.svg)
This paper explores the sexuality and spirituality of Aboriginal women and the ways in which the two are uniquely and inherently tied together in two fictional works. Aboriginal women’s sexual and spiritual bodies must be recognized and celebrated as the driving force behind the continuation of the people as a whole. The physical body is the vehicle used to gain, reclaim, or maintain spiritual power at each stage in a woman’s life, often through ceremony, as discussed in Kim Anderson’s Life Stages and Native Women; this paper explains how this spiritual power is tied to the physical through blood and breastmilk, sexual intercourse, birth, and death. The fictional works studied explore the interconnections of the body and the spirit in relation to power and cultural survivance using theories of decolonization. It is through recognizing the significance of women’s sexual and spiritual power that culture, traditions, and the people are able to be (re)born, as women are the heart or womb of the physical and the spiritual. Works studied include Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and The Painted Drum.
❐ PDFWhile engaged in gossip during her weekly hair appointment at the beauty parlor, Mrs. Fletcher tells Leota, “Women have to stand up for themselves, or there’s just no telling.” In Eudora Welty’s 1941 short story, “Petrified Man,” this conversation between hairdresser Leota and her client Mrs. Fletcher indicates that these southern women have found a space in which they can stand up for themselves in an otherwise oppressive milieu. One facet of the story worth exploring is its focus on synthetically created beauty. Through her descriptions of mirrors, dyed hair, lipstick, and lavender, Welty establishes the female characters’ obsession with appearances which in turn masks the darker realities present in the narrative. These include descriptions of a freak show, grotesque exhibits, and a “petrified” man who is later revealed to be a wanted rapist. Also of note is the fact that even within the seemingly “safe” space of the beauty parlor, moments of violence erupt when, for example, Leota digs her nails into Mrs. Fletcher’s scalp. Read within the context of my argument, these violent acts suggest that although the women’s obsession with appearances appears to be an outlet through which they can express agency, it instead functions as a means by which they turn on one another. Thus the resulting fragmentation of women ultimately allows the male-dominated power structures to prevail, as indicated when the only male voice, a young child, dominates the beauty parlor by asking the silenced women, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
❐ PDFPart horror story, part comedy, part road narrative, and part coming-of-age story, “Lizard Lick” is a piece about being lost, in more ways than one. It is partly inspired by a quote I once heard a character in a movie say: “Getting lost just means that you found something you weren’t looking for.”
As a girl with a colassally terrible sense of direction, it was only a matter of time before I ended up getting lost; I just never imagined it would be somewhere as otherworldly as Lizard Lick, North Carolina, a tiny community where the past is vibrantly alive, where the town’s single gas station is adorned with a giant statue depicting a lizard wearing a top hat, where all you can see for miles are the capsized bodies of wrecked cars that make up one massive vehicular graveyard. In Lizard Lick, time seems to move in circles rather than in a straight line.
This is where I found myself alone in the dark on a Friday night during my freshman year of college. This is the story of how getting lost helped me find something inside myself that I hadn’t even known to look for.
Megacopta cribraria, also known as the kudzu bug, was first discovered in the southeastern United States in 2009. M. cribraria feed on soybeans (Glycine max), which causes a significant decrease in overall soybean yields. Currently, there is no information regarding environmentally safe control methods of this particular invasive species. Used coffee grounds have been implemented in many agricultural settings as a fertilizer and as a preventative of invasive pests. The purpose of these two greenhouse experiments is to determine whether the application of used coffee grounds has the potential to control or deter M. cribraria herbivory on soybeans. We hypothesize that UCG application will cause a decrease in M. cribraria herbivory on soybeans. The first experiment evaluated used coffee grounds (UCG) with six treatments of soil mixture measured by volume with 0% UCG (control), 2.5% UCG, 5% UCG, 10% UCG, 15% UCG, and 20% UCG. The second experiment evaluated used coffee grounds as a mulch applied to the soil surface with UCG application and without UCG (control). Our results demonstrated that used coffee grounds, when applied as a 20% UCG mixture, are able to decrease M. cribraria preference for soybeans. The control soybeans were preferred despite a lower plant quality that could have been a result from nutrient deficiency, toxic heavy metal presence, or decreased rhizobia interactions. However, UCG do not deter M. cribraria when applied as a mulch to the soil surface.
❐ PDFWashington Duke and his son, James Buchanan Duke, were cutthroat businessmen, and both men valued increased production and profit above all. Production of smoking tobacco and cigarettes within the Washington Duke & Sons Tobacco Company was a painstaking endeavor for the company's laborers. Disgruntled workers established and joined the local branch of the Knights of Labor. The organization prided itself on publicizing and confronting injustice in the workplace, which often caused conflict between employers and employees. Members of the local Durham branch of the Knights of Labor documented notable incidents of abuse and reported them to the Master Workman of the organization, Terrance Vincent Powderly. The events reported were discussed and addressed at General Assemblies, and were printed in the organization's newspaper, the Journal of United Labor.
My aim is to investigate the interactions and conflicts between the W. Duke & Sons Tobacco Company and the Knights of Labor in Durham, NC. By examining correspondence between local Knights in Durham and Terrance Powderly, newspaper publications, and court records, I will be able to produce a full illustration of the events, and create a comprehensive documentation of the relationship between Knights of Labor and the W. Duke & Sons Tobacco Company.
The effects of self-compassion training, compared to traditional sports psychology imagery practices, on coping with fear of failure in collegiate female athletes were examined. We studied 33 female basketball and softball athletes who participated in various exercises over an 8 week period. Levels of self-compassion, fear of failure, sport satisfaction, and sport performance were measured. Results showed that the participants, following the self-compassion intervention, elicited higher sport satisfaction and lessened amounts of both fear of failure and negative self-evaluation than the traditional sports psychology manipulations. Due to the observed benefits, further research and implementation of self-compassion in athletics should be considered.
