In a 2017 article for the comedy website Cracked, Christopher Daed argues that “Die Hard and Home Alone are the EXACT same movie.” Daed was not the first to make this connection: a cursory search ...reveals frequent comparison on social media. Very little scholarship, however, has seriously engaged with this pairing. In this paper, I examine how both Die Hard (1988) and Home Alone (1990) use narratives of redemptive violence to define idealized American masculinity. Both films portray families ruptured by influences both foreign (the imposition of foreign culture) and domestic (maternal neglect) that are restored by their protagonists’ defense of Christmas, family, and by extent, old-fashioned American values. I situate both Die Hard and Home Alone within the canon of American Christmas films, arguing that their enduring, linked popularity is indicative of a rejection of the perceived weakness and femininity associated with many other Christmas narratives. I focus in particular on the films’ oft-overlooked treatment of religion: Christmas, after all, is a religious holiday, and its relationship to American identity cannot be separated from the ubiquity of Christianity in American life. I argue that both Kevin McCallister’s church attendance and his violent defense of his home align him with John McClane as all-American defenders of Christmas and the family.
Prior to her pregnancy, Bechdel's mother wrote poetry; she would not write another poem until her husband was dead and her children were grown and had moved away. In an interview with John Killacky, ...Bechdel explains, "Virginia Woolf figures into my book because she talked about how the experience of writing about her parents in To the Lighthouse was a way of getting them out of her head" (Killacky 44). Bechdel draws her mother standing in a field of shadow, head tilted downward, hair in an elegant bun (136). Demonstrating the modernist possibilities of the graphic novel to create simultaneous visual and thematic connections while emphasizing the fragmentation of memory and slippage within time, Bechdel juxtaposes crucial developmental scenes from childhood and her emerging adulthood.
Naomi Aldermans The Power (2016) imagines a world in which women develop the ability to deliver powerful electric shocks, reversing gender relations and leading to the establishment of global ...matriarchy enforced by violence. While the existing scholarship by José M. Yebra and Alyson Miller focuses on the figure of Mother Eve as a critique of global patriarchal religion as well as the relationship between religious and state power in Bessapara, I attend to the often-neglected figure of Margot, a rising American politician. In this paper, I examine the rhetoric surrounding Margot, arguing that Alderman uses Margot to satirize contemporary white evangelical Christianity and its accompanying right-wing political agendas. I explore the historic connections between abstinence-only sex education, patriarchy, and nationalism, analyze the novels parody of American political rhetoric, compare the depiction of Margots queer-coded daughter Jocelyn to gay conversion therapy, and examine the novels depiction of both sexual and military violence. Ultimately, I argue that The Power's depiction of a sexually violent, nationalistic, and ultimately apocalyptic American matriarchy is in fact a representation of American evangelicalism that has changed Her garment merely (127).
When Donald Trump unexpectedly won the American presidency in 2016, he was carried to victory by what seemed to some like an unusual demographic: white evangelicals. According to exit polls, 81% of ...white evangelicals voted for Trump, despite – or perhaps, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez suggests – because of his racism, sexism, and open displays of power. In the wake of Trump’s election, commentators questioned whether the future of American Christianity lay with Trump – and whether there was resistance within American evangelicalism of Trump and his vision. In this dissertation, I look to a community of progressive Christian women writers whose memoirs and public lives articulate a counternarrative to the white supremacist, patriarchal Christianity advanced by Trump and his supporters. I focus specifically on the figure of Rachel Held Evans, blogger, writer, and critic of white evangelicalism who died unexpectedly in 2019 at the age of 37, leaving behind a grieving community and questions about the longevity of her vision for a decentralized church led from the margins. In this dissertation, I draw on autobiography studies, intersectional feminist theories, various liberation theologies, affect theory, and religious studies to analyze the memoirs written by Held Evans and her cohort of progressive Christian women. I trace genealogies of the memoir as political and personal act – most prominently the traditions of the spiritual autobiography and of feminist consciousness-raising through testimony. In the context of these genealogies and methods, I read five related memoirs: Held Evans’s Searching for Sunday (2015), Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Pastrix (2013), Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here (2018), Kaitlin Curtice’s Native (2020), and Emmy Kegler’s One Coin Found (2019). I demonstrate how, though these women draw on different archives and have diverse understandings of their relationship to God, Christianity, and the church, they work together to produce a community of mutual affirmation, justice-focused Christianity, and counternarrative against hegemonic white American evangelicalism.
This thesis examines how patriarchal dystopian societies attempt to control their citizenry through the homogenization of discourse and the employment of Foucauldian panopticons. In the context of ...these power structures, I argue that nonviolent storytelling and restorative memory are more effective in resisting oppression than violent, openly subversive forms of rebellion. In my discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale, I examine how Gilead’s manipulation of public discourse through religious hegemony and restrictions on literacy suppresses the efficacy of individually heroic acts by characters such as Ofglen and Moira. I assert that Offred’s playful deconstruction of language, defiant remembering of her past experiences, and insistence on bearing witness to Gilead’s atrocities without the promise of a listener allows her to successfully resist power and maintain a distinct self. In the analysis of Salt Fish Girl that follows, I study how the Big Six employ a series of cooperative hegemonies to promote neoliberal policies, dehumanize Othered bodies, and rob people in diaspora of cultural memory. Though protagonist Miranda fails in a conventional sense, I conclude that she succeeds due to her remixing of Western texts, hybridization of histories and values, and role in birthing a new, more hopeful future.
Thesis
Master of Arts (MA)
