School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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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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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ItemFemale desire and agency in selected short stories by Lorrie Moore & Thrill: short stories( 2016)This dissertation employs Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jessica Benjamin’s theories of female subjectivity to perform a gynocritical feminist exploration of women’s desire and agency as depicted in selected short stories by Lorrie Moore. Examining Moore’s short stories ‘You’re Ugly, Too’ (Like Life 67–91), ‘Willing’ (Birds of America 5–25), ‘Two Boys’ (Like Life 3–19) and ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love’ (Self-Help 97–116), the thesis aims to discuss the ways in which Moore’s stories call into question both the objectification of women under patriarchy, and the impact that this objectification has on female subjectivity, desire and agency. It is my hypothesis that, key to Moore’s critique of the objectification of women, is the portrayal in her short fiction of straight women whose complex romantic and sexual encounters with men compromise their sense of themselves as subjects capable of desire and agency. My research attempts to show that Moore’s stories comment on the often-compromised desire and agency of women under patriarchy, and can be considered creative solutions to the question of how short fiction might function to broach the complexities of female subjectivity. The creative component of the dissertation, Thrill, comprises seventeen short stories that explore female desire and agency. Thrill responds to Moore’s work, and to the thinking of Beauvoir and Benjamin, by depicting young heterosexual women grappling with issues of desire, agency, and subjectivity. These stories hinge on the idea that female subjectivity is controlled and negated by a patriarchal sexual politics which is at its most potent in the interpersonal sexual arena.
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ItemContesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930( 2015)Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.
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Item'Parafeminism' and parody in contemporary art( 2014)Humour is a pleasurable and productive strategy for feminist artists; however, its role within feminist practice has received limited scholarly attention in the last two decades. The most recent study on the role of humour in feminist art is Jo Anna Isaak’s book Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (1996, Routledge), which frames feminist subversive laughter through the carnivalesque. Arguing that Isaak’s theory does not account for subsequent paradigm shifts in practice and ideology, this thesis aims to develop a conceptual framework that can explicate the forms and effects of humour currently emerging in contemporary feminist art. To develop this conceptual framework I draw upon art theorist Amelia Jones’ concept of ‘parafeminism,’ which suggests that contemporary feminist art is engaging in a revision of second wave methodologies: assessing and building upon earlier strategies by rejecting coalitional identity politics and reworking feminist visual politics of ‘the gaze.’ I interpret Jones’ theory by returning to Linda Hutcheon’s notion of parody, in order to frame three significant shifts in feminist practice: intimate corporeal preoccupations, phallocentric modes of spectatorship, and historical re-appropriation. To give focus to the influence of these changes in artists’ practice over the last three decades, I apply my framework of parafeminist parody to two major Euro-American case studies: an early Pipilotti Rist video, entitled Pickelporno (1992), and a more recent example, Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Mary’s Cherries (2004), as well as to a selection of works that traverse both video and performative modes of practice by three Australian artists (and collectives): Brown Council, Catherine Bell and the Hotham Street Ladies. Drawing upon writings from Freud, affect theory and corporeal semiotics, I extend Jones’ theory to this wider range of artworks thereby identifying ‘parafeminism’ as a greater phenomenon than previously proposed. To summarise, I aim to identify and develop a theoretical approach that will enable deeper understanding of humorous elements in contemporary feminist art.
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ItemThe Persephone complex: post-feminist impasses in popular heroine television( 2012)In this thesis I examine why the myth of Persephone is being retold in post-feminist media cultures where traditional feminist critiques have been otherwise foreclosed. Using psychoanalytic theory, I argue that this Persephone is a symptom of an impasse around the question of what it means to be a woman. I consider four popular television heroines who personify this phenomenon––Ally McBeal, Sydney Bristow, Veronica Mars and Meredith Grey––to demonstrate how Persephone’s story animates the question of sexuation or sexual difference today.
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ItemThe stomach is a grave: epidemic obesity and the metabolic body( 2011)This thesis examines epidemic obesity from a materialist perspective using the concept of metabolism. It develops an ontology of the metabolic body to identify and engage with material exploitations and injustices associated with epidemic obesity that occur at the scale of the individual, the city and the nation. Case studies include a history of weight loss surgery, evolutionary accounts of diabetes and global obesity reports. It uses an actor network theory approach to advocate for a materialist analysis of obesity that accounts for both human and non-human actors.