Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

What if I told you that a few photos of a sweatshirt, delivered at the perfect time, cracked a case that had stumped some of the world’s greatest marketing minds for more than twenty years? What if I told you that a dismissed lawsuit played an integral part in this? One made possible by a rainy night in Couva, Trinidad? Or that all of this, hundreds of years in the making, could aid a wrongfully incarcerated man in being freed after spending twenty two years in prison, and pioneer one of the largest-scale social justice movements of the 21st century? All catalyzed by the effects of a global pandemic? If I told you, would you believe me? But let’s get back to that sweatshirt for now.<br/>In January 2020, the Coronavirus was a seemingly distant issue for another part of the world to most Americans. A generation that had seen the likes of H1N1 and Ebola come, cause irrational panic, and subsequently disappear had grown complacent with regard to unknown diseases. On March 9th, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert took a defiant step in dispelling fears of COVID-19 by touching every microphone in the room at the end of an interview. Two days later, a test revealed that he had contracted the virus, the first professional athlete to do so. The NBA suspended all activities, and thus began the succession of sports leagues across the nation suspending their seasons as global infection numbers rose. But we humans are resilient. As weeks became months, the NBA and WNBA were able to engineer “bubbles” to play in: isolated areas with only the players and essential personnel to play the games, equipped with safety precautions and persistent testing. With no fans allowed inside, social media and media members provided the only glimpse into the “bubble” that ordairy fans would get.<br/>The mornings of July 25th and 26th, as the players arrived for the first games of the day and were snapped by photographers, many sported orange hoodies with the trademark white WNBA logo in the center, to promote the start of the WNBA’s “bubble” season that summer. This sent the internet into a frenzy. “#OrangeHoodie” was trending across all social media platforms, the item sold out on many websites, and more people than ever were talking about the WNBA online. That season, WNBA viewership spiked. More people watched the WNBA than ever before, even with the NBA’s playoffs taking place at the same time. How, then, did a single orange hoodie change the future of marketing the WNBA? What does that tell us about other women’s sports that have similarly struggled with attention and viewership? What role does media exposure play in all of this; do we perceive women differently in the media than we do men? Are these issues rooted in deeper societal prejudices, or are women’s sports simply quantifiably less entertaining?<br/>On a journey to find the answers to these questions, I learned a lot about the relationship of media and culture, about sport, and about the outstanding untold stories of American sportswomen. However, the most important thing I found was that women are marketable. After long being denied the opportunities and exposure they deserve, American culture has as a result pushed women to the background under the guise of them not being demanded or marketable. This could not be further from the truth. They are not demanded because they are not seen. Investing in sportswomen would not only create a better future for all women, but for all people. How, then, is this achievable? How will the powers that be allow for changes to be made? How can we as individuals be receptive to this change? In this thesis, I will take you on a journey where media is fun and fair, and where the future is female.

Backcountry Broadcasts is a multimedia project that aims to empower women in the great outdoors. This platform serves to inspire, encourage and appreciate women in the wilderness through photography, personal stories and more. Through our passion for the outdoors, we're incorporating our own female experience with the voices of others to bring light to the importance of gender inclusivity in the backcountry.

Backcountry Broadcasts is a multimedia project that aims to empower women in the great outdoors. This platform serves to inspire, encourage and appreciate women in the wilderness through photography, personal stories and more. Through our passion for the outdoors, we're incorporating our own female experience with the voices of others to bring light to the importance of gender inclusivity in the backcountry.

Shakespeare’s Case for Vulnerability: Giving Voice to Pain and Suffering is a combination of two pieces of work. The research centers around understanding the communication of pain and suffering and how this factors into our everyday lives, in combination with an interview and video project called Evolution of Woman. This project sought to determine the different facets of pain and suffering and how, specifically, Shakespeare communicates these concepts in his work. This work also explores how the representation of pain and suffering was different between male and female roles in Shakespeare’s writing. From this research, questions were developed to interview Shakespearean experts and actors. These interviews explore the details of portraying Shakespeare’s characters and how gender plays a role in the characters’ expression of pain and suffering, as well as what it means to be a female actor in plays that are dominated by male characters.

In Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science, gender is handled very carefully and intentionally. The women within this novel are characterized into two categories: sexually inexperienced and intellectually provocative. Women in the novel that represent the ideal English woman, such as Carmina, are presented as sexually inexperienced and full of compassion for animals. The ideal woman was child-like in her sexual inexperience and naivety towards topics easily understood by men. Meanwhile, women who represented the New Woman, such as Mrs. Gallilee, are presented as intellectually provocative and cruel. The New Woman was a woman who did not conform to societal expectations of women in the 19th century, and Collins’s interpretation of the New Woman as void of compassion reflects the public tensions against the insertion of women into male-dominated fields during the Women’s Rights Movement. This strain is integral to understanding the insurmountable pressures placed upon Victorian women in a society, such that society would dissect her choices and presentation regardless of which category she fell in.<br/><br/> Both the ideal woman and the New Woman in Wilkie Collins’s “Heart and Science” are repeatedly compared to children and animals, exposing the degraded stance of women within nineteenth-century society. Women were viewed as having lesser intellectual and emotional capabilities than their male counterparts, resulting in the association of women with other “lesser” beings. Collins’s negative portrayal of the New Woman and the pedophilic sexualization of the ideal woman represent how the Victorian woman was “vivisected” by patriarchal society. The meticulous and nonconsensual dissection of a woman’s entire being, from her sexuality to her intellectual capacity, resulted in women identifying with vivisected animals and thus resulted in a strong feminine presence in the Anti-Vivisection Movement. <br/><br/>The connection between women, the Anti-Vivisection Movement, and female sexuality provides context for the success of the Women’s Rights Movement. Victorian women stood against vivisection because they understood what it was like to have their bodies be used without their consent, and they understood the battle between men’s desires and women’s rights to their bodies. Women also identified with being picked apart by society, as a woman’s worth lay in her physical appearance and her sexual and intellectual reputation. Through the Anti-Vivisection Movement’s success, women realized that they could insert themselves into scientific conversation and succeeding at helping those who are voiceless. The traction from the Anti-Vivisection Movement carried into the fervor for the Women’s Rights Movement, because women stood together in a way that had never been done before and rejected all preconceived notions of their status in society.

This creative project examines identity, autonomy, and social hierarchy by manipulating the traditions and iconography of female figural painting. Female identity and autonomy is often marked by a tense relationship between the self and the body. Socially acceptable self-expression of one's behavior, body, and desires is strictly regulated within a set of often paradoxical parameters that repress abject, 'animal' behaviors. This series of three paintings reacts to this culture of restraint and repression by exposing the body to nature once more, finding catharsis in annihilation and the destruction of boundaries between the Self and the Other. The human body is depicted as a host for animal life cycles, exploring the duality of creating and supporting life while simultaneously being destroyed. Animals that embody socially unacceptable behaviors are brought crashing back into the human form, reuniting the idealized, contrived female figure with an expressive, imperfect nature and sense of self. Hybridized animal-human relationships in the paintings break down the falsely hierarchical distinction between 'humans' and 'animals' that distances and privileges humanity from that which is considered primitive. By releasing the human body to the uncomplicated consumptive and reproductive forces of ‘trash’ animals in these paintings, the work challenges how the worth of existence is socially defined, instead affirming that all life has some inherent value distinct from its transactional worth to society at large. This celebration of the grotesque shakes off repressive social constructs, offering a unique form of catharsis and agency.