UTSA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/2226
This collection contains electronic UTSA theses and dissertations (ETDs), primarily from 2005 to present. The collection is not comprehensive; search the UTSA Library Catalog for a complete list of UTSA theses and dissertations.
Since 2023, the UTSA Graduate School has required all theses and dissertations to be made publicly available in Runner Research Press. However, authors are able to request an embargo. Embargoed ETDs will not be downloadable until after their embargo expires.
Authors of these ETDs have retained their copyright while granting UTSA Libraries the non-exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their works.
There are two collections of Master’s and Doctoral ETDs. One is available only to currently enrolled UTSA students, faculty or staff. To be able to download an ETD that is UTSA access only, navigate to “Log In” on the top right-hand corner of this screen, then select “Log in with my UTSA ID.”
Open Access ETDs are those which the author has granted permission for their work to be available to the general public.
Former students are invited to broaden access to their thesis or dissertation by making it available in the Open Access collection. To initiate this process, or if you have any questions about the ETD collection, please contact rrpress@utsa.edu.Browse
Browsing UTSA Electronic Theses and Dissertations by Department "English"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item A Corpus-based Stylistic Analysis of Body Language in the Novels of Charles Dickens and Naguib Mahfouz(2022) Shimal, MohammedThe present dissertation investigates the stylistic features of "body language" references in the novels of Charles Dickens and Naguib Mahfouz through digital analysis. In this study, "body language" refers to the different forms of non-verbal behavior and physical descriptions such as facial expressions, body posture, hand gestures, appearances, and other body cues that authors use to describe their characters and the social interactions within their fictional worlds. The identification of specific words or strings of words as examples of body language will depend on three criteria: there must be a direct reference to a body part, the reference must be a repeated pattern, and the reference must have interpretive significance. The corpus part of the dissertation focuses on identifying and extracting the frequency of occurrence and sets of word clusters associated with "body language," which are then compared against larger corpora to identify any possible similarities and individualities. Following Mahlberg (2012), the study presents a corpus stylistic analysis that builds on the concept of "local textual functions." These textual functions describe repeated patterns of lexical items in relation to their textual functions. The functions are local since they do not claim to be applicable to the English or Arabic language in general but to a specific set of lexical items and a specific (set of) text(s); therefore, the description of such functions has to be flexible and works to some extent with ad hoc categories. In this dissertation, I argue that Dickens and Mahfouz use "body language" to achieve various linguistic and local functions particularly pertinent to developing and unifying the multiple themes and varied centers of interest in their novels. Furthermore, I argue that through these stylistic preferences, Dickens and Mahfouz individuate their characters with specific sets of gestures that become, like literary fingerprints, associated with those characters and define their relationship to one another and to the world in which they reside. With the analysis of local textual functions of "body language" in Dickens and Mahfouz's novels, this dissertation exemplifies how corpus stylistic methodologies and descriptive categories can contribute to the characterization of the style of a text. The objective digital analysis will identify body-related patterns and lexical associations that will be used as a baseline for interpretive readings of the texts. The combination of corpus analysis with close reading has long been associated with the development of the field of Digital Humanities. Therefore, I will begin with an examination of the role of corpus analysis in literary studies. This is followed by an overview of different corpus-based stylistic studies that focus on Dickens's and Mahfouz's writing and style. I then briefly introduce the methodological context for the present study before I deal with data extracted from the texts as pointers to local textual functions.Item A decolonial study of gender and sexuality: analyzing queer, Chicana, feminist, and trans theory, and pedagogy(2015) Gardin, Michael LeeThis dissertation argues for activating a decolonial study of gender and sexuality through analyses of select literature, criticism, theory, and teaching practices. The chapters explore queerness from a number of different disciplinary and political angles, and the explorations begin with my crafting of a new perspective in the study of gender and sexuality, what I call activating. I define activating to mean recognition and examination the