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Access status: Open Access ,
Women, reform, and the nation: transnational feminist thought in East Asia, 1870–1920
(2025) Farley, Holly
This research analyzes the development of modern East Asian womanhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period marked by rapid national transformation in Japan, China, and Korea. Through a comparative reading of primary sources, including feminist essays, women's magazines, reformist manifestos, and autobiographical writings alongside secondary scholarship on gender, nationalism, and modernity, the paper argues that women across East Asia were simultaneously objects and agents of reform. State-driven ideologies such as Japan's "good wife, wise mother" doctrine, China's competing revolutionary and Confucian pedagogies, and Korea's struggles under both internal reform and Japanese colonial rule established repressive models of femininity that sought to control female bodies, labor, and citizenship. Yet these same constraints generated powerful counter-discourses: writers like Na Hye-sŏk, Ding Ling, and He-Yin Zhen challenged moral conventions, articulated alternative perspectives of female subjectivity, and exposed contradictions embedded in modernization projects. By situating these voices within their broader political and intellectual networks, this research demonstrates that modern womanhood in East Asia cannot be reduced to a uniform, state-produced identity. Instead, it emerged through negotiation among reformers, nationalists, colonial authorities, and women themselves, whose writings illuminate competing representations of education, sexuality, domesticity, and public participation. Ultimately, this research highlights the extent to which gender functioned as both a symbolic tool of national progress and its ongoing terrain of resistance. The findings underscore the necessity of examining women’s experiences and writings not as peripheral to East Asian modernization but as central to understanding its ideological, social, and cultural transformations.
Access status: Open Access ,
Shaping interpretations: the role of evidence presentation and evidence ambiguity in mock juror decisions
(2025) Felix, Ryanne R.
Jurors are expected to make rational, evidence-based decisions in criminal trials. However, research shows that juror judgments are often influenced by extraneous factors unrelated to the evidence, which can undermine the fairness of the justice system. This study investigated how evidence presentation format (multimedia vs. text-only) and evidentiary ambiguity (clear vs. ambiguous) interacted to influence juror guilt judgments, hypothesizing that multimedia presentations would promote deeper processing, leading to greater sensitivity to evidence clarity. A mixed factorial experimental design was employed with 77 university participants recruited online, manipulating presentation format between subjects and evidence ambiguity within subjects. Results demonstrated that multimedia presentations were rated lower in terms of guilt, revealing a significant interaction between presentation format and evidence ambiguity. Participants exposed to multimedia presentations rated guilt lower for ambiguous evidence compared to clear evidence, indicating enhanced discrimination. Conversely, text-only participants rated guilt higher for ambiguous evidence, suggesting greater reliance on heuristic cues. The findings partially confirm the hypothesis: multimedia presentations facilitated deeper processing and sensitivity to evidence clarity, while text-only formats led to increased heuristic reliance under ambiguity. Enhancing juror engagement through multimedia presentations may help safeguard justice by supporting more accurate evaluations of complex evidence. Future studies should examine the effects of physical and emotional courtroom environments, incorporate directly relevant multisensory evidence, and consider factors such as cognitive load to better understand how presentation format and ambiguity influence juror cognition and verdicts.
Access status: Open Access ,
Monstrous mothers: containment, labor, and the Gothic feminine in modern film and television
(2025) Haws, Tabor Sterling
This thesis examines how recent Gothic media portray motherhood and emotional labor as forms of containment, turning the cultural ideal of the "good mother" into a source of horror. Drawing on Fred Botting's concept of the Gothic as "a writing of excess," Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Barbara Creed's theory of the monstrous-feminine, the project explores how cultural pressures around beauty, care, and emotional stability shape women's roles in modern film and television. Feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich and Sharon Hays show how motherhood is treated as "natural," even though it demands impossible emotional and physical labor. I argue that Coralie Fargeat's film The Substance (2024), Mike Flanagan's Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Jac Shaeffer's Disney+ series WandaVision and Agatha All Along (2021, 2024), and Sam Raimi's film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) reveal how maternal containment, the expectation that women hold the body, home, and world together, creates the modern monstrous mother. Employing qualitative textual and contextual analysis, I integrate close reading, audience and critical reception, and auteur commentary to trace how Gothic narratives shift containment from the physical to the emotional and ideological. Each work reimagines monstrosity through maternal labor: The Substance ties it to the body, Hill House to domestic duty, and the Marvel works to emotional regulation and authorship. The findings confirm that the Gothic now locates horror in endurance itself—the quiet, relentless work of holding everything together. This shows that even feminist creators reproduce the same systems of control they seek to resist, revealing how motherhood remains a cultural mechanism of containment. Future studies might extend this framework to other depictions of maternal labor across media, exploring how empathy and care continue to disguise control.
