Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Robocop, Logan, and War Girls all present dystopian futures where technology, and more specifically cyborg augmentation, unleashes the worst of humanity. Within these texts, the cyborg, when produced for military use, allows humans to indulge their most harmful impulses in armed conflict. The government-produced cyborg facilitates the domination of outgroups by forcing characters to shed empathy and to “other” perceived enemies. The cyborg in this situation works within the militarized masculine framework described by Cristina Masters in Cyborg Soldiers And Militarized Masculinities. This is the cyborg individual’s transformation into a weapon with a singular use. This transformation is facilitated and encouraged by dominant military power structures, and allows these structures with the help of the cyborg to execute brutal violence against any group unlucky enough to find themselves on the wrong side of a conflict. The solution to such exploitation, then, is for the cyborg to assert its humanity and reject this transformation into a weapon. This thesis argues that doing this will involve abandoning the military structure, rejecting the subjectivity of militarized masculinity characterized by empathy loss and “othering”, and refusing to remain a soldier of the dominant corporate or governmental power structures. Even though this cannot bring down the entire system that perpetuates injustice and bloodletting, it does free the cyborg and hinder the military structure’s ability to execute this injustice. In the uncomfortably plausible dystopias my primary texts reasonably predict, the solution to the cyborg’s exploitation and transformation is to firmly oppose the military-industrial war machine characterized by hyper capitalist and imperialist ambitions.
Speculative fiction and fantasy media have abundant power to portray alternative realities or imagined futures for minority groups. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the late 1990s-early 2000s, and Wynonna Earp, from the late 2010s, are two fantasy television shows that produce this often-progressive, impactful representation, particularly for lesbians and bisexual people. Drawing on Queer and Monster Theories from Susan Stryker, Marilee Lindemann, Harry Benshoff, and Alexis Lothian, this thesis examines queer representation in these TV shows and how it contributes to the normalization of LGBTQ+ individuals whilst simultaneously honoring the shows’ queer fans. Normalizing non-cishetero genders and sexualities helps rewrite the narrative of LGBTQ+ people being considered “deviant” and threatening societal order; and holding true to queer roots of challenging social norms prevents the power of the queer community from being influenced by the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality.
Orientalism as a cultural ideology serves the neo-liberal foreign policy goals of the West and has defined pop cultural perceptions of the Arab world from the Western perspective for centuries. Arab science fiction, often drowned out by dominant Western pop cultural forces presents the Arab world from an Arab perspective, fighting the negative global perception of the Arab world that Orientalism has worked hard to carefully cultivate. Cities such as the futuristic city of NEOM in Saudi Arabia, further serve to destroy the orientalist views of Arab society through innovative urban planning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In this thesis, I analyze the way Iraq+100 by Hassan Blassim and Linda Sansour’s Nation Estate push back against orientalist ideology in conjunction with Saudi Arabia’s urban and cultural revolution as the Arab nation builds the city of NEOM. Additionally, I will explore how Arab science fiction and dystopia reflect an optimistic future for the Arab world at large despite modern Western attempts to colonize the region.
This thesis examines the three films of the most recent Star Wars trilogy (2015-2019) through a feminist lens, investigating the following question: is the trilogy’s leading woman, Rey, a feminist character throughout her arc? This thesis finds that while the telling of Rey’s story certainly has its feminist moments, it fails in several ways to truly abolish the patriarchal frame/attitude that was ingrained from the first two trilogies, leaving the character of Rey feeling incomplete. As the first female to be the primary protagonist in a Star Wars film, Rey’s strength and light certainly make her a positive female role model for young audiences. However, she is held back by the patriarchal society in which she exists and thus is ultimately reduced to being second-best in her own trilogy to the all-powerful older white men who came before her.