simultaneous and dialectic relationships between academic and non-academic environments. It is my argument that an activating of the study of gender and sexuality entails a grappling with coloniality. Drawing on and extending queer of color theory, women of color feminisms, and theorizations of the decolonial turn, I assert it is impossible to think about the material conditions of queer sexuality and gender without considering the particularities of race, class, nationalism, and legacies of colonialism. Engaging with transgender studies, a portion of my effort in activating gender and sexuality studies is to refuse to privilege sexuality over gender, race, or class, thus leading to my emphasis on a decolonial study of gender and sexuality. Overall, activating a decolonial study of gender and sexuality contributes to the ongoing dialogues and debates surrounding the relationship of queer theory, feminism, and the nascent field of transgender studies, and it takes up the challenge urged by many women of color and third world feminists of truly grappling with gender and sexuality, colonization, modernity, and their relationships. I focus my decolonial study of gender and sexuality on the theories of decolonization and queerness that arise in US women of color feminist, queer, and trans texts. In terms of my analyses, I theorize the epistemological registers of queer strategy in the political essays of Cherríe Moraga, I begin to craft a reading strategy, reading for butch and femme, in an analysis of two novels, Rubyfruit Jungle and Margins, and I examine queer visions for alternative worlds, mainly that of Moraga's queer nation-building. I also propose new horizons in teaching feminist, queer, and trans studies, and I conclude by asserting the university's and theory-making's simultaneous roles as potential paths to liberation and as sites of and support of coloniality, suggesting a decolonization of Westernized universities and disciplines. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how the practice of activating a decolonial study of gender and sexuality enables us to see how cultural productions, radical visions, and lived experiences relate and affect one another.Item A sancocho of race and place: Critical race ecocriticism in the work of U.S. Caribbean Latino/a writers(2010) Acosta, Grisel YolandaMy dissertation has the purpose of examining U.S. Caribbean Latino/a texts for negotiations of race and place. I use aspects of critical race theory, ecocriticism theory, womanist theory, and educational theory, and synthesize them into a lens which I call critical race ecocriticism. The literary study explores how characters in the texts move into and out of different environments, how they negotiate their identities in different environments, and the characteristics they exhibit when successfully negotiating racial identity and survival in the environments. I explore the works of Julia Alvarez, Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, Sandra Maria Esteves, Evelio Grillo, Tato Laviera, Achy Obejas, Judith Ortiz Cófer, Loida Maritza, Pérez, Pedro Pietri, Willie Perdomo, Esmeralda Santiago, and Piri Thomas. Grillo's work shows that U.S. Caribbean Latinos/as have had to identify as African American in order to survive, Thomas' work shows that friendships with African Americans has facilitated racial negotiation, and the later work of Loida Martiza Pérez, Julia Alvarez and Sandra Maria Esteves shows Latino/a acceptance of a varied racial heritage, despite community members who still deny African ancestry. All the works demonstrate that White Latinos/as find themselves in less environmentally hazardous places than their Black or mixed race Latino/a counterparts. I use the information gathered to develop a lesson plan/unit that can be used in high school or college-level classrooms. The unit is designed to encourage mutual learning by teachers and students, as it is a student-centered approach to learning that allows students to pull from their own funds of knowledge.Item A thousand wonders(2013) Huddleston, Cynthia E."A Thousand Wonders" is crafted as a collection of scenes and vignettes which cannot stand up alone. Like people in a community, these small bits lean on, undermine, and reveal truths about each other, making at least as much sense as that Crazy Sweet Pea. Taken from an even larger work, this short story can't tell everything about Betsy, Lucy Belle, Kelso, and the trees of Bouren. No one reveals everything and some never say a word. The trees would like to remind you that they are the very paper of this thesis. Even the oils that make your computer components are just very old plants under a lot of pressure.Item Afromestizaje: Toward a mapping of Chicana/o blackness in Tejana/o literature and popular music, 1920-2010(2010) Cervantes, Marco AntonioFollowing Gloria Anzaldúa's challenge that "each of us must know our Indian lineage, our afromestizaje roots, our history of resistance," my dissertation pressures the persistently under theorized celebrations of mestizaje in Chicana/o culture, with particular attention to Tejana/o literature and music from the early 1900s to the present (108). I draw upon recent scholarship in