<p> Tale and myth have a long history of reinforcing, commenting on, and often subverting the ideologies at work in the society where the stories are being told. This research explores the ways three American novels, Eudora Welty&rsquo;s The Robber Bridegroom, Shirley Jackson&rsquo;s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Toni Morrison&rsquo;s The Bluest Eye, all incorporate variants of the fairytale Bluebeard: a fairytale which centers on domestic trauma. All three novels also re-vocalize the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and this re-vocalization serves to empower the female characters and subvert the dominant patriarchal paradigm. The subversion of white masculine ideology in these novels reflects a changing social structure during the thirty year span in which these three novels were published. Looking at the texts holistically while considering the ways the tale and myth interweave in each offers insight into the way these social changes for women were being narrated and explored. The question of interpretation is central to this research, which explores both feminine and masculine lenses in story. Particularly the ways a woman&rsquo;s sexual agency, decision not to marry, or even inability to escape are narrated and interpreted by the community around her. These fictional communities and the issues explored in the realm of tale reflect the larger society and ideological currents surrounding novels themselves. All three novels incorporate the Bluebeard tale, reject the masculine reading of women in that tale, and work to subvert not just patriarchal ideology but the flat literary trope and ways of writing and reading women.</p>

<p>The heroine in feminist speculative fiction signifies and functions as the creator and destroyer of her community, particularly based on dystopian societies, the heroine uses the duality of creator and destroyer without the complexities of present society; however, the issues in these novels serve to highlight and emphasize problems with current gender identity and equality. Furthermore, the idea this heroine exists to destabilize narratives of patriarchy give voice to the powerless while continuing a narrative of the powerlessness, and counter narratives of gender normality. Each heroine confronts a patriarchal leader who symbolizes the faults in the existing societal regime, which allows her to undermine the hierarchy set up by men. With narrative centered on experiences of the heroine, the authors of these texts show how one voice can help exemplify the many. As heroines who incorporate characteristics of gender, they demonstrate that to lead, a person must be willing to identify not just as one sex, but as a person who understands where certain characteristics are not inherently male or female. Her role as creator/destroyer is to achieve communal, structural, and personal unity, completeness, or wholeness. The heroine looks to institute communities that depend on one another, that understand each person has strength to share, and that build trust on these shared strengths. The heroine seeks harmony with the people around her, but she also discovers harmony within herself. She must learn to accept the notion that as the creator of something new, she is also the destroyer. It is her acceptance of this wholeness that will help her lead a new kind of humanity.

The universe of Marguerite Yourcenar is primarily masculine and the opposition between masculine and female is capital. Men dominate or initiate the action whereas women are supporting characters or negative. The women often appear as a deadly element which makes contemptible whatever they touch, making themselves by rebound conspicuous human beings, whether it is on the level of their intellect, their femininity, maternity or female sexuality, usually assimilated to prostitution. Prostitution thus crystallizes the attraction and the rejection of the female body. Although the feminine tries to get rid of this dirtiness and this opposition, the combat is impossible and the only exit is to dissolve, to disappear or to become masculine. On the contrary, men appear as positive characters. Fathers have filiations which mothers are unable to have, even if this bond is rather a chosen bond, more intellectual than biological. Homosexuality is a sexuality only fallen to men and makes it possible for them to live without women and to avoid a sexuation. Marguerite Yourcenar had nevertheless to develop a new vocabulary to approach this topic that was still a taboo. Homosexuality in the works of Marguerite Yourcenar is however ambiguous and hides a double and transgressive discourse. Because of this sexuality, men will have to find a different manner to perpetuate through transforming, as the feminine had done it. The need for men to perpetuate themselves without sexuation is actually linked to Far-Eastern philosophies at the same time as to the myth of Oedipus and shows that the masculine and feminine only want to create themselves ex nihilo.

<p> Artists such as Chantal Akerman and Sylvia Plath, both of whom came of age in mid-twentieth century America, have a tendency to show concern with doubles in their work&mdash;Toni Morrison&rsquo;s <i>Beloved </i>, Maya Deren&rsquo;s <i>Meshes of the Afternoon</i>, Cheryl Dunye&rsquo;s <i>The Watermelon Woman</i>&mdash;and oftentimes situate <i> their</i> protagonists as doubles of themselves, carefully monitoring the distance they create between themselves and their double. This choice acts as a kind of self-constitution, by which I mean a self-fashioning that works through an imperfect mirroring of the text&rsquo;s author presented as a double in a fictional work. Texts that employ self-constitution often show a concern with liminality, mirroring, consumption, animism, repressed trauma, suicide, and repetition. </p><p> It is the goal of this thesis to examine these motifs in Sylvia Plath&rsquo;s <i> The Bell Jar</i> and the early work of Chantal Akerman, all of which coalesce to create coherent&mdash;but destabilizing&mdash;texts that propose a new queer subject position, and locate the death drive&mdash;the desire to return to the mother&rsquo;s womb&mdash;as their source. I will examine the uncanny on various levels, zooming out from the micro-level elements of the text to its broader relationship to its environment: from rhetoric, to the physical landscapes of the texts, to characters of the text, to the structure of the text (as confined by its frame), and then, finally, outside the text itself, to the author&rsquo;s relationship with her double. What I will argue here is that Akerman and Plath&mdash;in doubling on both the extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels of their work&mdash;propose a queer liminal space that siphons and ultimately expels repressed uncanny desire, allowing for both self-sustainability and personal integrity.</p>

<p> Sovereignty, a mechanism of power around which a state is organized, has emerged as a way to understand the twenty-first-century biopolitical moment. Thinkers including Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito find sovereignty essential to understanding modern regimes of bodily domination and control. These thinkers look back to early modern England as an originary moment when older theories of sovereign power became attached to emerging modern political systems. Despite the sophistication of these arguments, however, no recent biopolitical theory accounts for the situation of women in historical or current system of power, nor do they discuss the role gender has played in the development of sovereignty.</p><p> My project addresses this ideological and historical gap by examining how sovereignty was being discussed, challenged, and appropriated by literary figures from 1588-1688. In the years leading up to and spanning the Interregnum, sovereignty splintered and became available to formerly disenfranchised individuals, especially women writers. Such women not only appropriated and challenged traditional sovereignty in their texts, but also influenced contemporary and future understandings of power, politics, and gender. Each of my four chapters serves as a test cases of a woman writer engaging with and transforming sovereignty. </p><p> I first examine Elizabeth Cary&rsquo;s closet drama <i>The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queen of Jewry</i> (1612); I then move on to Mary Wroth&rsquo;s epic romance <i>The Countess of Montgomery&rsquo;s Urania, Part 1</i> (1621) and <i>Part 2</i> (completed and circulated in manuscript 1629). In the third chapter, I examine Katherine Philips&rsquo; <i>Poems, </i> circulated in manuscript during the Interregnum, and published posthumously in 1667; my final chapter then moves to Margaret Cavendish&rsquo;s utopian fiction and work of natural philosophy, <i>The Blazing World.</i> These women challenged traditional notions of body and power, offering their own new understandings of sovereign agency; they enable us to more fully the genealogical progression of sovereignty and to incorporate the category of gender into twenty-first century understandings of biopolitics. </p>

Studies on gender in medieval and modern Sufism have tended to posit two extremes: Sufism as an oasis for women, away from the strictures of ‘orthodoxy,’ or Sufism as a haven for misogynistic views of women as temptations, distractions, and necessary evils. However, these simplistic characterisations cannot encompass the full range of the evidence, as we find many positive representations of women, and indeed female saints, alongside brutal anti-woman declarations. This study attempts to nuance these prevailing characterisations of medieval depictions of gender by providing further evidence of Sufi attitudes towards women and femininity. It does so via a comprehensive consideration of a prominent Persian Sufi poet, Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār, in the context of select Persian and Arabic hagiographies, Qur’an commentaries, and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’. Analysis of the material reviewed suggests that gender representations are not fixed, even within the work of a single author. I argue that these texts exhibit a striking disconnect between their conceptions of ‘woman’ as a category and the depiction of narrative women, especially Sufi women. I suggest that this tendency reflects a Sufi philosophy of gender-egalitarianism and that philosophy’s inherent conflict with predominant social hierarchies of the medieval Islamicate context. This study shows the utility of engaging the classical Islamic tradition with contemporary theory surrounding gender and identity, including corporeality theory and intersectionality theory. It also employs more traditional formalist literary critiques using the lenses of defamiliarisation and paradox/apophasis. Ultimately, this research reveals the need for careful, critical studies of medieval views on gender, and contributes to the bodies of literature on Islamicate sexualities and the construction of sainthood in Islam.

<p> This project analyzes historical trauma, the dominant fiction, and male subjectivity as theorized by Kaja Silverman in selected Kurt Vonnegut novels. </p><p> Chapter one examines Billy Pilgrim, the focal character of <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, as well as Vonnegut-as-narrator by analyzing the way these two men exhibit Kaja Silverman&rsquo;s notions of historical trauma, characterized by their failures to embody proper hegemonic masculinity as exhibited in popular culture and the dominant fiction. Despite Billy&rsquo;s comically absurd failures as a soldier and a civilian man, he survives the war and lives a financially successful civilian life, though he&rsquo;s seen by nearly all as a laughingstock of a man. Billy is a male subject whose very existence calls into question the penis/phallus equation: the symbolically and psychoanalytically significant linkage of the male sex organ with the signifier of sexual difference and, perhaps more importantly, power. His survival refuses to endorse the violent assumption that war turns boys into men, a belief in the regenerative properties of violence, a popular American mythology, especially during the WWII and Vietnam war eras. </p><p> In chapter two, I examine John, the protagonist of <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>. While John does not experience combat traumas as Billy and Vonnegut-as-narrator do, John experiences a loss of belief in society&rsquo;s organizing principles and narratives, in turn causing him to doubt his own power as a male subject. </p><p> Chapter three details Howard W. Campbell, Jr., of <i>Mother Night </i>, a former Nazi propagandist awaiting trial for war crimes. Campbell&rsquo;s character is Vonnegut&rsquo;s attempt to work through Hanna Arendt&rsquo;s concept of the banality of evil, while also dealing with the loss of social and phallic power. As Campbell loses everything he once found joy in during his life as a Nazi, he also loses his belief in the commensurability of the penis and the phallus, unable to exist as the man he once was. </p><p> While my selections of Vonnegut&rsquo;s texts all delve into World War II either explicitly or at the margins, I argue that Vonnegut is primarily concerned with the events of the 1960s, the decade in which <i>Slaughterhouse-Five </i>, <i>Cat&rsquo;s Cradle</i>, and <i>Mother Night</i> were published. All of these characters&rsquo; experiences are analogous to several cultural anxieties of the American 1960s: the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam war, the spread of communism, the Cuban missile crisis, and changing notions of acceptable masculinity. As such, I hope to establish that the penis/phallus equation upon which our society&rsquo;s reality is maintained is continually in danger of rupture, though through cultural binding, the equation and its organizing principles continue to shape male subjectivity and American culture as a whole.</p><p>

