Partisan politics has created an increasingly polarized political climate in the United States. Despite the divisive political climate, women’s representation in politics has also increased drastically over the years. I began this project to see if there is a partisan rivalry between women in politics or a sense of shared “womanhood.” This thesis explores the role political parties play for women in office by examining how they vote on bills, what type of bills they propose, and whether or not they work collaboratively with their female counterparts at the Arizona State Legislature. My main goals for this project are to see how strong or weak political parties are in shaping political behavior at the Arizona State Legislature and to determine if there is a sense of “womanhood” despite different political affiliations. I also explore the role party affiliation plays within women legislators at the Arizona State Legislature.

In recent years, immigration, especially concerning those individuals immigrating from Central America and Mexico, has become increasingly controversial. Within the last five presidents, policies concerning immigration have shifted. Under President Bill Clinton in 1997, the Flores Settlement, an agreement between immigration activist organizations and the government that created standards for detaining accompanied and unaccompanied minors was made. Following 9/11, in 2005, President George W. Bush increased the amount of money spent on immigration enforcement in an effort to deport more immigrants. President Barack Obama increased the number of deportations from President Bush during his first term. However, in 2014, an already imperfect immigration system was disrupted by an influx of child immigrants. As a result, detention centers were at capacity and unable to accommodate the increasing numbers of immigrants. Child migrants were placed in caged-areas, immigration lawyers and courts quickly became overwhelmed with cases, and children were alone and could barely communicate. This thesis explores the various relationships between accompanied and unaccompanied minors from Central America, the American legal system, and the media and broadcast news outlets’ rhetoric concerning child migrants. Focusing on the ways in which immigrant minors are objectified by the legal system and the framing of immigrants in the media, it is evident that their complex interaction allows for the oppression of the child migrants. Since the American legal system and the media influence and respond to each other, the responsibility of the child migrants’ dehumanization is on both the legal system and the rhetoric of the media and broadcast news outlets.

This project is a critical analysis of the works of 6 American war veterans and how they demonstrate trauma in their narratives. The texts covered here are Philip Red Eagle’s Red Earth (2007), John A. Williams’ Captain Blackman (1972), Roy Scranton’s War Porn (2016), Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).

Claiming Impossible Bodies is a collection of poetry and collage exploring gender and sexuality through the lens of the vampire. For this project, I researched various representations of the vampires through folklore, classical and modern literature, film, and pop culture. The liminality of the vampire allows such figures to take different forms and identities, ranging from dark and grotesque creatures, such as the succubus or incubus from mythology, to modern sex-icons, like Edward Cullen from the Twilight Saga. Considering this wide range of performances by vampiric figures throughout history, the poems in this manuscript seek to deconstruct the binaries that vampires live between and expose the liminality in social norms that attempt to define our identities and shape our performances.

For this Creative Project, I decided to explore the elements that set novellas apart from other genres and then experiment writing in the form. In doing so, I took into account three main categories: Plot Structure, Character Development, Style/Format, and then used my findings to write 45 pages of a novella titled Emmy and Me.

The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.

The application of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a lens through which one can analyze intergenerational trauma on an individual and communal level results in a blueprint towards a remedial process. The characters and their experiences in her novel are representative of a myriad of ways in which trauma is manifested. I have broken down the concept of intergenerational trauma into the idea that it can be seen as the state where one is both simultaneously “falling” and “fallen” at the same time. Used here, the term “falling” refers to the consistent, individual trauma that one is experiencing. On the other hand, the term “fallen” refers to the trauma that a community as a whole has experienced and internalized. This framework that I establish based off of Beloved is a launching point for the conversation surrounding the topic of remedial actions in relation to intergenerational trauma that resulted from slavery. Using it as a basis of knowledge allows one to truly gather the weight of the situation regarding trauma postbellum. Considering the current climate surrounding any meaningful dialogue, knowledge is one of the most important aspects. Along with the concepts of “falling”/”fallen,” I also coined the term productive memory, which refers to the act of confrontation as well as the remembering of intergenerational trauma. The use of productive memory is imperative in addressing the prior ideas presented regarding intergenerational trauma and the possible pathways to move forward.

The United States is an empire. It was founded as such and continues to be one to this day. However, during the most prominent periods of imperial expansion, anti-imperialist organizations and politicians often rise up to oppose these further imperialist actions. This thesis paper examines the rhetoric used by these organizations and politicians, particularly through their speeches and platforms. The primary focus is on the role of American exceptionalism in this rhetoric, and what American anti-imperialism not rooted in this concept looks like. This analysis will be done by looking at a few key specific texts from these organizations and politicians, including (but not limited to) the platform of the Anti-Imperialist League and the speech Representative Barbara Lee gave to explain her lone no vote on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan in 2001.

In this essay, I set out to explore and analyze how Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and the character of Eleanor Vance in particular, disrupts and redefines the traditional conventions of the Female Gothic within the context of the 20th century. I utilize Tania Modleski's gendering of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis in her exploration of the ‘Female Uncanny,’ arguing that the source of the Uncanny in the Female Gothic can be found in the "fear of being lost in the mother." I argue that Jackson's complex personal life, including her fraught relationship with her mother and her difficult marriage with literary critic Edgar Hyman, color her fiction and the primary motivations of her protagonist, Eleanor Vance. I also outline the traditional structure of the Gothic novel and the heroine's journey. With the necessary context provided, I then explain how Eleanor Vance’s character rejects these Gothic traditions and ushers in a new era of Female Gothic fiction.

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.