Chicana/o studies, Black Studies, subaltern studies, post-colonial studies, and ethnomusicology to re-center Chicana/o Blackness in the field of Chicana/o studies. The status of Blackness as a topos, trope, and performance in Tejano culture, I argue, is undergirded by complex models of Tejana/o Blackness. This dissertation is divided into 3 parts, each divided into chapters. In Part 1 "Chicana/o Literary Blackness," I examine works by Chicano writers Américo Paredes, Ricardo Sánchez and Raúl Salinas. In my preliminary mapping of the range of discourse on and performance of Tejano Blackness, I outline, In Chapter I, Paredes's critique of racialization in South Texas as well as the limited voice of his Black characters within his fiction. I also map Sánchez's and Salinas's performance of a Chicana/o nationalist literary Blackness in Chapter II. In Part 2, "Afro-Tex-Mex Music," I map afromestizaje contours of Tejano music by explicating Esteban Jordan's adoption of various Afro-centric styles, forms and genres in Chapter III. In Chapter IV, I explore the complex interplay between Blackness, Tejano popular culture and proto-feminist performances in the music, dance, and fashion spectacles of Selena. Part 3, "Chicana/o Hip Hop Culture in Texas" contains one Chapter and a conclusion. In Chapter V, I analyze Chingo Bling's performance of a Chicana/o Blackness that displays the overlapping cultures between Blacks and Chicana/os in Houston, Texas, as well as reinforces problematic masculinities associated with afromestiza/o performances. I conclude by exploring the contemporary and future performances of transracial musical politics in the works of Bocafloja, Las Krudas Cubensi, and Siete Nueve. I highlight multiracial afromestiza/o local performances in which Blackness situates multiracial bands beyond appropriation. I end calling for a shift in Chicana/o studies towards a broader engagement with a global Afro-Latina/o dialogue.Item Ambidexterity: agency, multi-ethnic differential movements, and ideology in baseball literature, film, and performance(2016) Moreira, Robert P.This dissertation argues that US and Latin American baseball fiction, films, and performances on and off the baseball field represent unexplored archives of uniquely racialized and gendered subaltern subjectivities that are being constructed through myriad negotiations of power. This dissertation: 1) exposes the ways in which the defamation of subaltern groups has been normalized in US baseball discourse and 2) maps Latina/o, Native American, Afro-Latino, and African American female negotiations of these effacements and corresponding oppressions. Building on Chicana third space feminism, postcolonial, and post-structural theories, I introduce the term ambidexterity, which I define as a praxis of meta-ideologizing that identifies, negotiates, and embodies in opposition to ideologized subaltern constructions within baseball-themed texts and performances. In "Preface" I discuss my personal connections with the game of baseball and the origins of my theory of ambidexterity as it relates to notions of ideology, power, and popular culture. My introduction contextualizes and defines the praxis of ambidexterity by discussing its origins within the traditions of mestiza/o consciousness, third space navigations, and differential consciousness. That is, through ambidexterity, I am able to "read" baseball texts in order to expose subaltern effacements as well as map the successes and limitations of negotiations within these lacunas. By centering my analysis thus, I supplement ongoing critical discussions surrounding subaltern poetics, politics, and agencies. In Chapter One I uncover survivance and trans-american ambidexterities in baseball-themed prose by Sherman Alexie, Ana Menéndez, and Sergio Ramírez, mapping the strengths and limitations of each authors' ambidextrous attempts to disrupt baseball's metonymy to US hegemony. In Chapter Two I employ ambidexterity as a hermeneutic to examine the baseball films Bull Durham (1988), The Sandlot (1993), and Sugar (2009), which I argue exhibit unique ambidextrous elements that complicate, as well as promote, meta-ideologies and oppositional spectatorships. Chapter Three examines the embodied ambidexterities of mestizo male Cuban Adolfo Luque in the 1920s and female African American Little Leaguer Mo'ne Davis in 2014. I argue for Luque's mestizo ambidexterity in the guise of mimetic violence as counter-movements aimed at negotiating his racializations on and off the baseball diamond. This chapter also maps Mo'ne Davis's Black feminist ambidexterities as resistances to heteronormative and misogynist prescriptions of female baseball players. This dissertation ends with discussions surrounding the extent to which ambidexterity can be deployed vis-a-vis Antonio Gramsci's notion of organic intellectualism. I discuss my own ambidextrous interventions within the baseball-themed literature including my edited collection of Latina/o baseball short fiction, ¡Arriba Baseball!, and how and why the impetus for that collection emerged to contest the mostly all-White, all-male canon of baseball fiction. Most importantly, I ask questions concerning the praxis of ambidexterity