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- All Subjects: Mental Health
- All Subjects: Latin American literature
- Creators: Department of Psychology
- Creators: Tompkins, Cynthia
Description
In the last years of the twentieth century, while the narrative of women in other Latin American countries has received critical attention, Bolivian women's narrative has been widely ignored. The fact that the voice of Bolivian women in Latin American feminist discourse is rarely discussed in Latin American criticism is enough to justify the present study. This work focuses on three prominent Bolivian writers: Gaby Vallejos, Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz, and Erika Bruzonic. The short stories of these three authors are characterized by accentuating certain telluric features revealed in the background of their feminine/feminist narratives. At the same time, based on the American and European feminist literary critique, this work analyzes the feminine/feminist themes mounted in the narrative of these authors. Gaby Vallejos, with a cinematic style, chronicles the life and customs of the "valluno" context, building a mosaic of different voices in dialogue. Her topics revolve around binaries: life-death, and pain and pleasure, voicing condemnation for a patriarchal society. Ericka Bruzonic deals with women and identity, memory and the breaking of lineage as an imposing structure. Her themes are built around the cosmopolitism of "paceña" urban life, and her voice transgresses the binomials established by a patriarchal society. Finally Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz takes the life and customs of the Santa Cruz and the Guarani culture and her plots weave these elements reaching for myths and taboos, involving the reader into her stories. In this manner, her narrative makes an incursion into the conscious and unconscious realm of the readers questioning their wealth of moral and social values, their notions of heterosexuality, and sexual taboos. The three writers, with different narrative styles yet dialogical, narrate various experiences of women from different regions, social classes, ages, education, and sexual orientations. Our authors give high value to the word and the body embedded in the culture, thereby affirming their woman's voice as Bolivians and their literary presence in the context of Latin American literature.
ContributorsLopez, Norma (Author) / Urioste-Ascorra, Carmen (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Las personas públicas de mujeres fuertes mexicanas generalmente se definen como desafiantes y contrarias a los roles sociales generalmente aceptados de las mujeres sumisas. Dichas personas públicas exigen atención y buscan incluirse en la cultura popular. Sin embargo, cuando se analizan mediante los rubros de la teoría queer, se revelan arquetipos heternormativos. Esta tesis examina cronológicamente la obra de tres cronistas mexicanos de los siglos XX y XXI, Salvador Novo, Carlos Monsiváis y Sara Sefchovich, analizando su retrato de mujeres fuertes que ocupan sitios urbanos públicos en la Ciudad de México. Se investigan los efectos sociales elitistas de las imágenes públicas de mujeres fuertes, revelando restricciones patriarcales de mujeres en espacios públicos y construcciones subsecuentes de personas públicas como exóticas y cosificadas, asimismo facilitando interacciones con una sociedad sumamente masculinista y machista. La falta de agencialidad social real se revela cuando el patriarcado se reafirma, a pesar de la índole disconforme de las mujeres retratadas. Los constructos de familia y de masculinidad exigen la existencia tanto del padre y del esposo ausentes como del hipermacho y de la acompañante mujer sumisa limitada a sitios privados. El retrato de mujeres fuertes en la obra analizada desnaturaliza la imagen de domesticidad, señalando que las mujeres mexicanas salen del hogar para ocupar sitios públicos en la Ciudad de México. Como la normalización del constructo de familia se cuestiona, la teoría queer se utiliza en una manera innovadora para analizar dichos retratos de mujeres fuertes y agencialidad sociopolítica.
ContributorsHolcombe, William Daniel (Author) / Foster, David William (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation analyzes three films from Mexico, Spain, and Argentina--Kilómetro 31, El orfanato, and Aparecidos (2007)--and their interplay with the historicism that has traditionally served as the default referent for "reality" in Western narrative. While grounding my approach in temporal critique, I borrow from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and queer theory to explore ways in which ghosts and the rhetorical figure of the family are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also pivotal in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for articulating generational anxieties about a nation's relationship with its history, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries according to its grammar/logic. The proposed trajectory through these films will help facilitate a study of the potential of these rhetorical figures to either reinscribe or question two of the most fundamental processes that go into the cartography of ideology: the imposition of (a) time and the negotiation of social subjectivity within it. Competing political narratives may use any number of rhetorical strategies to position themselves in time to promote their agendas while continuing to reinforce the overall framework that determines the parameters of what is visible, and thus debatable. As temporal anomalies who are defined by their (in)visibility, ghosts can be used to either reinforce this framework or they can be used to articulate alternative relationships to time, and consequently, other political possibilities. Ghosts, families, and children are especially volatile rhetorical figures because of their potential to expose the mechanisms of societal organization--the construction of social subjects through their relationship to the time and the families of which they are presumably products--as negotiable processes rather than self-evident truths.
