcus, for instance, argues queer encounters exist at the surfaces of Victorian literature. In addition, Anjali Arondekar’s...
Ever since Henry Jenkins’ groundbreaking _Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture_ (1992), fan studies has slowly worked its way further into mainstream academia. However, particular practices and cultures of femslash fandom, and the contribution of queer women to fandom archives and circulation have, in many ways, been neglected. In...
This project examines two understudied female characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales who emerge as subversive figures by striving to maintain control over their bodies and being. Through my analyses of the Knight’s and Second Nun’s Tales, I reveal how virginity correlates with bodily autonomy for the narratives’ respective protagonists,...