Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2023, Women's and Gender Studies

Within environmental and feminist politics alike, there exists a sense that the time to make substantial change has passed. I propose that to resist the sense of dread that occupies the minds of activists and scholars that a multidimensional approach could simultaneously address gendered and environmental violence and oppression by reviving ecofeminist ideas from the 1980s. This thesis is dedicated to interrogating ideas about gender, environment, and monstrosity to propose that the notion of the human must be resisted and rather an intentional occupation of the monstrous could aid in reimagining the a future of prosperity and community.

Committee: Julie White (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Philosophy; Environmental Studies; Gender; Gender Studies

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Art

Monsters are powerful symbols of transformative agency, heavily ingrained in Western culture. With transmutating creatures living rent-free in our collective imagination, I have to wonder: why is it taboo for queer people to transform? Tracing a historical line from biblical angels, Greek mythology, the gothic novel, and contemporary horror cinema, I create a framework for understanding monsters as revered, transformative figures in important texts throughout the centuries. Just as LGBTQ+ activists reclaimed `queer' as a radical identifier, I reclaim `monster' as an uncompromising symbol of bodily agency, engaging with Queer readings and critical media theory along the way. Using my MFA Thesis artwork God Made Me (And They Love Me), I weave my soft sculpture beasties through historical imagery, religious text, folklore, and media pieces depicting `monster' and `monstrosity'.

Committee: Amy Youngs (Advisor); Caitlin McGurk (Committee Member); Gina Osterloh (Committee Member); Scott Deb (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Fine Arts; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Mass Media

MA, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Patriarchal anxieties about and resistance to women's embodied power has pushed women into the margins with the monsters. Through psychoanalytic perspectives on womb envy (Catherine Silver; Sigmund Freud) and abjection (Julia Kristeva) we can delve into the dark space of the monstrous maternal. This space is illuminated in a number of comics and other modes of visual narrative from the 20th and 21st century. These beings unveil the longstanding rhetoric of control that patriarchal social structures depend upon in order to police the possibilities of not only women's bodies in terms of personal agency, but also of sexuality and reproduction of nonhuman bodies. I investigate how this connection to and identification with monstrosity influences cultural discourses about reproduction, identity, and agency in both. Not all of the stories I investigate are explicitly about women. However, the presence of what Barbara Creed aptly defines as the “monstrous feminine” and explicit images of reproduction and the womb are present and essential in each of the texts I discuss. Ultimately, when viewed from a psychoanalytic feminist perspective, monstrous representations of the maternal and of the womb offer generative spaces to rethink and resist structures of control over bodies.

Committee: Vera Camden (Advisor); Tammy Clewell (Committee Member); Sara Newman (Committee Member) Subjects: Ecology; Literature; Psychology; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2016, English

In the same vein as Jack Halberstam's analysis in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Horror, my thesis explores the representation of deviant embodiment and identification(s) in horror spanning from twentieth-century works of Gothic literature to contemporary serialized television, specifically American Horror Story: Freakshow (2014) and Supernatural (2005-present). By employing theoretical frameworks such as posthumanist, feminist film, queer, and disability theories, I argue that the horror genre depends upon the de-subjectification of non-normative bodies (non-white, female, queer, disabled, transgender) to sustain the normative “human” subject (white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender). Through an archive of horror's monsters, I aim to elucidate that horror and American culture both engage in a parasitical relationship that feeds upon and (re)produces anxieties surrounding non-conformant embodiment. Though the genre still manages to punish non-normative bodies on screen, my study demonstrates how bringing visibility to the disposability of these bodies acts to “queer,” or rupture, the understanding of monstrosity as it relates to those subjects considered less than human. Positing less than human “monsters” as queer-posthuman not only deconstructs humanist ideologies within horror and outside of it, but also encourages a reenvisioning of new possibilities of existence apart from normative constructions of “human.”

Committee: Katie Johnson Dr (Committee Chair); Erin Edwards Dr. (Committee Member); Madelyn Detloff Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Gender Studies

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2016, English-Literature

British Gothic literature of the early nineteenth-century offers multitudes of representations of `monstrous' females, often depicted as subversive, transgressive, seductive, and even supernatural. Making use of Gothic tropes, monstrous forms and actions, doubling, fractured or fragmented imagination, scenery of ruin and decay, as well as grotesque bodies, Gothic texts presented anxiety in ways that struck terror into readers' hearts. Of the central anxieties presented in these Gothic texts, monstrous females remain a lesser-examined figure. In an attempt to determine the importance of the commonly used trope of a `monstrous' female in nineteenth-century Gothic literary and cultural imagination, I will include examinations of central female figures in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as well as Catherine Smith's novel The Caledonian Bandit; or, the Heir of Duncaethal (1811), alongside ballads by Anne Bannerman from her Poems (1800) and Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) in order to trace gendered social anxieties across literary and cultural borders. By resurrecting these monstrous females, some perhaps for the first time, I hope show the importance and value of this monstrous female as a marker of changing social bounds. Rather than allowing these females to become relegated to the fringes of their stories, or to be left in a state of dereliction or abandonment, I wish to put them in conversation with each other and grant them access to ongoing literary conversations.

Committee: Heather Braun Dr. (Advisor); Hillary Nunn Dr. (Committee Member); Joseph Ceccio Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Folklore; Gender Studies; Literature