ContributorsSt-Georges, Charles (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This work aims to deepen the construction of identity of the Korean-argentinian through the "koreanity" and "koreanism". Therefore, we will analyze the short story collection La peonia y su sombra (2002) in search of evidence that discover the difficult definition of the "koreanism", or the practice of Korean culture, in which the language is included. The "koreanity" is a feature based on physical traits, while the "koreanism" is defined by the use of the language and the culture. While the "koreanity" is an exogenous factor, and it is well defined, the "koreanism" is defined through cultural impressions that are more difficult to distinguish. To do this we will use the Argentine native vision to find the "koreanism" and, if necessary, will exhibit different forms of subsistence of the "koreanism" in Argentina.
ContributorsLee, Jaekeun (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / De Jesús Hernández-G., Manuel (Committee member) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
From Impossible Angles Towards Strategic Ones: Narratives of Death, Life, and Disability in La Muerte me Da and El Huesped The glamour of single-handedly overcoming adversity, sidestepping obstacles, or defying the odds makes for great mystery or adventure fiction, but fails to do justice (poetic or otherwise) to lives that are both physically and conceptually "marked" by more complex challenges. From a theoretical view, a similar desire to escape or maintain the perceived "dividing line" between fact and fiction, nature and nurture, mind and body, is confronted by a diverse set of human experiences, all of which have come to be defined, and continue to define themselves, along both sides of such a divide. Disability, typically viewed as an "emerging" branch of literary and cultural critique, is perhaps the most pervasive. Hidden under the covert language of the "grotesque", "monstrous", "doppelgänger", "freak", "eccentric" or "queer", disability has historically represented something other than itself. Two texts that attest to both the real and imagined possibilities of resignification and new modes of articulation surrounding disability are La muerte me da (2007) by Cristina Rivera Garza and El huésped (2006) by Guadalupe Nettel. From different points of departure, both texts offer a narrative approximation towards the disabled mind, body, and perceptual experience. In ways that are both similar and different, these narratives question one's perceived access to that which is otherwise understood to be the physically and conceptually "inaccessible" or "illegible" space of disability. Such approximations towards, and articulations of, the disability experience are processes that move, largely unnoticed, both within and beyond texts. As this construct continues to transform itself from both within and outside itself, disability acquires intellectual and practical value while requiring the "experts" in fields beyond the narrow scope of medicine, education, and rehabilitation to (re)consider their own approaches to, and apprehensions of, disability in order to redefine what or who is accessible or viable for literary and cultural debate.
ContributorsNewland, Rachel Renee (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Globalization has brought a renewed interest in the discourses of the past and national/ethnic identities that has been reflected in the cultural production and the social sciences around the globe. Historical novel (and their sequel telenovelas), a literary field closely linked to historiography, reflects, and has contributed to (re)shape the discourses of the past and identity in Latin America. Since the first decades of the 19th century until nowadays, Colombian novelists have explored Colombian identity through historical novels. Their plots and characters are highly influenced by new historiographical trends. During the19th and the first half of the 20th century, Romantic and Realist novels were generally constructed over historicist assumption of the past: the belief that it is possible to acquire a completely “objective” knowledge of the past. However, some outstanding Colombian historical novels, such as La Marquesa de Yolombó (1928), challenged this notion of the past. Since the last decades of the 20th century, Colombian historical novels share an attitude toward the past that Linda Hutcheon has defined as Historiographical Metafiction. This approach to history challenges the idea of an objective total history, and emphasizes the importance of the personal experiences, the subjectivity, of their characters and of the narrative voices. Donde no te Conozcan (2007), Trí¬ptico de la Infamia (2016), and Mancha de la Tierra (2014) are three Colombian historical novels written in the 21st century that share this attitude towards history. They question the nineteenth-century interpretations of Colombian history, especially those related to the role of Jews, Moors, Indigenous, Africans, and mestizos in the colonial social dynamics, and, therefore, in Colombian culture.
