MFA, Kent State University, 2024, College of the Arts / School of Art

This written thesis, Fibrous Beings and the Forces of the Body, addresses the research of social, political, personal, and art historical contexts around the making of the sculptural body of work of the same title. I explore the impacts of the rising evangelical neoconservative movement in America on the political and social environment of today, and the use of social media as a tool for aestheticizing a brand of neoconservative biological essentialism made desirable for women during at a time of repealed reproductive rights. I combine this research with personal experiences growing up on a cattle farm, and my involvement at a young age with the fundamentalist Christian Southern Baptist church. Realizing the potentials for my body, its processes, and its harms often came alongside the experiences of birthing calves and other animal husbandry as well as moralizing of the body through a biblical lens. Using fiber sculptural abstraction, then analyzing the work through Julia Kristeva's Theory of Abjection and Michelle Meagher's Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust, I formalize some of the bodily processes that are the underbelly of our physical beings that tie us to our aliveness, while questioning why we are taught to reject them.

Committee: Eli Kessler (Advisor); Isabel Farnsworth (Committee Member); John Paul Morabito (Committee Member); J. Leigh Garcia (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, English

A combination of literary criticism and ethnography, this thesis explores emerging adult women and their relationships with food. Pulling from three novels (Margeret Atwood's "The Edible Woman," Chelsea Summers' "A Certain Hunger," and Claire Kohda's "Woman, Eating") and three interviews with woman-identifying Ohio University students, an analysis of eating habits, body, and identity is conducted. This analysis is divided into three thematically-based sections: "Restriction," "Indulgence," and "Creation," which describe and investigate the various ways emerging adult women consume.

Committee: Matthew Rosen (Advisor); Nicole Reynolds (Advisor) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation examines theater, performance, and music in twenty-first-century Spain in order to theorize how the artistic and the mimetic have an impact on the moral, political, and legal limits of freedom of expression. I reflect on the role of activist, political, and abject stances, and argue that art and the imaginary have broadened the legal and moral limits of freedom of expression. To explain this process, I deploy the work of Julia Kristeva on the abject as a perverse violation of norms, prohibitions or laws, a transgression that the subject needs to expel in order to remain a subject. This work also incorporates theories of art and the mimetic dimension regarding the imaginary that draw from Aristotelian theater as well as from the pragmatic approach to literature. I show how activism that can be regarded as art and rests on an almost total taboo, has the potential to loosen a strong social consensus on the limits of freedom of expression. I call these manifestations “aesthetics of the maximum abject” and illuminate how they are a consequence of the Spanish historical period following the social-protest movement known as15-M, a period marked by challenges to the structures of state power and by the Catalan secessionist crisis. This research expands on studies of artistic activism and activist art that have been penalized by the courts and that have been mostly analyzed in the context of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. Thus, the aesthetics of the maximum abject can be regarded as artistic activism in which, paradoxically, the mimetic dimension matters. It is fundamental to understand the role of art as a vehicle for sociopolitical transformations that have an impact on the limits of what can be said and which, in turn, affect one of the pillars of liberal democracies.

Committee: Ana Elena Puga (Advisor); Ignacio Corona (Committee Member); Dionisio Viscarri (Committee Member); Eugenia Romero (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Language Arts; Law; Legal Studies; Literature; Music; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Theater

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, Popular Culture

This thesis investigates the relationship between the body of the witch in popular culture and attitudes and assumptions about the female body. This study was conducted through textual analysis of several popular films and television shows about witches. This analysis is structured around three core archetypes of femininity: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, examining how each of the three archetypes preserve stereotypes about women and how witches can subvert or reinforce those stereotypes. Using the theory of abjection as a foundation, this thesis argues that witches have a strong relationship to abject femininity and can therefore expose the anxieties and fears about female bodies in a patriarchal culture. This is not a comprehensive study of witches in popular culture, and further research into the intersections of gender and race, sexuality, and ability is needed to form any definite conclusions. This study is merely an exploration of female archetypes and how the female body is conceived through the witch's body in popular culture.

Committee: Jeffrey Brown Dr. (Advisor); Angela Nelson Dr. (Committee Member); Esther Clinton Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Film Studies; Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Religion; Womens Studies

MFA, Kent State University, 2020, College of the Arts / School of Art

With my work I dissect human forms, allowing me to further understand the bodily systems within myself. By intervening on the harmony of my body, I reveal intestinal, arterial and other biomorphic forms that exist in a state of tension and disorder. Bodies, flayed like frogs in a high school science class, are my explorative responses to my own anxieties and fears about my body and health. Physically embodying sharp, tight, and sporadic pain, my work exists between a measured, scientific inquiry and a chaotic, manic probe of the human anatomy.

