The photographer discusses work in “Hearing Through Walls”, a Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at downtown Tipton Gallery from February 19th through March 2nd, 2018. The exhibition consists of 15 archival inkjet prints and one two-channel video piece, representing the artists three-year exploration into narrative forms in image making. Using non-traditional approaches to photographic portraiture and experimental exhibition layout, the artist forms questions around themes of domesticity, lost youth, and American masculinity. Among these themes is an investigation into photographic issues, including the cultural role that photographs play in perpetuating, miming, and disrupting the facades of everyday life. Non-photographic influences are listed, including the paintings of Edward Hopper and the filmmaking of Paul Thomas Anderson. Historic and contemporary photographic influences included are Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Philip-Lorca Dicorcia, and Katy Grannan.

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This dissertation is a study of antebellum literature about the home and the post-Revolutionary conceptualization of domesticity as political participation. Analyzing texts that take the construction, management, and pursuit of a home as central concerns, I trace a cultural preoccupation with isolation in the idealization of the home. The cult of domesticity that emerged and was reflected in these texts was a troubled, conflicting response to the ideology of Republican Motherhood, which defined a woman's political contribution as raising good citizen sons and patriotic daughters. By taking a previously private role and turning it into a public duty, the mother became a highly visible and symbolically loaded figure. It also made her sphere of action, the home, a highly charged political space, subject to government intervention and social control. In conduct manuals, magazines, memoirs, and fiction, women writing about the home represent it as vulnerable to unwelcome intrusion, invasion, and influences, giving both power and critique to the ideal of home as isolated and pure, and, ultimately, attempting to reveal a domestic ideology that was at odds with Republican Motherhood and notions of liberal privacy that held the home to be a completely private, independent space. Tracing this tension in canonical and popular literature, I construct comparisons of texts not frequently put into conversation with each other, drawing provocative parallels and important distinctions between them and opening up scholarly understandings of domesticity with discussions of isolation and purity. Beginning with an analysis of domestic manuals by Catharine Beecher and Lydia Maria Child, I read these texts side by side with manuals on the construction of the asylum and penitentiary, which along with the home were built on models of isolation. These prescriptive texts attend obsessively to air purity and proper ventilation, and the figure of the nation's "inmate" emerges: a version of subjecthood in which self-development and redemption rely on an environment protected from all external influences (physical, political, economic, and social). Following this version of the ideal home as it plays out in the most popular women's magazine of the period, Godey's Lady's Book, I next examine how the figure of the child becomes a powerful symbol for vulnerability and freedom, unpacking the ways that sentimental rhetoric both served and failed the American homebuilding project. In the last two chapters, I analyze the female authors Caroline Kirkland and Fanny Fern and their attempts to transplant the American home to the West and the urban center, respectively. In A New Home, Who'll Follow?, Kirkland's "hut in the wilderness" becomes the best embodiment of the American Myth. Finally, in the autobiographical novel Ruth Hall and in her newspaper writings, Fanny Fern places her heroines "beyond the pale of female jurisdiction," rejecting the bonds of womanhood, but also revealing fears for the isolated woman and her potential for desolation and madness. Contextualizing Fern within the written output of maternal associations, I conclude with a consideration of the home as complex and multivalent: it is imagined as a space to work and a space free from work, a woman's empire and her prison, a place one desperately hopes to find and a place one wants to escape; the home is where one is free to be herself and where one is cut off and confined. / English

Although Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Maggie Pollitt are examined frequently in scholarship on Tennessee Williams's plays, many critics assume that the three women's Southern femininity translates to fragility and that their nostalgia for the Confederate past constitutes delusion. Distancing our perceptions of the three women from the common connotations of Southern femininity--frailty, selflessness, and domesticity—and leaning into the more disagreeable facets of Lost Cause nostalgia reveals the classist and racist ideologies that motivate their quests for upstanding Southern aristocratic lives. Critics have been slow to read Amanda, Blanche, and Maggie as rational socioeconomic actors, but this reading emphasizes the three women's socioeconomic desires, thus de-romanticizing Southern femininity and expounding on its problematic ideological positionalities. Blanche DuBois, Amanda Wingfield, and Maggie Pollitt have been evaluated in terms of their "monstrous" femininity. However, they become less monstrous and more familiar when we recognize the clear race- and class-based motivations for clinging so fiercely to their Southern identities. When we assume that their Southernness is defined by their literal proximity from and ideological relationships to ethnic and racial Others and people from lower socioeconomic classes, their motivations lose some of their critical abstraction and gain a new level of complexity. / Master of Arts / Tennessee Williams is known for crafting complex female protagonists in his dramas. Although Amanda Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, and Maggie Pollitt of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are examined frequently in scholarship on Tennessee Williams's plays, many critics assume that the three women's Southern femininity stems from inherent fragility and that their nostalgia for the Confederate past constitutes mental instability. Reorienting our perceptions of these women away from the common connotations of Southern femininity--frailty, selflessness, and domesticity—and leaning into the more disagreeable facets of Lost Cause nostalgia reveals the classist and racist ideologies that motivate the three women's quests for upstanding Southern aristocratic lives. Critics have been slow to read Amanda, Blanche, and Maggie as rational socioeconomic actors, but this reading emphasizes the three women's socioeconomic desires, thus de-romanticizing Southern femininity and expounding on its problematic ideological positionalities—namely, extreme racism and classism. Although Blanche DuBois, Amanda Wingfield, and Maggie Pollitt have been evaluated previously in terms of their "monstrous" femininity, they become less monstrous and more familiar when we recognize the clear race- and class-based motivations for clinging so fiercely to their Southern identities. When we assume that their Southernness is defined by their literal proximity from and ideological relationships to ethnic and racial Others and people from lower socioeconomic classes, their motivations become more tangible, more complex—and more menacing.

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Esta dissertação visa recuperar e examinar criticamente a trajetória da empresa de móveis Mobilinea entre 1959 e 1975, considerando que foi uma das mais importantes do período no país, assumindo não apenas um papel de produtora de objetos, como também de promotora de certos estilos de vida. O primeiro capítulo pretende apresentar o contexto da produção moveleira no Brasil até a fundação da empresa, sua inserção no circuito de design brasileiro nos anos 1960 e 1970 e as histórias individuais de seus criadores e colaboradores. O segundo capítulo busca focalizar as principais características de seus produtos, assim como seus locais e formas de venda, evidenciando o modo como foram tratados enquanto parte de cenas domésticas completas. O terceiro capítulo exibe a presença da Mobilinea em publicações impressas durante o período estudado, analisando os diferentes discursos criados para cada público, elencando suas semelhanças e diferenças. Foi principalmente nestes espaços que a empresa divulgou seus valores, que incluíam formas de se ocupar e se comportar na casa, dando à mulher um papel de protagonismo na proposição e no consumo desses modos de morar. / This dissertation aims to uncover and critically examine the evolution of Mobilinea, a Brazilian furniture design company. During the period from 1959 to 1975 it was one of the most prominent firms in the country, not only as a producer of goods but also in terms of promoting certain lifestyles. The first chapter of the study presents the context of furniture production in Brazil until the founding of the company, its insertion in the Brazilian design circuit of the 1960s and 1970s, and the individual stories of its creators and collaborators. The second chapter has a focus on the key attributes of the products, as well as the promotional environments and sales approaches, highlighting them as components of domestic environments. The third chapter reviews the presence of Mobilinea in publications during the studied period, analyzing the different messages created for the target audiences, through charting out the similarities and differences. It was mostly in this media that the company disseminated its values, which included ways of inhabiting and acting in the home, suggesting a leading role for women in developing and consuming these living styles.

Esta dissertação visa recuperar e examinar criticamente a trajetória da empresa de móveis Mobilinea entre 1959 e 1975, considerando que foi uma das mais importantes do período no país, assumindo não apenas um papel de produtora de objetos, como também de promotora de certos estilos de vida. O primeiro capítulo pretende apresentar o contexto da produção moveleira no Brasil até a fundação da empresa, sua inserção no circuito de design brasileiro nos anos 1960 e 1970 e as histórias individuais de seus criadores e colaboradores. O segundo capítulo busca focalizar as principais características de seus produtos, assim como seus locais e formas de venda, evidenciando o modo como foram tratados enquanto parte de cenas domésticas completas. O terceiro capítulo exibe a presença da Mobilinea em publicações impressas durante o período estudado, analisando os diferentes discursos criados para cada público, elencando suas semelhanças e diferenças. Foi principalmente nestes espaços que a empresa divulgou seus valores, que incluíam formas de se ocupar e se comportar na casa, dando à mulher um papel de protagonismo na proposição e no consumo desses modos de morar. / This dissertation aims to uncover and critically examine the evolution of Mobilinea, a Brazilian furniture design company. During the period from 1959 to 1975 it was one of the most prominent firms in the country, not only as a producer of goods but also in terms of promoting certain lifestyles. The first chapter of the study presents the context of furniture production in Brazil until the founding of the company, its insertion in the Brazilian design circuit of the 1960s and 1970s, and the individual stories of its creators and collaborators. The second chapter has a focus on the key attributes of the products, as well as the promotional environments and sales approaches, highlighting them as components of domestic environments. The third chapter reviews the presence of Mobilinea in publications during the studied period, analyzing the different messages created for the target audiences, through charting out the similarities and differences. It was mostly in this media that the company disseminated its values, which included ways of inhabiting and acting in the home, suggesting a leading role for women in developing and consuming these living styles.