ContributorsRuiz-Olaya, Andrés F (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Sarreal, Jualia (Committee member) / Fredrick, Sharonah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Coming out from under the shadow of sight, blindness has a story to tell. From Tiresias to The Miracle Worker, literary and visual representations of blindness are cornerstones of compelling tales of loss and overcoming. In support of the inherent value of sight, these conventional narratives overshadow the stories and lived experiences of blind people themselves. In light of this misrepresentation, I explore what it means to read, write, and see blindness, as well as consider the implications of being blind in present-day Latin America. I achieve this through a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of novels, short stories, film, and photography by blind and sighted artists and writers whose work has been published or exhibited after the year 2000. In this context, I will demonstrate how blindness can serve as a lens through which the production and reception of narrative and visual culture can be critically evaluated from a blind person’s perspective. Most importantly, this dissertation showcases the critical and creative work of blind people in order to demystify stereotypes and contextualize anxieties surrounding blindness, perception, and identity.
ContributorsNewland, Rachel Renee (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W. (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This paper explains what factors influence mental health issues and what type of care is provided in various countries. The countries in this study will include the United States, Japan, Ethiopia and South Africa, all of which have varying degrees of ethnic diversity, economic status and understanding of mental health issues. It discusses the specific healthcare systems in each country, as well as the attitudes and problems associated with depression and schizophrenia, two prevalent mental health disorders. This paper examines the different ways that a diagnosis is reached for schizophrenia and major depression in these different countries, as well as what methods are used for treating individuals with these disorders. It will also examine the prominent notion that schizophrenia has better outcomes in developing countries than in places that have wider medical care available. It then discusses what treatments are available in each country, as well as social constructs that exist regarding those treatments in order to understand the ways that treatments can be expanded to improve outcomes. This paper will then examine the different outcomes of these mental health disorders that are common in each country, and conclude with ideas on how to make global mental health a reality.
ContributorsOlsen, Rachel Lindsay (Author) / Gaughan, Monica (Thesis director) / Wood, Reed (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
While the concept of healthcare is largely respected in Arab culture, the stigma underlying mental health is particularly startling. This study examined the differences in mental health treatment-seeking behaviors using data from Arabs living in Syria (12.9%) and Arabs (25.6%) and non-Arabs (61.5%) living in the United States of ages 18-60. A Web-based survey was developed to understand how factors like religiosity, acculturation, and positive attitudes towards psychological treatment increased help-seeking behaviors. This survey was also provided in Arabic to include non-English speaking participants. It was hypothesized that Arab-American individuals will be more open to pursuing professional psychological help when suffering from mental symptomology (i.e. anxiety) than individuals who identified as Syrian-Arabs. In contrast, both Syrian-Arabs and Arab-Americans would definitely pursue professional help when suffering from physical symptomology (i.e. ankle sprain). Striking differences were found based on Western acculturation. Findings suggested that Arab-Americans were less inclined towards treatment and more trusting of an in-group physician ("Dr. Ahmed") whereas Syrian-Arabs were more inclined to pursue psychological treatment and preferred to trust an out-group physician ("Dr. Smith"). The results of this study identify main concerns regarding Arab attitudes towards seeking mental health treatment, which can better inform future research and mental health services for this minority.
ContributorsRayes, Diana S (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis director) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Olive, Michael Foster (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This project aims to help with the stigma and mystery surrounding mental health through the combination of art and psychology. The project was created by first interviewing individuals with different disorders and then researching the disorders further to acquire an accurate idea of the experiences of those afflicted. Then paintings were created to depict the emotions and struggles faced by individuals with psychological disorders. The project focusses on five different abnormal disorders: Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia. These particular ailments were chosen because they include the main diagnoses that the average American thinks of when mental health is mentioned. My thesis contains interviews that I personally conducted, descriptions of the five disorders included, and artistic representations of those disorders in the form of oil paintings. It is my hope that this project will help unafflicted individuals to better understand others who live with abnormal psychological disorders, as well as help the afflicted see themselves represented in a way that they otherwise might not.
ContributorsSanchez Rodriguez, Wendy (Author) / Solis, Forrest (Thesis director) / Cavanaugh Toft, Carolyn (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2015-05