<p> Given the increased public enthusiasm for the genres of Horror and Science Fiction, as well as the renewed and ever-evolving interest in indie horror films (propelling them into the mainstream), there is a noticeable increase of public eagerness to consume films that toy with the ideas of anxiety and the body. While many of these films seem to fit the rubric of heteronormative and mainstream Hollywood productions that occupy a neat world of perfectly defined gender identities, we can still excavate bodies that fall outside of such neat definitions. On the one hand, we are presented with a defined female or male character, thrust into a chaotic situation through which they must endure tremendous anxiety and pain and strive to survive. On the other, these bodies seem to survive and thrive despite not fitting in with the simple heteronormative worlds in which they dwell. </p><p> The purpose of this thesis is not to provide a stand-in or voice for the queer body, nor is its purpose to create an index of films that fall under the sub-genre of &lsquo;Body Horror,&rsquo; but to explore how films in this genre that seem to privilege performances of able-bodiedness and heteronormativity actually treat queerness and queer topics in very different ways. This thesis wishes to explore these bodies as they cruise through their respective dystopian technofetishistic worlds; as their bodies are infected, their figures transformed, and their psyches liberated as they attain physical, sexual or psychological release. </p><p> To facilitate both observation and maintain its central focus, this paper will be divided into three main parts. The first chapter will define key terms and phrases that are the central focus of this paper. The second chapter will explore the concept of &lsquo;Infestation,&rsquo; which will focus on the queer and disabled bodies as they are occupied, annexed, and attacked by external forces or internal strife. This chapter will consider the concept of &lsquo;Transformation&rsquo; and further examine the manner through which the &ldquo;monstrous queer&rdquo; emerges through the definition of normalcy and the anomalous. Lastly, the final chapter will revolve around the concept of &lsquo;Liberation,&rsquo; and review these observations in terms of how these performances reconcile and imagine their own respective ideas of queer futures. This final chapter will expand the narrative of queer futurity while also dwelling on notions of the inevitable &ldquo;queer dystopia&rdquo; in &lsquo;Body Horror&rsquo; films. The voices and scholarship in the fields of Queer and Disability Studies, Psychoanalysis, and Film Studies will guide this reading as it seeks out these bodies and unearths the deeply affective, psychological, and physical states of transformation they undergo.</p>

<p> This research looks at the production of <i>Hamlet</i> by Thomas Ostermeier, the director of the Schaub&uuml;hne Berlin. The production presents two female characters with a single female performer, and persents the concept that coporeality is an impossible exteriority. This research uses the playscript of Ostermeier's production of <i>Hamlet</i> as reference, and Judith Butler's book <i>Bodies that Matter</i> for its theoretical method, as well as contemporary critics of feminist study on the gendered body, to interpret the role of female characters in Ostermeier's production of <i> Hamlet.</i> The focus will clarify how Ostermeier cultivates Butler's theory of body performativity as the source for portraying his understanding of the female identity, and as the decoder for the conventional sexgender culture. The research shows how Ostermeier's presentation of Gertrude and Ophelia reflects the contemporary concern for the deconstruction of the normative concept of woman.</p>

<p> This study examines the representation of women in Emile Zola&rsquo;s famous series Les Rougon-Macquart. Critics have described Zola&rsquo;s novels and their presentation of women as misogynist, yet this judgment obscures many of the textual details establishing the female protagonists&rsquo; relationships to industrial capitalism and the rapidly changing social landscape in late nineteenth century France. This study reexamines the narrative synthesis between Zola&rsquo;s naturalist &ldquo;objective&rdquo; narrator and his female protagonists. It also highlights one particular pairing that of Adelaide Fouque and her opportunist daughter-in-law, Felicit&eacute; Puch: Whereas Adelaide, the biological matriarch of the family who figures in each of the twenty novels, does not have an active voice, Felicit&eacute; as maternal <i>protectrice</i> of the family speaks frankly, even aggressively. Zola uses this pairing to link one generation to the next, a key structural element of his naturalist project. Ultimately, Zola&rsquo;s representation of women is more complex than might otherwise be understood.</p>