Access status: Open Access ,
Under pressure: how stress and bias skew eyewitness memory
(2025) Huxley, Ally
Examining eyewitness identification is vital because it significantly influences wrongful convictions. The accuracy of eyewitness memory is highly vulnerable to distortions influenced by factors such as stress and biases. Specifically, explicit racial bias among White observers predicts false identifications of Black faces. However, research shows mixed effects of implicit racial bias, especially in stressful conditions. This study explored how stress interacts with implicit racial bias to exacerbate the cross-race effect in eyewitness lineup identifications. Participants (N = 80) completed the Race IAT and Symbolic Racism Scale to assess implicit and explicit biases and viewed a crime video (under control, low, or high stress conditions). Participants then chose a suspect (or not) from a lineup of White or Black faces and rated their confidence regarding their selections. Eyewitness identification accuracy was analyzed using binary logistic regression with implicit racial bias, stress, and target race as predictors. The results did not support the hypothesis, and there were no significant interactions regarding eyewitness identification accuracy. However, a significant main effect of bias for confidence was found. These results contribute to the ongoing eyewitness memory literature and demonstrate the importance of continued research into the potential roles of individual and situational factors in influencing eyewitnesses' accuracy and confidence.
Access status: Open Access ,
I think therefore I ship: language, gender, and food as rhetorical practices in BL fanfiction
(2025) Piñero, Stephie
Fanfiction serves as a site of linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural engagement. In this project, I use Burke's dramatistic pentad to analyse how fanfic authors work as "double-agents" in their story creation. I consider linguistic, embodied, and cultural/food rhetorics in fanfictions for the Chinese drama The Untamed, also known as Chén Qíng Lìng (CQL). This drama is a live-action adaptation in a group of canons consisting of many remixes: the original metatext is a webnovel written by 墨香铜臭 Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù; other adaptations include a donghua (animated series), manhua (graphic novel series), audio drama, two spin-off live-action movies, and manga. Fanfiction authors must consider the expectations of a diverse global audience who has differing levels of familiarity and sensitivity to the nuances of the canon material. Wolfgang Iser believes that it is the "gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader that give rise to communication in the reading process." Fanfiction can subvert these gaps as the community is able to be interactive with each other. Fandom studies is a continuously evolving space as new material is released and adapted/remixed. Henry Jenkins, Jungmin Kwon, and Suresh Canagarajah provide some key frameworks for my analysis of the CQL fandom's development. Henry Jenkins informs us of the participatory culture that influences fandom culture as well as transmedia storytelling. Kwon works with straight female fans of MLM texts and offers insights into how the BL media movement has developed. Suresh Canagarajah highlights how meaning-making develops, in particular with translingual practices; this is most apt due to the multicultural, multilingual practices that the assumed Western writers adopt in the MDZS/CQL fandom. As this project explores, fanfiction writers collaborate in complex rhetorical spaces defined by multiple entry points, multiple cultural contexts, and, in the case of this project, multiple canons. These combine to create specific vocabularies and systems within given fanfiction communities. Chapter One focuses on how fanfic authors of assumed Western backgrounds adopt translingual practices and evolve the meaning-making of the fandom's shared vocabulary. This chapter integrates Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" alongside Suresh Canagarajah’s concept of "translingualism" to unpack the way that a danmei lexicon develops in the fandom. Through my interviews with fanfic authors, I unpack some of the choices authors make, alongside a more quantitative analysis of Orphan_Account fanfics, to consider how choices in language communicate literacies and authorities in fandom spaces. Chapter Two addresses fanfic authors' use of sexual and gender dynamics and modes of expression. In exploring embodied rhetorics, I focus on how gender is codified within the canon text and how the protagonist, Wei Wuxian, counters the coding given to him as the designated "female" of the relationship, in addition to interpreting what happens when fanfic writers play around with gender by switching canon dynamics. In this way, fanfic serves as a space for play with how bodies are manipulated through narratives. I incorporate some discussion of how widespread fan-canons (fanons) participate in both coding Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji and in generating critical discourses around binary coding and characterisations. Chapter Three concerns diasporic narratives and food rhetorics. I consider the use of modern food cultures as an example of subjectivity and self-insertion which allows writers to incorporate various markers of culture and authority. Diasporic fic writers promote themselves as agents of authority in this scene, often completely rewriting the canon through modernised contexts. The multiplicity and meaning of the canon is viewed through the way fanfic authors have decided to address "food as a love language" in their writing, demonstrating various expertise in platform and cultural familiarity. These three chapters establish a framework for understanding fanfiction as more than derivative work, and instead as a site of linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural engagement. In examining CQL's fandom through the three lenses, the project puts fanfic authors as active participants in meaning-making, to negotiate canon and community norms within the discourse community.

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