School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMasculinity, Violence, and the Failure of Patriarchal Values in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy( 2022-10)This dissertation examines Cormac McCarthy’s concerns in his fiction with how American patriarchal, hegemonic masculine values fail to deliver their promised benefits to men. I argue that McCarthy is critical of the way cultural myths around manhood exacerbate in these men what he sees as a propensity toward violence as a means of control.Through an analysis of McCarthy’s manipulation of form, including his evocation and interruption of mythic narrative structures and recognisable character typologies, I assess the extent to which McCarthy distances himself from or aligns himself with the violent and misogynist masculinities he portrays. I also examine McCarthy’s attitude toward representation, language and narrative as adequate mechanisms for structuring human life and whether his presentation of American masculine ideals as linguistically generated allows for a more ameliorative reading of his fiction. Crucially, I consider the fact that the suffering of women is generally portrayed as subordinate to the suffering of men. I find McCarthy’s fiction to be still beholden to many core characteristics of hegemonic white American masculinity, in particular its tendency to centre itself in narratives of suffering and survival–and so I propose that any critique of white American masculinity in his works must only be seen as partial.
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ItemThe environment in English versions of the Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale literature, 1823–1899( 2016)This dissertation explores the intersections between literature and environmental history in nineteenth-century English versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale literature. While the success of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tale literature in England can be attributed to the inclusion of Christian principles, the privileging of individualism, the omission of licentious content and the focalisation of child protagonists, this dissertation argues that the tales were also valued for presenting an environmental ethos. English versions of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tales relayed anthropocentric ideas about nature which competed with a developing sense of environmentalism during a period of rapid environmental change. While these tales idealised the tremendous possibilities offered by the environment, nature is not prioritised above human interest; rather, these versions effectively highlight humanity’s destructive disposition by disempowering female and animal characters. By focusing on depictions of nature during a century of environmental devastation, this thesis contributes to our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as relayed in literary texts.
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ItemWhen romance is dead: vampires in romance narratives for girls( 2018)In this thesis, I examine how the archetype of the vampire in Western literature continues to evolve within contemporary Young Adult vampire romance narratives. Building on Auerbach’s contention that vampires mutate according to the social demands of their time, I argue that the late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of romantic vampire figures in Young Adult narratives for girls is a response to cultural anxieties concerning rapidly changing societal expectations of femininity following second-wave feminist movements in the twentieth century. I study three contemporary vampire romance narratives, Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2008) and Mead’s Bloodlines (2011-2015). Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate different ways in which the romantic vampire archetype has responded to Western anxieties concerning contemporary femininity, and I argue that the romantic vampire continues to evolve, drawing on conventions that have been set up in preceding vampire romance narratives to address changing social environments. The creative component of this thesis is an opening extract of a Young Adult vampire romance narrative titled The Blood Pact. In this extract, I explore ways in which the romantic vampire archetype can continue to transform in response to contemporary cultural concerns.
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ItemWelcome to the coven: organising feminist activism in the connective era( 2019)The highly publicised protest wave of the early 2010s triggered a reconceptualization of the organisational practices and structures of contemporary activism. Prior research was focused on analysing the new sociality of the internet, primarily organisational websites and forums, and how this was affecting, influencing, and extending collective action (Bimber et al., 2005; Chadwick, 2007; Earl, 2010). The traditional model of collective action was found to no longer account for the full range of actions that were occurring in digitised spaces. In response to this shift, Bennett and Segerberg (2012, 2013) proposed the logic of connective action to account for new models of protest organising with social and digital technologies. However, their large-scale networked analysis, while insightful, fails to capture the finer-grained relationships between activists particularly within less transparent networks. In addition, since the development of their theory, there has been an explosion of feminist protests epitomised by the recent #MeToo movement. The scale, reach, and seeming permanence of these feminist actions demands further examination. Thus, this thesis provides a theoretical account of the organisational structures and practices occurring behind the scenes of contemporary feminist actions. Drawing on a social media ethnographic approach, this thesis documents the post-digital and hybrid feminist social movement repertoire that is resulting in a globalisation of feminist protests. The research is based on in-depth interviews with feminist activists and focuses on three case studies of feminist protests: the original Hollaback! campaign hosted on a photoblog, the series of #TakeDownJulienBlanc post-digital protests, and the solidarity feminist hashtag #EndViolenceAgainstWomen. The thesis also incorporates a discussion of the #MeToo movement due to its significance in the contemporary political climate. Its key contributions are challenging the myth of structurelessness within contemporary protests; reaffirming the hybridity of organisational practices; and conceptualising the franchising of feminist activism. Overall, the thesis identifies the profoundly feminist issues that impact contemporary organisational structures and practices, resulting in an expansion and partial contestation of Bennett and Segerberg’s (2013) connective action typology.