❐ PDFSexually explicit, provocative, and entrancing are three descriptors that merely scratch the surface of Rodney Sharman's solo piano work The Garden. The piece is representative of a more recent style of writing that requires a pianist who both speaks and plays. With text by queer Canadian playwright Peter Eliot Weiss, The Garden juxtaposes the complexities and politics surrounding homosexual kissing, momentary sexual encounters, and the gay club scene with nostalgic remembrances and the transformative power of a single kiss. Musically, The Garden heightens this juxtaposition, featuring both highly dissonant and tonal passages. Specifically, the piece systematically combines numerous genres and styles including rock-n-roll, 50's pop ballad, and contemporary bi-tonal dissonance. In addition to The Garden's technically challenging piano score, Sharman includes speaking, singing, and percussive passages for the solo performer, demanding extra-musical, cabaret-style theatrical qualities in performance. This approach creates a postmodern blend that reflects the influence of American pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski, whose monumental work for speaking pianist entitled De Profundis is based on Oscar Wilde's prison-based letter under the same title. Yet, Rodney Sharman's The Garden steps beyond Rzewski's piano piece in it queer aspects, openly and unapologetically detailing homoerotic desire for cock, sex, and love. Sharman was born and raised in Biggar, Saskatchewan and now resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has written a variety of operas, chamber and choral works, and compositions for various solo instruments. The Garden was originally commissioned by American pianist Anthony de Mare with funding from the Canada Council Music Commissioning Program.
A video of the performance can be seen here.
This research paper will look at the rise of the Safavid dynasty in Iran and Azerbaijan during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The goal of this paper will be to explain the rise of the Safavids in the context of the political, military, and religious landscape of the Middle East in the late fifteenth century. The central question that this paper will seek to answer is how did the Safavids evolve from a small, fairly conventional Sufi order founded in the thirteenth century to a radical Shi'i revolutionary force powerful enough to destroy the Shirvanshah and the Aqquyunlu states, and found a major empire that would endure for over two centuries in the process?
Questions such as how and why the Safavids become a radical Shi'i force, what role their conflict with the rulers of the Shirvanshah played in their development, how did the Safavids attract a large enough following to form a powerful army, why they engaged in extreme violence against other Sufi orders, and how they converted Iran to Shi'i Islam are all discussed in the process of laying out Overall, a comprehensible picture of the origin and evolution of the Safavids will have to be formed from the available primary and secondary sources in order to answer the question of how the Safavids rose to power in the late fifteenth century.
In Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, characters, most of which are historical figures, strongly utilize both profanity and street vernacular. As part of my role as dramaturg on the production of that same play, I had to determine why that particular language style was used. I applied Lewis Hyde’s book titled Trickster Makes This World to the production in effort to determine causation for the language within the play. Through the synthesis of the two materials, I found why that language choice was necessary to the play’s function. Without it, this play, which is religious in nature, would be unable to fulfil its function. Through the use of such vernacular, Guirgis’s script is able to meet people where they are in discussing matters of religion. Additionally, the language is used to break the boundary of silence that cannot exist if such topics are to be properly explored. This paper argues for the use of profanity and street vernacular in the play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot as it relates to the character of the trickster. The play itself models trickster-like qualities in that it crosses boundaries of silence in relation to common religious questions.
❐ PDFThis thesis questions fundamental assumptions about analytical approaches and evaluative procedures relating to the interpretation of early-modern English poetry. In particular it looks at how typical analyses prioritize elements of close reading, such as complexity of diction, syntax, metaphor, which in many ways neglect to account for the full possibility for interpretation. Because this thesis challenges core assumptions about poetry, it will require a reworking of approach that requires that the generative elements of poetry, especially linguistics, phonetics, and prosody, which form the foundation of literature, be considered alongside secondary features, mainly historical perspectives, performative traditions, metaphysical assumptions, and cultural backgrounds. This research will be focalized through Elizabethan poet and musician Thomas Campion and select examples from his contemporaries. Campion’s large body of lyric verse presents a unique challenge to criticism from any literary perspective in that his literature being written simultaneously as music deconstructs fundamental assumptions about the sanctity of the written text. This research uses this inherent deconstruction and its ripple effects as the foundation for an argument towards multi-disciplinary approaches. Conclusions are based upon close considerations of the relationship between music and poetry. This approach is ordered as such: firstly by an establishment of issue and context, secondly by close analysis using modified and interdisciplinary approaches, and thirdly through hermeneutic conclusions positing some potentially rewarding alternatives to traditional analysis and greater insight into English Renaissance Poetics
In 1966, the American Scott Paper Company created a marketing campaign where customers could send in money to receive a dress made of a cellulose material called "Dura-Weave." What began as a way to sell more products became a defining trend of American fashion in the late 1960s. The paper dress created a market for paper clothing while simultaneously capitalizing on broader social issues. The advent of paper clothing was directly related to the rise in consumer and disposability culture, and as Americans looked to space as "the last frontier," paper clothing seemed a feasible solution to laundry on the moon. Paper clothing as acted as a vehicle for artistic expression, best seen in the Pop Art movement. Despite projections that paper clothing could come to dominate the fashion industry, the paper dress was all but obsolete by the end of 1968. The growing influence of the "hippie" movement was effectively changing public perceptions on the subject of a "disposable society." In addition, many women reported receiving unwanted attention while wearing paper dresses, and the growing women's movement in the late 1960s was supporting more sexually equalizing styles. Paper clothing and the enthusiasm surrounding this style was an indicator not only of the American mindset in the late 1960s but of American projections for the future.
❐ PDF