Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, History of Art

In the decades following Edward Said's 1978 formulation of the discursive theory of Orientalism and the publication of his book of the same name, scholars working in a variety of disciplines, including the history of art, have deployed the theory to explain the nature of the historical relationship between the Eastern and Western worlds. One defining concept of Orientalism proposed by Said that is also found in the work of these other scholars is that the historical interaction between the East and West has been governed by a gendered hierarchy that proposes the East to be feminine and the West masculine. The material products of this interaction are Orientalism, according to Said, thus revealing his belief that the discourse of Orientalism is not only binarily gendered but also heterosexually oriented. While this manner of thinking has inarguably produced important works on the art of Orientalism, it has also limited its interpretation. Primarily relegated over the past four decades to studies of enticing harems, cavalier European explorer-painters, savage warriors, and generative landscapes, art historical scholarship has largely heterosexualized Orientalist art and essentialized its gendered components. Recently, however, an increasing number of scholars working in both the history of art and in associated disciplines have begun to suggest that such a theorization is problematically binary, and that it fails to entertain the possibility that other narratives and motifs, such as those concerning queer bodies, gender nonconforming individuals, and male homoeroticism, are found within the linked textual and visual archives of Orientalism. One such motif is the eunuch, whose image is frequently found in nineteenth-century France. Focused on France and French colonial contexts and geographies, this dissertation examines the representation of the eunuch during the long nineteenth century. It suggests that the image of the eunuch functioned as a type of Orientalist (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Shelton (Advisor); Lisa Florman (Committee Member); Karl Whittington (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Creative Writing

The Frailty of Fruit is a young adult post-apocalyptic thriller, set in a far future subterranean farming community. The novel follows protagonist Qari Hofler, a reluctant tomato farmer, who must develop a hybrid tomato to earn her family's stewardship or be banished to the Deep Dark. Her 33rd great-grandfather's tomato strain cured violence. But because their cultural understanding of violence didn't include sexual violence, Qari develops an asexually reproductive strain with the naive hope of curing gender. Little does she know, she's not the only one with the seeds of that idea. Told in intertwining narratives, a second protagonist Iona also must race against time to beat Qari at her own hybrid game. But once the two of them find each other, with the help of a humanoid sexbot-turned-scientist named Misty, Qari and Iona realize that finding a place where they could grow together was the point all along. Told in the dystopian tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Frailty of Fruit draws upon themes of reproductive justice, hegemony, posthumanism, and the subaltern. Written in a traditional narrative structure, the novel invents an accessible story with textured social imaginings. It posits a poetic truth that utopias will always become dystopias, that will then become utopias, and so on. Like nature, human social conditions have birth and death cycles. In this way, the novel employs contemporary feminist methodologies which utilize post-structural theories to challenge the notions of stable concepts. The ground, literally and conceptually, is always shifting.

Committee: Reema Rajbanshi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lawrence Coates Ph.D. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Modern Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

This dissertation investigates the cultural influences between the so-called East and the West through the harem and the boudoir. This research is the first of its kind to explore the influence of the harem on the development of boudoirs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the analysis and synthesis of historical accounts of these spaces. The staple ingredient of the French Rococo period (1723-74), the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, produced spaces and furniture with an unprecedented attention to bodily comfort. In addition to Ottoman-inspired furniture pieces such as sopha, divan, lit a la Turque (Turkish bed), lit de repos a la Turque (Turkish bed of rest), canape a la Turque (Turkish couch), veilleuse a la Turque (Turkish sofa), veilleuse a la Ottomanne (Ottoman sofa), and ottomanne (ottoman) to be used in a chamber a la Turque (Turkish room) or elsewhere, there was one space every modern eighteenth-century upper-class woman needed: the boudoir. The boudoir was an exclusive space for females, informed by the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western fascination with Orientalism. Encapsulating the experience of colonialism, the boudoir became the site for both the repression and reconciliation of gender roles and biases. Furthermore, the eighteenth-century boudoir was a space where modernization of the interior was underway due to the level of informality, personal privacy, and bodily comfort it afforded to its users. Although both the boudoir and the harem were feminine spaces, men authored most of the primary sources on them. When the aristocratic boudoir reemerged in the more bourgeois nineteenth-century, it also marked the highpoint of paintings depicting bourgeois boudoirs both fictional and authentic. The boudoir genre paintings exposed the awkwardness and the ironies of female bodies disciplined by corsets and placed on soft, Eastern-inspired furniture pieces. The nineteenth-century Anglo-American revival of the boud (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Aarati Kanekar Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Patrick Snadon Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Frierson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Joori Suh (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture