Inking Social Skin: Tattoos as Care of the Self and Embodiment of Identity
Tattoos may be understood as a way to navigate one's own social being and the continuity of it over different social contexts and parts of the self. The project Inking Social Skin presents two intertwined aspects, where the first one touches on how identity is embodied in having tattoos and the second aspect touches on identity embodied from getting tattooed. Identity embodied in having tattoos dives into what tattoos say to both their carrier and to their surroundings. In other words, tattoos perform as and constitute physical manifestations of personal experience for our participants. Using Foucault’s theory of care of the self, this project argues for the belief that tattoos can function as a process of embodiment.
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Quaestio mihi factus sum: Death, Friendship, and the Construction of Identity in the Confessions
This article argues that Augustine’s identity in the Confessions is not fixed or purely inward, but is continually reshaped through relationships marked by friendship, love, and death. By examining the deaths of close companions—alongside enduring friendships with figures such as Alypius, Nebridius, and Monica—it shows how grief destabilizes Augustine’s sense of self and ultimately redirects his love toward God as its proper end. The study contends that friendship functions as a crucial mediator between self-knowledge and divine knowledge, revealing identity as relational, mutable, and ordered through rightly directed love.
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Japan's Monstrous-Feminine: Unspoken Ghost Stories
Monsters arise from the desire to disempower what is perceived as a threat. This article examines the figure of the Japanese female ghost through the theoretical framework of the monstrous-feminine, arguing that the spectacle of horror and victimhood of patriarchal narratives also contain expressions of female suffering and resistance. The article explores how, historically, the Japanese female ghost embodied the anxieties of patriarchal Japan concerning female sexuality and how contemporary artists, particularly Yuko Tatsushima, have recontextualized representations of female ghosts as figures of subversion and resistance against patriarchal norms.
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From Religion to Reason: Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach and the Public Perception of Christianity in Revolutionary France
This article examines how Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Holbach questioned religious authority along with Christianity during the Enlightenment. It goes over how their multiple critiques of church authority and the clergy weakened the French monarchy along with the Catholic Church. By relating events such as church reforms and the abolition of the monarchy to Enlightenment ideas, this article makes a clear case for how religious skepticism completely helped reshape the political and religious landscape in France.
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A Matter of Public Opinion: How The Jamestown Exposition Built Naval Station Norfolk
This article argues that the Jamestown Exposition of 1907 was pivotal in the creation of Naval Station Norfolk (NAVSTA), now the largest naval installation in the United States. It demonstrates that beyond economic considerations, the exposition’s military displays fundamentally reshaped public opinion in the Hampton Roads area, transforming sailors from an unwelcome presence into a valued civic and strategic asset. By tracing nearly a decade of local advocacy following the exposition, the article contends that this shift in public sentiment was the decisive factor influencing Congress to establish a permanent naval base at Norfolk.
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Disaster Response: Preserving Art and History in the Face of Climate Change
As climate change intensifies, natural disasters pose growing threats to the preservation of art and history for museums and cultural institutions. This article explores disaster response, museum preparedness, and equity in determining what cultural heritage is protected and what may be lost.
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Challenging the Stereotype of the Witch: Medea in Fifteenth Century Burgundy
Decades span the changing perceptions on Medea as a mythological figure; from spiteful child killer to potent sorceress, each time period brings with it a new way to reinterpret Medea’s portrayal in literature and media. This paper seeks to understand and explore these changing perspectives and focus its lens on Raoul Lefèvre’s 1460 adaptation L’Histoire de Jason against the backdrop of the Arras Incidents in 15th Century Burgundy.
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A Case Against Constitutional Interpretation: Expanding Upon Sontagian Theory
Though living document theorists allow for some “revamping” of the Constitution through interpretation, the core document still remains an authoritative and sometimes oppressive force through interpretative devotion to content. Both the originalist and living constitutionalist interpretative lenses hinder progress and uphold a document that may no longer be fully relevant in its current state. Instead of a new method of interpretation, following the logic proposed by Sontag, the form of the Constitution should be considered. Thus, when issues of this strange new world arise that could not have been envisioned by the founding fathers, we need not guess what their stance would be or twist ancient texts to fit modern needs.
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Italian Modernism: A Fascist Trauma Response
Italian artists Alberto Burri and Umberto Boccioni were artists that created modernist art that reflected the overall sentiment of Italian society during their respective times. Although their art was made in two different time periods, as Boccioni created Futurist art under Mussolini’s Fascist regime and Burri created art as a response to the traumas left behind by it, their art represents changes made to Italian society as a result of a political ideology. It is through the complete study of the primary sources from this time that one can understand the integral nature of these works in the overall understanding of the way in which Italy both coped and lived as a result of Mussolini.