and whether it is just a term for baseball and its ideological nexus, and whether or not it can be expanded to describe academics, pedagogical styles, and other types of emancipatory work and sites.Item Beastly Tales of Cowardice(2017) Guzman, Christopher RyanThis Creative Thesis provides a story cycle narrative following the titular protagonist and supporting characters as their lives progress beyond the limits of their small, South Texas town. Concentrating on themes of failure, longing, and cowardice, particularly masculine cowardice, the work is equal parts bildungsroman and kunstlerroman and delves into the generational migrations of the South Texas/Mexican-American Diaspora. This work also concentrates on generational concerns and differences, particularly with coded dialogue and exploration of what has been termed "geek" culture. The writing style is heavily influenced by authors like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Americo Paredes. Additionally, the work is research intensive, and, in order to provide a high degree of verisimilitude, interviews were conducted, especially in regards to various generational impressions of popular and social climates.Item Big Take Over: Blackness as Technology in Punk(2023-08) Lepovitz, LyndseyThrough an analysis of the creative expressions of Black punk music, the question this thesis asks is how can specific forms of liberation be achieved through theorizing Blackness as a technology through modes of Black creativity in predominately white spaces? From the contemporary art pieces of Aaron Douglas, the photographs of Gordon Parks, and many forms of musical production, Black creativity has laid the foundation of what it means to examine and appropriately theorize Blackness as a technology for liberation throughout history and in our contemporary moment; as Katherine McKittrick writes in Dear Science, a love note to Black creativity, “Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever” (McKittrick 5). To contribute to this conversation, this thesis examines the Black punk music of Bad Brains and The 1865 as a form of Black life writing that specifically embraces using Blackness as a technology with the tools of available media for creative expression. Both Bad Brains and The 1865 demonstrate how Black punk artists have used Blackness in relation to musical media techniques to achieve and multiply what Black humanity can mean. Through a rhetorical analysis of Black Punk music from Bad Brains and The 1865, this thesis demonstrates that when Blackness is theorized and put into use as a technology, there is an ironic capacity to re-humanize Black people and Black communities that have been especially invisiblized.Item Black and Chicana feminisms, science fiction, and US women's bodily oppressions in the past, present, and future(2013) Ranft, ErinThrough a framework of Black and Chicana feminist theories, including intersectionality and nepantla, I argue in this dissertation that feminist science fiction authors engage and expose complex bodily issues that impact women in the United States, issues that specifically relate to racial identity, sexuality, and reproduction, and that these authors utilize the conventions of science fiction to create literature that portrays resistance by women of color against bodily oppressions. The theories of intersectionality and nepantla together create a feminist framework that examines the structural implications of oppression while also creating modes of resistance. Utilizing the Black and Chicana feminist scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Emma Pérez, Dorothy Roberts, Chela Sandoval, as well as others, I examine feminist science fiction texts and each author's construction of the narratives of women of color characters. The science fiction texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and Phyllis Alesia Perry address the internalized, personal oppressions and experiences for women of color as they concurrently address systemic and cultural confrontations of characters with white heteropatriarchal society in the US. Feminist science fiction authors such as those discussed within this dissertation employ feminist theoretical notions within their works to simultaneously articulate the realities and possibilities related to the bodily oppressions of women of color within the US while also theorizing the potential outcomes of resistance by women to such oppressions.Item Border places, frontier spaces: Deconstructing ideologies of the Southwest(2009) Barrera, Cordelia ElizaIn this dissertation, I bring together Border Theory and frontier ideologies in the Southwest to argue that the search for individual identity via the historiographic re-telling of stories is central to uncovering the metaphorical power of border places and frontier spaces. Cross-cultural re-tellings allow me to reconstruct these tropes syncretically to transcend individual difference with the aim of cohering the experiences of Anglo, Native American, Mexican-American, and Chicana/o cultures. A close reading of works by Chicana/os, Mexican-Americans, American Indians, and Euro-Americans in the Southwest points to parallel ideas of the need for an inclusive, third