Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

(this never happened): Queer monstrosity, survival, & the monstrous-feminine on stage & screen

Publication Date
2016-January-01
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In what ways are monstrosity, the abject, and queerness connected? What are the mechanisms by which we as a culture twist perceptions of difference into denouncements of monstrous otherness? How can we use creation as a tool for healing? How...

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Miss Samoa: Navigating Gender, Politics, and Culture in the National Pageant

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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As a national pageant, Miss Samoa operates as a performative space where notions of gender, politics, and culture are negotiated and transformed. In this thesis, I examine how these concepts operate on an individual, local, and transnational level. Plus, the...

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Speaking to the Silences: Black Women's Mediation of Historical Trauma and Healing

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Black women's trauma, which is largely unclaimed, un-mediated and unrecognized, is transgenerational. The physical, social, and psychological effects of holding on to a racialized history of trauma, caused by systematic and structural racism and sexism, continue to effect the identity...

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Theater and Social Change: How Small-town U.S. Theaters Reproduce and Resist Inequality

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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This thesis interrogates the social function of small-town theater in the United States. Through a series of interviews with theater artists working at regional and local theaters in the northeast United States, I demonstrate theater's capacity to both reproduce and...

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