Tag: Oh the Humanities!

“Desde Abajo, Como Semilla:” Narratives of Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance

Presenter(s): Momo Wilms-Crowe—Political Science

Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor, Michael Fakhri

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

This thesis explores the power, possibility, and agency embedded in food in the contemporary Puerto Rican context . Building from participatory ethnographic fieldwork with activists, chefs, and farmers engaged in food sovereignty work on the island, I examine the concepts of agency and subjectivity as they relate to embodied experiences of politics . This approach is made possible with the understanding that the food we consume directly connects our individual lived experiences to broader structures of power in intimate and material ways . Through food, I offer a grounded critique of US colonial violence, inherently linked to ecological destruction, cisheteropatriarchy, and disaster capitalism . I also document dynamics of radical prefigurative politics as visible in people’s generative reimagining of relationships with their bodies, each other, and the land . This analysis is supported theoretically by key indigenous, anarchist, and queer/feminist perspectives which similarly connect the personal to the political and offer examples of political action that extend beyond state-centric formal politics . Ultimately, I argue that food is a powerful site of resistance, source of resilience, and mechanism of resurgence; as Puerto Ricans reclaim autonomy via food, they are resisting deeply rooted patterns of colonial extraction and dispossession and directly cultivating a more ecologically, socially, and politically just future .

‘All Surface and No Soul’: John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of Modern Mannequins

Presenter(s): Katelyn Jones—Art History

Faculty Mentor(s): Nina Amstutz

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

This research analyzes the popular late nineteenth century society portraitist, John Singer Sargent, and his portraits of women, primarily those of which critics have noted a unique postural tension
in the sitters . This nervous tension has been up to this point considered by art historians to be a visual tactic deployed by the artist to create a dynamic and attractive composition . I argue that this tension goes beyond just clever compositional structure and rather can be contextualized through
an understanding of changes in the contemporary fashion industry . From the memoirs of sitters to critical reviews, Sargent’s women are often compared to inanimate objects . One object in particular that is repeated often is that of the mannequin, whose commercial use emerges alongside the need of department stores at the end of the nineteenth century .Through formal analysis of key portraits in Sargent’s oeuvre and contemporary document analysis, I draw connections between the visual presentation of female sitters and their dummy counterparts, as well as how the two worked similarly within their respective sales environments; the gallery and the store . Ultimately, this research seeks to understand the shifting role of art in the beginnings of mass international consumerism, providing a background to how viewers of the 21st century understand the industries of commercial design, art, and fashion .

The Experience of Hyperobjects: From Percy Shelley to the 21st Century Instagram User

Presenter(s): Tucker Engle—English

Faculty Mentor(s): Forest Pyle

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

My project performs a comparative and analytical study of the romantic poetry of the 19th century, in particular that of Percy Bysse Shelley, with contemporary literature and digital texts of today . Examples of contemporary texts my project will examine are the 2018 film Eighth Grade (dir . Bo Burnham), the 2017 poetry book Nature Poem by Tommy Pico, and Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 work Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, among others . I bring the cultural and literary criticism of the 20th century in as an intermediary between these two distinct literary eras and traditions . The project focuses on the work of the critical work of theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Giles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson to accomplish this end . Each of these moving parts is strung together by Timothy Morton’s concept of Hyperobjects and ecological thinking . My work shows how the internet and technologies which produce culture today have created manifested as Hyperobjects which greatly occupy the artistic bandwidth of the modern subject . The relationship with self and culture experienced by poets in the romantic period has erupted to exist everywhere in the Internet age . Through building on the work of the 20th century cultural theorists and Shelley’s poetry, I will begin to piece together what this all means for the 21st century reader and critic .

She’s Straight but She’s a Dyke: Sexuality Discourse on the Lesbian Lands

Presenter(s): Gracia Dodds—Sociology, Womens’, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Faculty Mentor(s): Judith Raiskin

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

The 1970s and 80s held tremendous significance in the history of women’s intentional living communities . In Southern Oregon, lesbian lands popped up along the rural portions of the I-5 corridor, running from Eugene to Northern California . These lands served as women’s-only communities that were largely self-sufficient and created an entire subculture of a lesbian network that spanned across the United States . The mid-late 1970s were a period of revolution due to the uptick in second- wave feminism and the gay liberation movement, and these lands served as an intersection right in the middle of these two issues . Lesbian separatism was a radical and controversial political strategy that deserves more thought than it’s been given in the academic sphere .