space consciousness to usher social, political, and cultural change on the borderlands. The movement of the works I critically study through the lens of border theory involves a response, as well as a challenge to Euro-centered ways of seeing and presenting the world. Works by authors as diverse as Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Leslie Marmon Silko, Arturo Islas, Américo Paredes, and Eve Raleigh and Jovita González, provide the base from which I examine ideas about storytelling, time, personal identity, and the bond between individuals and a Southwestern geography. Importantly, these works either demand alternative conceptions of understanding time, place, and space, or reveal how the linearity of Euro-centered conceptions of time, place, and space have resulted--ironically--in the false utopian visions of a conquering people.Item Bringing Chicana Feminism Into the Gothic Narrative(2024) Mendoza, ImeldaThe purpose of this study is to explore Chicana Feminism in a modern Gothic narrative to reclaim identities of the past that have been lost throughout generations following the Mexican American War. Influenced by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: La Frontera, the creative project expands on the new Mestiza and is set in south Texas following a matrilineal line of curanderas. Taking from classical and contemporary Gothic stories, I rework some of the genre’s frameworks into a modern collection of narratives that portray experiences from the South Texas borderlands, a geographic location that has true anachronistic qualities, where both Mexican and Anglo cultures collide and force the people of the land to align with one culture at the detriment of the other. I also attempt to rework the female social contract by first accepting the structures of our past in order to reclaim and overthrow the limitations of self-representations, embracing the darkness that we have been taught to fear (Anzaldúa’s serpent, which I will explore in the next section) and nurturing this darkness to heal the cultural and gendered wounds as a metaphor for an oppositional form of consciousness against the new forms of hostility, antagonism and dangers that live between and within cultural spheres.Item Chicana Shakespearean Pedagogies: A Literary Approach to Social Justice and Educational Equity(2023) Gutierrez, LourdesBased on a desire to decolonize Shakespeare studies for the sake of educational equity and social justice in the borderlands, this thesis looks to those Chicana pedagogies that signal an inclusive approach that has its basis in Latinx theatrical adaptations. Placing much of the focus on Borderlands Shakespeare scholarship, this work reviews the practice of the decolonial pedagogical approach as expressed by borderland scholars that informs the new ways of seeing, analyzing, and practicing Shakespeare's literature to fulfill the inclusion of a Chicanx/Latinx perspective. Furthermore, placing Chicana Shakespearean pedagogical approaches in correlation to the Chicanx theories of rasquachismo and Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness, this work suggests that Chicanx/Latinx Shakespeare should approach Shakespeare's literature and its inspired appropriations in terms of inclusivity for all students of the Borderlands.Item Close confidences: Students' experiences of relational pleasure, reflective competence, and self-authorship in first year composition research writing(2017) Ellis-Lai, Laura LeeThis dissertation explores students' perceptions of their own scholarly development in first year college writing courses. Using a mixed methods approach -- including ethnographic, case study, and teacher-research methodologies -- I explored statements my students made about their research-writing experiences during interviews, in their online research journal blogs, and in their final research papers. The student participants involved in this dissertation research all noted that the people they interviewed for their own ethnographic projects offered them an impressive level of trust and engagement during their recorded conversations. This aspect of those conversations, what I call "close confidences," serves as an overarching metaphor for the three main findings of this dissertation research, which point to the ways first year college writing students may experience 1) a motivating sense of relational pleasure when conducting their own ethnographic interviews, 2) a heightened sense of competence in their own scholarly abilities after completing their research-writing projects, and 3) a newfound shift in thinking of themselves as scholars, something I refer to as "self-authorship," a term I borrow from the field of adult developmental psychology.Item Confronting predators and shadow-beasts: Representations of working-poor Chicanas in contemporary young adult literature(2012) Lopez, Laura MarieYoung adult Chicanas, both real and fictional, occupy a unique interstitial space, the space "in-between" adolescence and adulthood where vast physical and emotional transformations take place, and where identity development solidifies in important ways, such as in the further acquisition of agency and sense of efficacy. These