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ItemSoma-masculinities: centring the body within studies of masculinities( 2018)Whilst feminist and queer scholarship have paid generous attention to bodies and embodiment in their attempts to better understand gender and sexuality, studies of masculinities have tended to lag behind. In this thesis, I attend to the theoretical strains within studies of masculinities to demonstrate that these studies are at an impasse, a point at which scholars remain reluctant or unable to push beyond current frameworks into new and, as I argue, productive territory. In particular, these studies have most readily employed social constructionist approaches in their analyses, typified by Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, however such frameworks have been unable to adequately describe and account for the complexities, contradictions and possibilities of masculinities and male subjectivities. I suggest that bodies are central to this understanding and must be brought into the frame in a more significant manner. Throughout this thesis I draw attention to the blind spot within these studies and attend to bodies more closely through an examination of contemporary masculinities. In particular I consider three specific sites of the body: the phallic, the hegemonic and the homosexual body. I interrogate these through a number of case studies, including pornography, Australian rules football and online dating sites, all of which continue to arouse interest and debate within academic and public spheres. It is here that I draw attention to some of the limitations of current studies and attempt to produce a richer account of the key questions and problems within these debates. In doing this, I introduce a new framework I call soma-masculinities which I employ to address masculinities in a more profound manner, and make some original contributions to the scholarship. In particular, this framework places a greater emphasis on the material body and its fleshy components; it aims to bring the flesh into bodies and questions of masculinity. Soma-masculinities is not one specific theory or concept but rather a mode of enquiry. Thus, it utilises a broad toolkit that incorporates conceptual models that are already available and engaged, particularly within feminist and queer theory. I demonstrate how this framework might offer a more capacious account of contemporary masculinities and the complex ways in which they are embodied and lived.
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ItemRituals of girlhood: fairy tales on the teen screen( 2015)The research question that this dissertation asks is: can contemporary teen screen media include representations of adolescent girls who oppose their subordinate, objectified position within adult patriarchal culture, and how do these expressions of opposition manifest onscreen? I explore this question through an analysis of postmodern screen texts that hybridise the fairy tale with the contemporary teen screen genre because this contemporary trend in fairy tale revision produces new, more empowered representations of the feminine rite-of-passage. In this thesis, I compare fairy tale narratives that once privileged patriarchal authority – particularly the versions written by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen – with contemporary teen screen revisions that produce new representations of fairy tale heroines who confront and challenge this very authority. To identify moments of feminine adolescent resistance and noncompliance on the teen screen, I chart the phase of liminality in the rite-of-passage narrative. While there has been some theorisation of liminality on the teen screen, not enough work has been done on how liminality provides a space for heroines to articulate alternative feminine adolescent voices and identities. This dissertation redeploys Victor Turner’s work on liminality for a feminist agenda. I use this theory as a way to not only locate instances of dislocation and fissures in the dominant system that regulates girlhood, but to also discover how the limits of this system can be made malleable in the liminal zone. Additionally, I explore the political potential of liminality by investigating whether this unsettling of limits can create social change for the heroines beyond the liminal phase in their post-liminal return to conventional culture. This dissertation makes an original contribution to knowledge by arguing for the feminist potential of these moments because they represent a rupture in the status quo, and in the resistant space of this gap, a new screen language of feminine adolescence articulates the girl as a powerful subject who is agentically doing girlhood.
