“A Bit of Woman in Every Man”: Creating
Queer Community in Female Impersonation
BY MARA DAUPHIN
In the decades immediately following World War II, female impersonation thrived
as an art form in America. Springing from a beloved vaudeville tradition, female
impersonation had a significant claim to the realm of
heteronormative, mainstream entertainment, which was invoked frequently
by performers and producers. While maintaining this rhetoric, however, revues
used hints of queerness to attract both substantial heterosexual crowds and
large pockets of gay, lesbian, and transgender performers and regulars. This
paper reveals how these burgeoning female impersonation revues served to foster
queer community and queer niches of urban landscape in post-war America, even
while relying on rejections of queer identity in order to stay afloat. More….
David Benatar, Death and the Harm in Existence
BY MICHAEL DA SILVA
In his 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into
Existence, philosopher David Benatar argues that
existence is an inherent harm. Since existence necessarily imposes harm on those
who experience it, and non-existence cannot deprive a non-entity of a good it is
incapable of experiencing, existence is always a harm.
This has several implications for applied ethics, including the adoption of
anti-natalism, the ethical position holding that
having children is wrong. This paper uses
concessions from Benatar’s own account of existence
and its related harms to show that existence is not necessarily
a harm. Once birth can be justified,
Benatar’s distinction between lives worth living and
lives worth continuing allows for continued existence, delaying the extinction
Benatar’s anti-existence would imply. More….
Domestic Composition: A
Reconstructive Pictorial Project
BY MARISSA SABBATH
Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work is a
pivotal piece in post-southern literature which aims to give faces to the
legions of nameless domestic workers and, thus, to bear witness.
Trethewey faces the task of weaving together events
and emotions to create a holistic picture that is cultural, historical and
personal. Her project is to capture unique moments in an aesthetic stillness to
accomplish a sense of sublation. This paper argues
that Trethewey’s project is successful due to her
use of the Polaroid instant. Because she invokes the concept of photography, she
is able to capture the emotions that occupy the most private of thoughts.
More….
Reflections in Contemporary Feminist Literature
BY THEODORA HERMES
While mirrors in literature and culture have long been associated with female
vanity, self-consciousness, and other restrictive conceptions of female
identity, a "gaze" into the mirrors of contemporary feminist literature reveals
that the mirror has adopted a markedly different role. Through a close
examination of Margaret Atwood'sThe Handmaid's Tale and Toni Morrison's
Sula,this paper suggests that contemporary feminist literature revises
the conventional meaning of the mirror motif while simultaneously positing a
less restrictive notion of female selfhood.More….
Second Language Acquisition Through the Eyes of
Teenagers
BY ALEKSANDER KLIBISZ
The study of second language acquisition has been a field of active debate for
nearly five decades. While linguists continually debate the processes by which
humans learn new languages, people around the world are doing just that –
learning new languages. They are leaving their homes and moving to completely
new places, trading familiar languages for new ones which they must learn from
scratch. This paper shows how this process of migration and language acquisition
occurs each and every day, and its course of progression and ultimate effects
can be best observed in the world’s next generation of leaders, thinkers, and
innovators – today’s teenagers. More….
Simply Not There: Externality Versus Internal
Identity in American Psycho
BY DERIK COOL
In her 2000 film American Psycho,
Mary Harron crafts a sleek and provocative view of
1980s executive New York. While the film
is a testament to the period’s overblown consumerist splendor, it equally
reveals the consequences of such unfettered tendencies. Through their overt and uninhibited
materialism, the characters maintain their popularity while compromising
themselves. This paper explores the
culture’s emphasis on externality and its hindering effects on individuality and
emotional connection. More….
The Albanian Kanun in Ismail
Kadare’s Broken April
BY SEAN GUYNES
This paper offers a sampling of Albanian literature by introducing Ismail
Kardare’s dark novel Broken April (Prilli i
thyer, 1978) and the way in which the novel
utilizes the code of Albanian traditional law, the Kanun.
It shows how Kardare, a self-exiled Albanian, calls
into question the relevance of tradition in the face of modernity, a theme which
may be interpreted as broadly as a comment on Westernization and globalization,
or as narrowly as a comment on the contemporary Albanian communist regime of
Enver Hoxha (d.1985).
Kardare’s use of the Kanun
in Broken April, though a piece of obscure Albanian folk law to the
outside world, evokes an interpretation pregnant with universality while
providing a unique teaching experience for the reader uninitiated into the world
of Albanology. More….
You Can’t Hurry Soul: Redefining the Integration Politics of Martin, Malcolm,
and the Supremes
BY ERIC GONZABA
The Civil Rights Movement was complex; from protests and marches, legislative
and judicial victories, to assassinations and riots, the Freedom Struggle was by
no means easy. Current understandings of the movement are often centered on
watered down ideological interpretations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X. However, popular culture can also shed light on the political atmosphere of
the turbulent Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s-1960s. If Dr. King and Malcolm X’s respective
ideologies are the source for an incalculable number of books and articles,
there should be some expectation that their views would play out in popular
music of the time—and it does, notably in soul music. Soul’s founding is rooted
in the ideologies of Dr. King and Malcolm X, though contemporary scholars have
dismissed certain black artists, particularly the Supremes, as un-soulful, too
“white,” and too eager to cross over. This paper argues that this criticism is
unfounded and lacks a historical analysis of soul’s varied definition in the
1960s. Moreover, the very discussion of
soul’s definition is a clear example of the King-Malcolm ideological divide and
the political importance of popular culture in historical narrative.
More….