processes are mediated by interlocking social forces of race, culture, gender, and class making this transitional space filled with power struggles for young adults as they maneuver in the primary social environments of family, school, and community. Similar to the scholarly praxis of many past and present Chicana cultural critics, this dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach to literary analysis. Drawing primarily from the theory and practice of Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as theory and research in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and Chicana and Latina historians and cultural critics such as Cherríe Moraga, Aurora Levins Morales, and Rosa Linda Fregoso, this dissertation analyzes the literary representations of young, working-poor Chicana protagonists in contemporary young adult (YA) literature. I analyze four YA novels that have been published within the last five years: Belinda Acosta's Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over (2010), Sandra C. López's Esperanza: A Latina Story (2008), Kelly Parra's Graffiti Girl (2007), and Alan Lawrence Sitomer's The Secret Story of Sonía Rodríguez (2008). I purposefully include novels written by both cultural insiders and one cultural outsider to complicate issues of representation and discursive analysis on young girls of color. These literary representations reflect the social reality of young, working-poor Chicanas from the Millenial generation, in particular the significant threat of confronting physical and sexual violence on a daily basis in the family and community. Moreover, confrontations amidst sociopolitical hierarchies in the family, school, and the larger community during the period of late adolescent development cause these young adult Chicanas to be positioned as outsiders within these social institutions with the accompanying feelings of alienation, exclusion, and mistreatment. These "ruptures," as Anzaldúa calls these violent, soul-startling events, direct a young Chicana down the "path of conocimiento," an Anzaldúan concept of transformative consciousness and identity shift that begins with living in a contentious and contradictory "in-between" state and can lead to facultad consciousness, a deeper understanding of how the world operates around her. Propelled down this path, young Chicanas also come to experience the Anzaldúan concepts of Shadow-Beast and Coatlicue state that can create or delay a progressively transformative identity development. Ultimately, this path has the potential to create a new vision of these young adult Chicanas' places in the world, one with unity, purpose, and agency.Item Conjuring Traditions of Resistance in Nineteenth Century Narratives of Slavery(2023) Greathouse, Corey D.When William Grimes published his autobiographical slave narrative in 1825, he offered more than a detailed recollection of his self-emancipation from enslavement. His narrative also provides an account of the various conjuring acts as resistance that enslaved Black people engaged to counter the violence enacted by white enslavers. While enslaved Black people's engagements with conjuring acts grew from an exigency to survive the day-to-day atrocities of slavery, these conjuring acts also represent the retentions of African cultural practices and the development of pan-African identities. It is through the preservation of the traditions from their African cultures that developed out of modes of religion, spirituality, and folklore that various pan-African identities took shape. I suggest that by inscribing conjuring acts such as tricksterism and Hoodoo into their narratives, slave narrative authors reveal that there are numerous Africanisms that not only survived the Middle Passage but also shaped the resistance strategies of enslaved Black people and fostered cultural memory. Through their display of conjuring acts, William Grimes as well as authors such as Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs composed counternarratives that challenged the perceptions of the white status quo's attestations of Black people's inhumanity. Informed by the pan-African identities that manifested in the Atlantic world, they reaffirm ideas of Black humanity. In addition, the African diasporic practices (conjure) Black slave narrative authors capture in their texts remain present and ever evolving beyond nineteenth century writings.Item Cuerpo, or a spatial-material rhetoric: embodied approaches using Chicana third space feminism for understanding and teaching literacy on the border(2015) Hinojosa, Yndalecio Isaac, Jr.This dissertation introduces cuerpo, the Spanish word for body, as a spatial-material rhetoric for understanding and teaching literacy on the border. As a theoretical framework, I developed cuerpo to argue two points: literacy takes place and occurs within a place, and the material conditions of discourse are interactive and relational with place in the form of interactive rhetorical actions. I explored how literacy and literacy practices manifest with and in spatial-material-rhetoric juncture(ings); three dimensional processes that interpellate the body by concurrence or circumstance. Cuerpo will offer practitioners