<p>  </p> <p>My dissertation proves that movement for both women and men is tantamount to power. The choice for a quest maiden (that is, a woman who takes part in a quest) to move between places and spaces is a choice for them to be able to change both their social and spatial positionalities. Focusing on high- and late medieval English chronicles and romance, I divide medieval Arthurian quest maidens into one of four categories based upon their movement: the static “in” and “out” groups that either remain inside a court or outside in the forest, and the mobile “inwards” and “outwards” groups that either enter into a court from outside it or who leave a court for the outside world. This diversity of categories is a novel contribution to spatial studies within Arthurian literature, as quest maidens are found everywhere across the Arthurian landscape. Such women dwell in the most intimate castle chambers as well as within the most remote forest copse. These placements are significant, as I argue that spaces are defined by the people who exist within them. As communal space is shaped and created by the multiple identities that inhabit that space, the ability to exist and shape that space becomes itself a demonstration of power. This power is expressed both by individuals, such as a knight in the woods or a queen in her castle, and by collectives, such as the Knights of the Round Table. A space gains its reputation by the deeds of its inhabitants, and those inhabitants either benefit or suffer by their space(s)’s reputation. This extends to the movement that occurs between such spaces. A maiden who enters Camelot to ask for help changes the identity of the court: it becomes a place that succors maidens. A maiden who conversely stops a knight in the Forest of Adventure helps shape that forest into a space for quests. As the Arthurian world is founded upon the questing process that these quest maidens both support and enable, their very existence shapes the form of the world. The space of the quest cannot be unlinked from the maidens who occupy and enable it.</p>

<p>Drag Cuisines is an interdisciplinary study of the cultural, social, and historical interconnectedness of veganism, queerness, and animality. To interrogate these links requires mixed methods such as the collection of oral histories with self-identified queer vegans, analysis of animal themes in queer film and literature, social media analysis, and analysis of food cultures and restaurant rhetorics. Following work by prominent American Studies scholars, this project posits that the practice of veganism embodies queer performativity in how queerness and animality are ontologically linked.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation analyzes how lesbian activism contributed to the genealogy of the prison abolition movement from the late 1980s through the early 2000s through collective practices, including grassroots organizing, exchanging writing and art, and acts of intimacy. Although the language of prison abolition did not emerge widely until the 1990s, their work —though not explicitly abolitionist at the time — proved instrumental to the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. Through archival research and oral histories with Judy Greenspan, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, and Eve Rosahn, this research shows how these activists interceded in abolition's genealogy through their nuanced interrogations of gender, sexuality, and incarceration within the broader context of systemic racism and imperialist violence. Their critiques challenged mainstream feminist and gay and lesbian movements' failure to recognize their interdependencies within the carceral system. In 1986, as anti-imperialist lesbian activist Susan Rosenberg was led to a prison isolation unit, Rosenberg called out “Don’t let them bury us!”; excavating these genealogical threads enriches our understanding of abolitionist thought and illuminates crucial intersections between lesbian activism, anti-imperialism, and the struggle for a world without prisons.</p>

<p>This work looks at the intersections of nature, race, and spirituality in Black communities primarily situated in the United States from the early 20th century to the present day. These communties stories are interpreted through the Black women that lived in them, and their stories denote that Black folks' relationship with and amongst nature could not be had without spiritual praxes in their day-to-day lives. </p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>