In this research project, I focus on understanding how women on these lands talked about and understood sexuality and the identification markers of women who loved women . The queer community as we know it is ever-evolving in its understanding of acceptable linguistic terminology, and it is worth understanding where that language began . The Southern Oregon lesbian lands gives insight into one of the first geographic spaces where same-gender attraction could be freely and candidly discussed . I aim to understand and better categorize how sexuality was understood and what linguistic terms meant in the context of their era . In my initial research, I have found that the term ‘lesbian’ is better understood as a catch-all word for all of women’s same-gender attraction– meaning that includes multi-gender attracted women . This research will give better insight into how umbrella terms, like lesbian, affect who is included (and excluded) in both the 1970s and 80s, and in current times . This linguistic evolution will give important context to why certain terms are used and what the implications of those uses are .

Questioning Stability: Nonbinary Bodies in Contemporary Horror Film

Presenter(s): Ryan Cooper—English

Faculty Mentor(s): Priscilla Peña Ovalle

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

As a film genre, horror is infamously known for its complicated construction of gendered bodies on the screen, from its culturally informed grotesque depictions of the monstrous to the often-fearful reactions and movement of its protagonists from frame to frame . Feminist film critics like Carol Clover (author of Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 1992) and Barbara Creed (author of The Monstrous Feminine, 1993) have previously worked to name the phenomena that underline these depictions of gender in horror films, yet they do so primarily through a heteronormative, binary feminist lens . By focusing on bodies in this way, they fail to consider what depictions of gender outside the binary might look like, refusing to address the varied manifestations of bodies on the screen . Through

a nonbinary feminist lens, this project will investigate how gender is constructed and received
in contemporary horror films such as Neil Marshall’s The Descent (2005) and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) in order to understand the mechanics of nonbinary expression in the genre . Along with close reading and analyzing these films, I will take up a dialogue with scholars like Clover and Creed as well as queer studies works like Riki Wilchins’ GenderQueer (2002) and Cáel M . Keegan’s Cinematic/ Trans*/Bodies Now (2018) in order to consider the social attitudes and cultural significance of
these constructions . Ultimately, this project argues that the ways we view, express, and construct bodies in horror films are varied and complicated, but that as readers and critics, we have a social responsibility to consider the texts we read and watch both in and outside the gender binary . By conducting this research, it is my goal to address these social implications in order to urge my readers to pursue textual analyses of films that challenge traditional theory within the horror genre .

The Incomplete Male: Sex, Control, and Womanhood in Classical-Era Greek Medical and Philosophical Texts

Presenter(s): Daisy Burge—History

Faculty Mentor(s): Linni Mazurek

Session 1: Oh, the Humanities!

This project explores how Classical Greek philosophers and medical writers explained the female body and how their ideas affected perceptions of femaleness, gender, and sexual difference in classical antiquity . In several Classical Greek academic and artistic works, women are portrayed as “incomplete” versions of men, naturally servile and unable to exercise free will . Supposedly scientific understandings of female anatomy within antiquity justified and reified these ideas, creating justification for male exertions of control over women and rigid patriarchal mores in several regions through the Classical Mediterranean .

This project provides a critical gendered analysis of key medical and philosophical texts from Classical Greece which define sexual and gendered difference by casting women as inherently incomplete . This work primarily focuses on the treatment of the female body within the medical works of the Hippocratic Corpus and the biological works of Aristotle on regeneration, while incorporating political and philosophical passages of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon which discuss womanhood and femaleness . Examining the works of these Classical authors, this work seeks to understand how Classical Greek scholarship influenced and established gender norms throughout Mediterranean . In addition, this work seeks to incorporate the ideas and analysis feminist scholars on ancient philosophy and medicine, in particular focusing on the work of Hippocratic gynecological scholar Helen King and the theories of classicist feminist theorist Page DuBois in understanding how female identity was constructed and reinforced through ideas of biological determinism .