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- All Subjects: Latin American literature
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- Creators: Tompkins, Cynthia
- Creators: Department of Psychology
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 purpose of this thesis study was to examine variables of the "War on Cancer" frame, loss-gain prime, and patient gender on treatment decision for advanced cancer patients. A total of 291 participants (141 females) participated in an online survey experiment and were randomly assigned to one of eight possible conditions, each of which were comprised of a combination of one of two levels for three total independent variables: war frame ("War on Cancer" frame or neutral frame), loss-gain prime (loss prime or gain prime), and patient gender (female or male). Each of the three variables were operationalized to determine whether or not the exposure to the war on cancer paradigm, loss-frame language, or male patient gender would increase the likelihood of a participant choosing a more aggressive cancer treatment. Participants read a patient scenario and were asked to respond to questions related to motivating factors. Participants were then asked to report preference for one of two treatment decisions. Participants were then asked to provide brief demographic information in addition to responding to questions about military history, war attitudes, and cancer history. The aforementioned manipulations sought to determine whether exposure to various factors would make a substantive difference in final treatment decision. Contrary to the predicted results, participants in the war frame condition (M = 3.85, SD = 1.48) were more likely to choose the pursuit of palliative care (as opposed to aggressive treatment) than participants in the neutral frame condition (M = 3.54, SD = 1.23). Ultimately, these significant findings suggest that there is practical information to be gained from treatment presentation manipulations. By arming healthcare providers with a more pointed understanding of the nuances of treatment presentation, we can hope to empower patients, their loved ones, and healthcare providers entrenched in the world of cancer treatment.
ContributorsKnowles, Madelyn Ann (Author) / Kwan, Virginia S. Y. (Thesis director) / Presson, Clark (Committee member) / Salamone, Damien (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The purpose of this thesis study was to examine whether the "war on cancer" metaphor influences cancer perception and treatment decision. A total of 249 undergraduates (152 females) from a large southwestern university participated in an online survey experiment and were either randomly assigned to the control condition (N=123) or to the war prime condition (N=126). Participants in the control condition did not receive the metaphor manipulation while participants in the war prime condition received the subtle "war on cancer" metaphor prime. After the prime was given, participants read a scenario, answered questions related to the situation, and responded to demographic questions. The results suggested that, compared to participants in the no-prime condition, participants exposed to the war metaphor were more likely to (a) view melanoma as an acute disease, (b) choose chemotherapy over molecular tests, and (c) prefer more aggressive treatment. These findings illustrated the unintended consequences of the "war on cancer" slogan. The results were encouraging and in the predicted direction, but the effect size was small. The discussion section described possible future directions for research.
ContributorsShangraw, Ann Mariah (Author) / Kwan, Virginia (Thesis director) / Neuberg, Steven (Committee member) / Cavanaugh Toft, Carolyn (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Cancer is a disease that occurs in many and perhaps all multicellular organisms. Current research is looking at how different life history characteristics among species could influence cancer rates. Because somatic maintenance is an important component of a species' life history, we hypothesize the same ecological forces shaping the life history of a species should also determine its cancer susceptibility. By looking at varying life histories, potential evolutionary trends could be used to explain differing cancer rates. Life history theory could be an important framework for understanding cancer vulnerabilities with different trade-offs between life history traits and cancer defenses. Birds have diverse life history strategies that could explain differences in cancer suppression. Peto's paradox is the observation that cancer rates do not typically increase with body size and longevity despite an increased number of cell divisions over the animal's lifetime that ought to be carcinogenic. Here we show how Peto’s paradox is negatively correlated for cancer within the clade, Aves. That is, larger, long-lived birds get more cancer than smaller, short-lived birds (p=0.0001; r2= 0.024). Sexual dimorphism in both plumage color and size differ among Aves species. We hypothesized that this could lead to a difference in cancer rates due to the amount of time and energy sexual dimorphism takes away from somatic maintenance. We tested for an association between a variety of life history traits and cancer, including reproductive potential, growth rate, incubation, mating systems, and sexual dimorphism in both color and size. We found male birds get less cancer than female birds (9.8% vs. 11.1%, p=0.0058).
ContributorsDolan, Jordyn Nicole (Author) / Maley, Carlo (Thesis director) / Harris, Valerie (Committee member) / Boddy, Amy (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05