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Item(Re-)examining Blank Fiction: an excerpt from Barely Anything, a novel & Sex, narcissism and disconnection in Australia and the United States( 2016)(Re-)Examining Blank Fiction: Sex, Narcissism and Disconnection in Australia and the United States analyses works of ‘Blank Fiction’ from Australia and the United States within a selection of novels, including: Less Than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis, Loaded (1995) by Christos Tsiolkas, Rohypnol (2007) by Andrew Hutchinson, The Delivery Man (2008) by Joe McGinniss Jr., and Snake Bite (2014) by Christie Thompson. It examines the use of images drawn from celebrity and lifestyle magazines, music videos, advertising, pornography, television, and Hollywood cinema and argues that these novels co-opt images of mass culture in an effort to critique contemporary social practices, values, and lifestyle. Additionally, this dissertation provides an excerpt of a novel entitled Barely Anything. Barely Anything, like other Blank Fiction novels, details the social practices of a small group of young adults, addressing themes of sex, boredom and privilege on both sides of Melbourne’s Yarra River.
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ItemComplex conformities: Tibetan women's life writing and the en-gendering of national history in Exile( 2016)This thesis examines the ways in which the life writing of Tibetan women in exile negotiates the place of gender in the (re)writing of Tibetan history, within the larger project of ideological nation building. Located at the intersection of literary, cultural and historical studies, this study is concerned with the alternative histories contained within women’ s life stories and their relation to ‘ official’ Tibetan national history and the structures of power that maintain the gendered nature of the historical archive in the Tibetan exile community. Engaging questions of gender, nationalism and life writing through the lens of postcolonial feminism, I use a historically contextualized close-textual analysis to show how five selected exile Tibetan women’ s life narratives present previously neglected national histories that both challenge and uphold the dominant exile political history of Tibet during the first half of the twentieth century. This research project is thus also an inquiry into our understanding of what constitutes Tibetan national history and the possibility of transforming the Tibetan historical archive, within which women and their histories have mostly remained hidden from view.
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ItemLooking back: contemporary feminist art in Australia and New Zealand( 2016)This thesis sets out to examine the ways in which feminism manifests itself in contemporary art, focusing in particular on Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with practicing contemporary artists Kelly Doley, FANTASING (Bek Coogan, Claire Harris, Sarah-Jane Parton, Gemma Syme), Deborah Kelly, Jill Orr and Hannah Raisin. During these interviews, a number of key themes emerged which form the integral structure of the thesis. A combination of information drawn from interviews, close reading of art works, and key theoretical texts is used to position contemporary feminist art in relation to its recent history. I will argue that the continuation of feminist practices and devices in contemporary practice points to a circular pattern of repetition in feminist art, which resists a linear teleology of art historical progress. The relationship between feminism and contemporary art lies in the way that current practices revisit crucial issues which continue to cycle through the lived experience of femininity, such as the relationship to the body, to labour and capital, to the environment, and to structures of power. By acknowledging that these issues are not tied to a specific historical period, I argue that feminist art does not constitute a short moment of prolific production in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but is a sustained movement which continually adapts and shifts in order to remain abreast of contemporary issues.
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Item'Unlocked Doors': correspondence as female-centric writing practice( 2017)The aim of this thesis is to investigate, through critical analysis and creative work, the notion of a female-centric writing practice that not only accommodates but incorporates motherhood. By dismantling the central tenets of the nineteenth century androcentric Romantic myth of creativity, this thesis begins to imagine what a female-centric creative practice, built around women’s experiences, might look like. To do so, it investigates correspondence as a writing form commonly and traditionally practised by women that subverts the approach, value systems and goals of an androcentric model of literary production. I contend that correspondence has been overlooked as a feminist model for writing practice, and that it provides a blueprint for a female-centric model of creative process — a writing practice structured around a woman’s reality that does not insist upon a ‘room of one’s own’ with ‘a lock on the door’ as proposed by Virginia Woolf in 1929. This model would not be antithetical to the realities of motherhood, but would go so far as to acknowledge the benefits motherhood can bring to a writing practice. I hypothesise that in correspondence a tradition of ‘writing in the midst of life’ can be found that enables mother-writers to differently conceptualise the how of writing, freeing them from age-old conflicts between creativity and mothering. Specifically, this thesis uses a gynocritical analysis of the correspondence of successful mid-century Australian female poet Gwen Harwood to hypothesise the potential of correspondence as a model for a female-centric creative practice.