four contributions within the interdisciplinary contexts of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and Chicana/o studies. First, cuerpo expands literacy scholarship to spotlight literacy practices that manifest and are manifested on Latin@ bodies in the borderlands. Second, cuerpo highlights location, materiality, and rhetoric juncture(ings) within the context of concepts of literacy and literacy practices by spotlighting how bodies exist with and in a place, and junctures offer a three dimensional approach for theorizing the production of bodies, especially in relation to place(s). Third, cuerpo builds on and expands Chicana rhetoric, specifically the concept of a theory in the flesh by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Analdúa. As a framework, cuerpo augments a theory in the flesh from a self-reflexive abstraction into practical actualization for literacy studies. Fourth, cuerpo makes concrete abstract notions of third space by offering a framework to contextualize bodies to places. Contextualizing the anatomy of space(s) generates an organic third space that is reflexive, toward alterity and difference in particular.Item Decolonizing the classroom: Mapping the impact of educational inequalities on Mexican-Americans through a Third Space Chicana Feminist analysis of literature and film(2012) De Leon-Zepeda, Candace KellyThird Space Chicana Feminists invite an alternative reading of the historical, social, personal, and political experiences of marginalized identities, as a means to challenge colonizing and linear narratives, theories, and texts. Diverging from the homogeneity of the first and second wave Feminist movements, Third Space Chicana Feminism articulates what Chela Sandoval explains as a "theory of difference" that allows for the visibility of one's gender, race, culture, or class. Chicana Feminists draw attention to an in-between social category defined as a Third Space in order to reject prevailing hegemonic classifications of otherness and marginality. My dissertation project elaborates Chicana Feminists assertion of Third Space to include the experiences of Mexican-American students and the construction of a Third Space classroom. Theorizing my lived experiences as a South Texas Chicana English-Composition instructor, I propose that the origins of this Eurocentric and homogenous discipline must be reevaluated in order to dismantle existing and oppressive theories, practices, and pedagogies that silence the agency of Third Space subjects, or Mexican-Americans; a population I define as U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry descent. I argue that the theories of Third Space Chicana Feminists provide new methodologies for decolonizing the classroom and developing pedagogies that address the population of Mexican-American students. To better support this position, I introduce alternative ways of theorizing students' spaces by means of analyzing Mexican-American literature and films that center on the educational experiences of Mexican-American bodies. Finally, I conclude with a conversation on Third Space Chicana Feminists' praxis and how those theories can strengthen the discipline of English-Composition as evident in an analysis of Laura I. Rendón's sentipensante pedagogy and my interpretation of a pedagogy of the barrio.Item Depathologizing the diseased body, creating alternative knowledges: Chicana and African American women's epistemologies of critical illness(2015) Gutierrez, ChristinaThis dissertation recognizes states of critical illness as potential pathways to distinct and even subversive counter-knowledges. I focus specifically on illness narratives by selected Chicana and African American women writers, arguing that these texts articulate epistemic reconstructions of Western medical scientific knowledge and of white heteropatriarchal productions of a "mythical norm." A connecting theme that joins all the narratives together is the desire, or perhaps more accurately, the urgency to heal. And while the authors considered in this dissertation do express hope for restored bodily health, the healing processes and paradigms they enact through their narratives extend beyond their corporeal survival. For Gloria Anzaldúa, Gabriela Arredondo, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Ire'ne Lara Silva, whose lives before illness were profoundly structured by their raced, gendered, sexed, and classed subjectivities, healing acquires personal, spiritual, political, and community-based resonances. That is, their narratives capture the ways in which the experience of illness wrests them from any semblance of stability or cohesion and thus forces them to shift perspectives, to redefine in their own terms their relationships to their bodies and their conceptions of self. The illness narratives featured in this dissertation reveal the authors' intimate experiences with critical illnesses, concomitantly documenting their physical and psychic suffering and, as I show, their development of new and alternative knowledges. These new knowledges, what I name epistemologies of critical illness, emerge from the disruptive presence of illness and from the ensuing work of redefining and