Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: American studies
- Creators: Holbo, Christine
Description
This dissertation illuminates overlaps in Mormonism and the New Spirituality in North America, showing their shared history and epistemologies. As example of these connections, it introduces ethnographic data from women who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in order to show (a) how living LDS women adapt and integrate elements from the New Spirituality with Mormon ideas about the nature of reality into hybrid spiritualities; and (b) how they negotiate their blended religious identities both in relation to the current American New Spirituality milieu and the highly centralized, hierarchical, and patriarchal Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The study focuses on religious hybridity with an emphasis on gender and the negotiation of power deriving from patriarchal religious authority, highlighting the dance between institutional power structures and individual authority. It illuminates processes and discourses of religious adaptation and synthesis through which these LDS women creatively and provocatively challenge LDS Church formal power structures.
ContributorsDaughtrey, Doe (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / McDannell, Colleen (Committee member) / Wenger, Tisa (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Since the mid-1970s, punk has operated to fulfill the postmodern objective to destabilize and disrupt metanarratives. In the early days of punk, US and UK punks used their Do It Yourself (DIY) aesthetic and ethos to counter the aggressive capitalist takeover of music and media. With its roots in anarchism, egalitarianism, and individuality, punk’s philosophical and ideological base, methods for pushing boundaries, and monstrous aesthetics have made a lasting impression that can be clearly identified in many of the social justice movements of the past 40 years. This project examines punk publics and publishing praxes and argues that marginalized groups utilize punk’s disruptive strategies to disseminate culture beyond the boundaries of hegemonic systems of knowledge production. This dissertation focuses on punk not as a counterpublic but as what I call a parapublic due to its position alongside the dominant culture. As punk’s recognizable signifiers continue to be absorbed into and consumed by capitalism, these signifiers become part of the mainstream, leading to a reconfiguration of punk. The reconfigurations signal a shift in the dominant culture because punk seeks to make itself abject to appear monstrous. We can look at the abject as occupying a position between the subject and the object, and then we can see that punk allows us to examine culture’s fears and desires through the embodiment of its monsters. This project centralizes the figure and the function of the monster within the works and publishing practices of zines and the punk authors Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker.
ContributorsHorton, Joshua T (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This dissertation is an examination of a modernist desire to construct future materiality via material language, which represents a desire to overcome biology and the biological body. As such, modernist discourses of material language must be understood within their broader historical context, as these textual constructs developed against a cultural backdrop replete with eugenicist ideologies. Modernists wielded discourses of material language to determine via cultural reproduction which futures might materialize, as well as which bodies could occupy those futures and in what capacities. This dissertation argues that these modernist constructs contain their own failure in their antibiologism and their refusal to acknowledge the agency of corporeal materiality before them. Unlike language, the body expresses biopower through its material (re)productivity—its corpo-reality—which, though it can be shaped and repressed by discourse, persistently ruptures through the restraints of eugenicist ideologies and the autonomous liberal model of white masculine embodiment they uphold. This work analyses sexually marginalized bodies in texts by Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Nathanael West, and Ernest Hemingway that, through their insistently persistent biological materiality, disrupt modernist discourses of material language that offer no future for feminine, queer, and disabled corporeality. By exploring how intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, and disability complicate theories of language’s materiality in modern American literature, this dissertation brings attention to writers and texts that challenge broader attempts in the early decades of the twentieth century to subvert the biological body through eugenicist projects of cultural reproduction.
ContributorsJohnston, Amilynne Rose (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Goggin, Maureen D (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019