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- All Subjects: Queer Theory
- Creators: Miller, April
- Resource Type: Text
Description
This thesis is a two-part theatre and literature project on The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. The research component will consist of gathering information from the origins of this play in writing and in production to further understand my knowledge of the time it was written in and how it has been interpreted over the years. The theatrical elements will come as I direct and produce my own production of the play, and compare my research of Wilde's play and past productions to my own directorial decisions in attempt to make a successful student performed play.
ContributorsMarnick, Courtney Melissa (Author) / Miller, April (Thesis director) / Brown, Dori (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The Bachelor first aired on ABC in 2002, and its gender-swapped counterpart The Bachelorette aired a year later. The premise of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is that one lead, the titular bachelor or bachelorette, pursues romantic connections with up to thirty contestants at a time, with an elimination ceremony every week where the lead decides who they would like to continue dating and who they would like to send home. This paper uses queer theory on non-monogamy to explore the role of non-monogamous practices in the franchise and their relationship to the monogamous goals of the shows. By exploring the tension between monogamy and non-monogamy, this paper illustrates how dissonance between monogamy and non-monogamy is not only present but essential to preserving the shows' goals.
ContributorsKuntz, Alexis Rachel (Author) / Van Engen, Dagmar (Thesis director) / Miller, April (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
A posthuman figure like the female cyborg challenges traditional humanist feminism in ways that make room for theorizing new subjectivities and feminist epistemologies. Rather than support a traditional feminism that assumes common experiences within patriarchal society and erases differences among women, cyborg feminism moves beyond naturalism and essentialism to acknowledge complex, individual, and ever-changing identity. Three films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), all offer such a vision of the female cyborg. In these films, the cyborg subject is a composite of machine and human—sometimes physical, dependent on the corporal mixing of flesh and machine, but just as often mental. Human sentiment, human memories, and human emotion merge with mechanical frames and electronic codes/coding to produce cyborgs. Importantly, every main cyborg in these films is coded as female. For each cyborg, a female body hosts preprogrammed sexuality and the emotions each creator thinks a woman should have, whether those are empathy, compassion, or submissiveness.
The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.
The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.
ContributorsMargolis, Madison Lawry (Author) / Dove-Viebahn, Aviva (Thesis director) / Miller, April (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05