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Transphobia in the Media: Crossdressing as a Point of Fear and Comedy
Film as a visual medium has been established as one of the most accessible displays of the human condition, nuanced philosophical discussion, and societal examination since its invention at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite its adolescence as a vehicle for narrative, film was, for a time, the most popular storytelling form, surpassing theatrical performances, stage plays, and technical innovations such as FM radio. However, due to the invention of television and its emergence as a separate genre, film has now emerged as one of many alternatives to experiencing moving, visual art. Artists began to utilize this art form to examine the human psyche and the environment from which it was constructed to more complex examinations such as the desire for self-discovery. Gender and sexuality when expressed in this fashion is often[i] used as a foil for this desire and can be utilized to grapple with one’s identity being either outside the norm or accepted at any capacity, the most contentious being identities under the trans hypernym (transsexuality, crossdressing, etc.)
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Never Have We Ever Missed The Point: The Compound Effect of the Male Glance on Women of Color
Critical reception has failed Mindy Kaling, the writer and creator of several popular TV shows including The Mindy Project (2012–2017), Champions (2018), and Never Have I Ever (2020–now). Though her most recent venture, Never Have I Ever received plenty of praise when it first aired on Netflix in April 2020, critical reception also quickly revealed the viewer’s assumptions that make complex messages written by women of color difficult for audiences to notice.
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"The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers”: From Basile to the Brothers Grimm
The European fairy tale tradition began with oral folktales from different regions throughout the continent. Writers like Giambattista Basile (1566 – 1632) of Naples and the German brothers Jacob (1785 – 1863) and Wilhelm (1786 – 1859) Grimm were some of the first to compile stories from Western Europe into anthologies, spreading these folk and fairy tales to a wider audience and bolstering widespread interest in them over the next several centuries.
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Dirck Jacobsz's Artistic Family Lineage and Identity In "Jacob Cornelisz Painting His Wife Anna"
The Rijksmuseum identifies Dirck’s Jacob Cornelisz Painting his Wife Anna as a commemorative family portrait, which has been the most common interpretation of Dirck’s painting in recent scholarships of the past two decades. In fact, the Renaissance experienced increasing social and cultural practices to commemorate family identity and lineage through various means, including the commemoration of the dead through art production such as portraiture and bust sculpture.
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Examining Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith as a Case Study: Notes of Religious and Mystical Experience
While the philosophy of religion project requires an outsider perspective, the African American student—as a cultural insider whose religious background lies in the Black Church—examining gospel music cannot always separate personal memories and experiences from their inclination to interpret Mother Ford’s experience as religious or mystical. Having witnessed the frenzied behaviors of individuals singing gospel makes an outsider perspective difficult to attain for those individuals. In this article, I blur the lines of the Durkheimian perspective on the sacred/profane dichotomy to underscore the nuances of reading gospel as religious material.
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Void and Construction: The Historicization of Anti-Utopian and Dystopian Social Criticism in Early Soviet Literature
Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–1921) was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1929–1930) met a similar fate just nine years later, and both writers suffered extreme marginalization afterward. Given this, one wonders why and how they and so many other authors of the period criticized the regime indirectly at all.
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Seventeenth-Century Dutch Animal Imagery Challenging Anthropocentrism: Paulus Potter’s Punishment of a Hunter
In the painting Punishment of a Hunter, the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Paulus Potter depicted animals putting a hunter on trial and enacting a death sentence. In this artwork, the animal court and hunter’s execution by burning appear in two central scenes, surrounded by smaller allegorical and hunting vignettes that show animals and humans. Compared to other works of seventeenth-century Dutch art, the content and format of this painting stand out as being rather peculiar.
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The Taboos of Family Romances: In Search of the Distorted Feminine Image
The feminine image is a broad conceptualization of feminine identity and behavior and is thus based in archetypical femininity. Archetypical femininity includes the nurturing quality associated with maternity, the chaotic element of nature and transformation, and the display of physical beauty and sexual appeal. Archetypal femininity, though expansive and necessary to the substance of life, becomes an oppressive tool when rigid expectations for gendered behavior arise from it.
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Emerald Atlantic: Motivations in Irish-American Diasporic Violence
Civil wars and emigration are closely related concepts; wars force relocation, while refugee populations beyond a state’s borders can influence a conflict within its original borders. As Idean Salehyan writes in his “Rebels without Borders: State Boundaries, Transnational Opposition, and Civil Conflict,” from Sikhs in Pakistan to Contras in Costa Rica, “modern insurgencies are not limited to the geographic area of the state.”
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The Martial and Marital Entwined: Femininity and the Military World in Shakespeare’s Othello
Shakespeare’s Othello is familiar to literary scholars and high school students alike: the eponymous Venetian general, falsely led to believe his wife is an adulteress, kills her and, upon realizing his error, himself. Some scholars analyze Othello’s fall by adopting a military lens.
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The Power We Speak: Language, Anti-Black Racism & Black Resistance
Whatever the modality, whether verbal, written, body-language, or even the release of various chemicals and pheromones, communication is universal between all living things. Humans naturally congregate and gravitate towards one another for more than just survival, rather for companionship and celebration, primarily through language. It is from these congregations, each with their distinct methods of communication, language, that cultures are born.
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