Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Performativity
- All Subjects: American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.
- Creators: Clarke, Deborah
- Creators: Lucio, Joanna D.
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
The stories that we tell matter. Public storytelling influences how we think about ourselves and how we treat others. This project explores how Arizona's Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070) affected the development of social identities such as citizen, immigrant (documented and undocumented), and public administrator through public storytelling. The question of how a public policy shapes identity development is relatively under-explored in the literature. Critical aspects of feminist and political theory demonstrate that identity is affected by discourses, such as performatives and accounts of oneself. A public policy authorizes public administrators to issue or demand discourses, such as performatives and accounts of oneself, from the individuals they encounter. Moreover, the text of a public policy resembles an account of oneself, delivered on behalf of a fabricated subject. In this project, the structural elements and storytelling techniques of SB 1070 are drawn out through tools derived from the field of narratology. When applied to the text of SB 1070, narratological tools reveal four major organizing principles or plots, all of which center on the identification and punishment of four types of individuals or organizations: (a) employers of undocumented immigrants; (b) transporters/shielders of undocumented immigrants; (c) undocumented immigrants; (d) state and local government agencies or officials that do not fully implement federal immigration law. An analysis of 321 news stories published after SB 1070's passage reveals that some plots resonated more than others with storytellers. The storytelling about SB 1070 also makes visible the policy's power as a discourse to unsettle the identities of citizens, immigrants (documented and undocumented), and public administrators. It also raises concerns about who bears the responsibility for the impact of policies like SB 1070, which have been passed but not implemented, and yet have a tangible impact on the lives of citizens and other residents. These findings suggest that not only can public policy unsettle social identities, but proposes complicated questions about who is responsible for the harm inflicted on others when a public policy is passed.
ContributorsWarnicke, Margaretha (Author) / Catlaw, Thomas J (Thesis advisor) / Kitch, Sally L (Committee member) / Lucio, Joanna D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines contemporary U.S. women writing about war, with primarily women subjects and protagonists, from 1991-2013, in fiction, memoir, and media. The writers situate women at the center of war texts and privilege their voices as authoritative speakers in war, whether as civilians and soldiers trying to survive or indigenous women preparing for the possibility of war. I argue that these authors are rewriting scripts of war to reflect gendered experiences and opening new ways of thinking about war. Women Rewriting Scripts of War argues that Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead juxtaposes an indigenous Story concept against a white industrialized national “Truth,” and indigenous women characters will resort to war if needed to oppose it. Silko’s and the other texts here challenge readers to unseat assumptions about the sovereignty of the U.S. and other countries, about the fixedness of gender, of capitalism, and of how humans relate to each other‒and how we should. I argue in Essay 3 that the script of “the body” or “the soldier” in military service can be expanded by moving toward language and concepts from feminist and queer theory and spectrums of gender and sexuality. This can contribute to positive change for all military members. In each of the texts, there are some similarities in connections with others. Connections enable solidarity for change, possibilities for healing, and survival; indeed, without connections with others to work together, survival is not possible. Changes to established economic structures become necessary for women in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible; I argue that women engaging in alternative modes of economy subvert the dominant economic constraints, gender hierarchies, and social isolation during and after war in the Congo. In Essay 5, I explore two fictional texts about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Helen Benedict's novel Sand Queen and Katey Schultz’s short story collection Flashes of War. The connections in these women’s texts about war are not idealized, and they function as the antithesis to the fragmentation and isolation of postmodern texts.
This dissertation examines contemporary U.S. women writing about war, with primarily women subjects and protagonists, from 1991-2013, in fiction, memoir, and media. The writers situate women at the center of war texts and privilege their voices as authoritative speakers in war, whether as civilians and soldiers trying to survive or indigenous women preparing for the possibility of war. I argue that these authors are rewriting scripts of war to reflect gendered experiences and opening new ways of thinking about war. Women Rewriting Scripts of War argues that Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead juxtaposes an indigenous Story concept against a white industrialized national “Truth,” and indigenous women characters will resort to war if needed to oppose it. Silko’s and the other texts here challenge readers to unseat assumptions about the sovereignty of the U.S. and other countries, about the fixedness of gender, of capitalism, and of how humans relate to each other‒and how we should. I argue in Essay 3 that the script of “the body” or “the soldier” in military service can be expanded by moving toward language and concepts from feminist and queer theory and spectrums of gender and sexuality. This can contribute to positive change for all military members. In each of the texts, there are some similarities in connections with others. Connections enable solidarity for change, possibilities for healing, and survival; indeed, without connections with others to work together, survival is not possible. Changes to established economic structures become necessary for women in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible; I argue that women engaging in alternative modes of economy subvert the dominant economic constraints, gender hierarchies, and social isolation during and after war in the Congo. In Essay 5, I explore two fictional texts about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Helen Benedict's novel Sand Queen and Katey Schultz’s short story collection Flashes of War. The connections in these women’s texts about war are not idealized, and they function as the antithesis to the fragmentation and isolation of postmodern texts.
ContributorsStamper, Cambria A (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The Female Patient: American Women Writers Narrating Medicine and Psychology 1890-1930 considers how American women writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein, use the novel form to examine medical culture during and after the turn of the 20th century. These authors insert the viewpoint of the woman patient, I argue, to expose problematics of gendered medical relationships and women’s roles in medicine, as well as the complexities of the pre-Freudian medical environment. Issues such as categorizing and portrayal of mental illness, control and perception of the patient through treatment, women's alternative medical practices, addiction, and the immigrant and minority patient are all examined. In doing so, the goal of revising medicine's dominant narratives and literature's role in that objective may be achieved. Authors using the subjectivity of the patient help to refigure perspectives of women's medical and social encounters. Utilizing historical record and sociocultural theorizing, this dissertation presents the five women authors as essential in creating new narratives of modernity and ways of understanding medical experience during this time.
ContributorsSlatus, Kerri (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Tromp, Marlene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
When discussing gay literature in the French, contemporary sphere, one of the most up
and coming and prominent authors is Édouard Louis. His works’ focus on the realism and
violence of the working class offers a critical and necessary perspective of the gay experience in
modern-day France. While recent in their creation, Louis’ works follow a connecting thread that
is inseparable from other autofiction novels that have a narrator with same sex attractions such as
Annie Ernaux’s Ce qu’ils disent or rien and Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims. Often commonly
discussed as French LGBT literature, these autofictional works that extend from Gide to Eribon
to now Louis demonstrate how the proposed societal dualities, limitations, and hierarchies
described by philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler affect homosexual
performativity. Louis’ first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published on January 2, 2014,
offers another illustration of this analysis. It specifically describes the metaphysical
(metaphysical being the relationship between the outer stimuli and internal perspective) effects
and constraints of current poverty on homosexual performativity. By analyzing En finir avec
Eddy Bellegueule through this theoretical framework of power and poverty, this thesis adds a
theoretical and intersectional nuance to the narrative voice that current literature focusing on the
novel’s landscape mentions but does not reflect on. I argue that it is important to attach an
autofictional timeline that is necessary to promote and apply future ontological doctrines to this
genre.
ContributorsYanez, Mariano (Author) / Canovas, Frédéric (Thesis director) / Agruss, David (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Dean, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05