Committee: Peter Johnson (Advisor); Gianna Commito (Committee Member); Shawn Powell (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2016, Art

This thesis intends to outline the development of my studio practice during my MFA candidacy at The Ohio State University. I entered graduate school as a potter but through the process of maquette-making my training as a craftsperson started to unravel. Setting aside pottery making, I experimented with form, made performances, and have now returned to the object. I intend to activate the objects I make with the same energy of my previous performances and to demonstrate my interests in: experimentation, physicality, the body, and space.

Committee: Steven Thurston (Advisor); Amanda Gluibizzi (Committee Member); George Rush (Committee Member) Subjects: Architectural; Fine Arts; Gender

Bachelor of Science of Communication Studies (BSC), Ohio University, 2014, Communication Studies

The study of illness narratives has been effective in uncovering its ability to allow the narrator to make sense of the chaotic nature of illness, and also present a unique account of illness that stands in contrast to the established norms. While illness narratives are well researched, the medium in which they are told matters a great deal, making Tig Notaro’s LIVE a unique illness narrative amongst the others. Utilizing the tools of humor to both reclaim her abject body and mediate her experience, Notaro delivers an illness narrative that not only combats her own cancer, but also works to provide a narrative outside the hegemonic breast cancer narrative in our culture.

Committee: Roger Aden Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Communication

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Young mothers who are coming out of sex slavery in India are rendered abject and have no options for their children other than to restart the cycle of slavery. They are abject, in that they are both from their community (subject) and completely separate from it (object). Architecture can participate in the rehabilitation and empowerment of these women, while providing for the needs of their children. Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Judith Herman outlines the steps needed for recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder, which are establishing safety, acknowledgement through mourning, and assimilation into the community by participation. This will be achieved by working with Oasis India, as well as looking at West Indian cultural and climatic building strategies. The result is a women's center in Ahmedabad, India, with family residences, staff residences, therapy rooms, a children's center, small business space, training classrooms, and a craft market on the street level. Through the research the critical points of this type of building are: the use of urban agriculture as a means of therapy and self-sufficiency, the lightwell to open up the dense building, the threshold as a point to establish safety, and the use of the screen to filter light and views in and out. This is all to create a dialogue about how to design for the abject, with opposing needs and desires.

Committee: John Eliot Hancock MARCH (Committee Chair); Jeffrey Tilman PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Art

My fellowship at The Ohio State University coincided with a marked shift in my work from abstraction to research-based artwork that reflects my ecological and political concerns. Through working with honeybees and investigating the issues surrounding nuclear power following the tsunami-induced collapse of Fukushima, I have expanded my practice to something that resonates more deeply with my moral imperative to communicate about urgent issues of concern. By employing references to the souvenir and the miniature, the abject and the uncanny, I have endeavored to make ideas and materiality meet by working with living systems, new technologies and socio-politically charged materials and imagery. In this paper, I will outline my attempt to give voice to my concerns about radiation contamination and Colony Collapse Disorder, while also addressing more abstracted formal issues via sculpture, collage, and photography.

Committee: Alison Crocetta (Advisor); Ann Hamilton (Committee Member); Ken Rinaldo (Committee Member); Amanda Gluibizzi (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2010, Popular Culture

In the past milk has represented white, hegemonic society in the US through its association with middle-American wholesomeness and its red-checked table cloth. The recent shift from the good-guy-drinks-milk motif of films of the past to the villains-drinks-milk motif in films of modernity rejects the ideal society that milk represents through grotesque representations of its consumption and its consumers. In such recent US media as The Strain (2009), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-2009), Mr. Brooks (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and The Professional (1994) milk's representation perverts its myth indicating a souring of society-as-we-know-it. As milk turns “bad” in these films, whiteness and those norms and values associated with whiteness lose their quality of invisibility and can be inspected accordingly. The following pages ultimately investigate representations of milk in the media and suggest that recent changes in those representations subvert the hegemonic image of the virtuous white body, his God-given beverage, and the issues often overlaid with race such as class, normality, cleanliness and morality.

Committee: Jeff Brown PhD (Committee Chair); Maisha Wester PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies