English Theses and Dissertations
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/2042
2024-03-29T11:23:38Z"I love you more than my eyes": Glimpsing the Oblique in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/29241
"I love you more than my eyes": Glimpsing the Oblique in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio
Basaldua, Josiah
Reading Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s understanding of the visual challenge to logocentric epistemologies presented by Caravaggio’s paintings in Caravaggio’s Secrets against their reading of Caravaggio in film, the biopic Caravaggio by director Derek Jarman found in their monograph of the same name, produces fascinatingly contrary conclusions of aesthetic postulations of alternative relationalities and systems of knowing. Bridging this gap are the very bodies whose irreducibility drives the critique of narrativization read into Caravaggio by Bersani and Dutoit, but surprisingly not extended to Jarman, whose work and life as “Britain’s most up-front and articulate advocate for homosexuality” is profoundly offered in Caravaggio through a similar methodology of irreducible bodily presence. This paper seeks to explore these two different readings of Caravaggio as the consequence of a search for the noncoercive image, the mark of its critique of epistemology being its very ineffability.
2024-01-10T00:00:00ZTracing Lines: A Personal Investigation Into Yaqui Storytelling, Displacement, and Belonging
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/29238
Tracing Lines: A Personal Investigation Into Yaqui Storytelling, Displacement, and Belonging
San Juan , Annalise
This project uses fracture as a framework to analyze and visualize the devastation that settler colonialism has wrought on Indigenous communities, specifically through the history of Yaqui people, my ancestors. Utilizing Yaqui history and stories, I frame Indigenous storytelling as a critical method to (re)write oneself out of and beyond the fractures in order to (re)claim the losses, gaps, and absences through an intentional tracing of the lines left behind by family, ancestors, stories, violences, and ghosts. In order to further disrupt institutional violences and conventions and (re)claim a voice and story beyond them, I have interrupted scholarly writing with various creative forms, such as narrative and poetry, as well as family archives in the form of letters, photos, and, essentially, my father’s memoir.
2024-01-10T00:00:00ZWash Yourself White: Race, Hygiene, and Environmental Justice in Twentieth-Century U.S. Multi-Ethnic Women's Working-Class Literature
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/29237
Wash Yourself White: Race, Hygiene, and Environmental Justice in Twentieth-Century U.S. Multi-Ethnic Women's Working-Class Literature
Galentine, Cassandra
My dissertation argues that studying literary representations of women’s labor helps us to understand the intersection of racial capitalism and environmental injustice. I examine how various twentieth-century working-class literary women characters’ positionality within the private sphere of domestic labor gives them intimate knowledge of the material conditions of poverty and resulting racial discourses of hygiene. I argue that reading dirty materials like grime, dust, and garbage and the accompanying racial discourses of hygiene as environmental justice issues in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1924), Sanora Babb’s Whose Names are Unknown (written in the 1930s but not published until 2004), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Alice Childress’s Like one of the Family (serially published in Paul Robeson’s Freedom 1951-1955 and re-published in 1956) reveals how such discourses re-direct the responsibility of environmental injustice away from its source, racial capitalism, and onto the individuals who bear the burden of environmental harm. I explore how women in these texts resist gendered imperatives of hygiene by foregoing cleaning rituals and embracing dirty material to reveal the limits of liberal individualism and re-focus blame on structures of power and injustice. Finally, I argue that dirt, which transgresses physical and social boundaries, becomes a central material through which these women defy the constructed borders of gender, the body, and nationhood. Resistance to sexism, racial violence, and environmental injustice demonstrated by women in these novels can provide a roadmap for feminist approaches to the same systems of oppression that persist in our racial capitalist society today.
2024-01-10T00:00:00ZFraming Ferments: Discursive (Micro)Biopower in Fermentation Practice
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/29235
Framing Ferments: Discursive (Micro)Biopower in Fermentation Practice
Beavers, Kaleb
This paper considers how The Noma Guide to Fermentation is a microbiopolitical artifact that (re)produces certain values and characteristics associated with fermentation praxis. The Noma Guide to Fermentation is a significant and popular book within fermentation circles; the text transforms the fermentation program at Noma, the restaurant, into a narrative. By discursively framing the practice of fermentation within potent ideological contexts, The Noma Guide assists human fermenters at Noma in shoring up hegemonic power via fermentation praxis. In the book, microbes regularly take on the discursive role of the natural, the magical, the cultural, and the technoscientific—often simultaneously. This portrayal of fermentation is an alluring one; it can be wielded to collapse the scale between microbiopolitics and biopolitics, in effect transforming fermentation into a practice that can harness (micro)biopower and entrench existing systems of power.
2024-01-10T00:00:00Z