reclaiming the diseased body. I use "epistemologies of critical illness" as an umbrella phrase to refer to the counter-knowledges communicated across the multiple texts addressed throughout this dissertation. However, this is not to propose a monolithic or generalizing epistemological paradigm that erases the particularities of each author's experience with illness. As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the authors articulate epistemologies of critical illness that, in many ways, intersect and can be placed in dialogue with one another. Equally important and productive, however, is to note where these epistemologies diverge and to position them within the different genealogies that inform their development. Therefore, each chapter situates the authors' respective epistemology within their unique vision of the world that draws from and reflects their personal and political ideology.Item Dis(curse)sive Discourses of Empire: Hinterland Gothics Decolonizing Contemporary Young Adult and New Adult Literature and Performance(2018) Schoellman, StephanieThis dissertation advances Gothic studies by 1) arguing that Gothic is an imperial discourse and tracing back its origins to imperial activity, 2) by establishing a Hinterland Gothics discourse framework within the Gothic Imagination, 3) and by defining three particular discourses of Hinterland Gothics: the Gotach (Irish), Gótico (Mexican-American Mestizx), and the Ethnogothix (African Diaspora), and subsequently, revealing how these Hinterland Gothics undermine, expose, and thwart imperial poltergeists. The primary texts that I analyze and reference were published in the past thirty years and are either of the Young Adult or New Adult persuasion, highlighting imperative moments of identity construction in bildungsroman plots and focusing on the more neglected yet more dynamic hyper-contemporary era of Gothic scholarship, namely: Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008), Celine Kiernan’s Into the Grey (2011), Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006), Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009), Virginia Grise’s blu (2011), Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching (2009), Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) and Binti: Home (2017), and Nicki Minaj’s 54th Annual Grammy Awards performance of “Roman Holiday” (2012). The cold spots in the white Eurocentric canon where Other presences have been ghosted will be filled, specters will be given flesh, and the repressed will return, indict, and haunt, demanding recognition and justice.Item Discrepant experiences in the Irish borderlands: Gendered spaces, contested language, and shifting identity in Free Derry, Northern Ireland(2010) Mac Crossan, ElizabethThis dissertation focuses on the literature and culture of the nationalist community of the Bogside, in Derry, Northern Ireland, which I theorize as a border community that is the epicenter of the modern Troubles. This site, also known as "Free Derry," is a community that negotiates its history in a variety of complex and often contradictory ways, from violent to artistic, anti-imperialistic to patriarchal, openly to subversively. I draw on borderlands theories from Chicana/o and postcolonial intellectuals such as Emma Perez, Mary Pat Brady, Jose David Saldivar, Edward Said, David Lloyd, Walter Mignolo, and Joe Cleary to reassess the cultural politics along the borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as between Northern Ireland and Britain. I also use various theoretical pursuits in cultural studies to consider such multi-genre and multi-media cultural artifacts as texts developed by women's collective writing groups, textiles, memoir, testimonial literature, graffiti, murals, journalism, popular music, and poetry as performative borderlands discourses. Following U.S. Chicana/o theorists, I argue that the Irish borderlands discourses challenge hegemonic Irish cultural nationalist discourses on history, culture, and politics. I ultimately propose a new paradigm for looking at the north of Ireland based in part on U.S. border studies, and further complicated by women's studies and spatial studies. I propose to destabilize hegemonic ideas of "Ireland," "Northern Ireland" and/or "the north of Ireland," and "the Troubles" pursuant to opening up possibilities of seeing Northern Irish literature and art as complicating the traditional picture of an Ireland that is becoming a much more industrial and ethnically diverse nation and thus more complex, perhaps, at times, more hegemonic. Colonialism around the globe involved drawing borders, and we can begin to work out the consequences of those borders by marking similarities and differences that those imagined and imaginary lines engender. On the island of Ireland, we can begin to center the marginal and marginalized to rethink the Irish canon and its historical project through the works I engage here, including those by Bernadette Devlin, Paddy Doherty, the Bogside Artists, Nell McCafferty, Mary Nelis, Gerry Adams, women's writing groups and oral histories, the Undertones, and Colette Bryce, as well as the Museum of Free Derry, Free Derry Corner, and the Derry City Walls.