Browsing by Author "Comer, Krista"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    A Feminist Ecology of the Suburbs
    (2022-04-20) Culver, Annie; Comer, Krista
    Many critics of post-WWII American culture dismiss the suburbs for their conformity and banality. This project intervenes in commonly held beliefs about the suburbs by illuminating how these large, populous, and complex places both conform to and resist the set of tropes that exclusively subject them to critique. Much of the scorn that the suburb accumulates comes from the gendering of these domestic spaces and the feminized labor performed there. This dissertation places the suburbs front and center in a feminist ecological analysis. This method is a reading practice that promotes a concept of ecology that emphasizes the relations of place, drawing on feminist and bioregional environmental methods. “A Feminist Ecology of the Suburbs” analyzes a multi-media archive including canonical and genre novels, film, and television because the American pop culture imaginary generates the suburbs. Central to this analysis is the figure of the “ecological housewife” whose refiguring takes seriously the environmental commitments and knowledges, held largely by women and domestic laborers, already present in suburban places. Bringing together the fields of environmental studies, feminist theory, and suburban studies, this synthetic approach attends to the particularity of suburban places across several U.S. bioregions. This project intends to meet suburbanites where they are both geographically and politically to mobilize them towards a political project to mitigate the worst effects of living in a changed climate.
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    Affection: Essays on Affect, Empathy, and the Politics of Feeling
    (Rice University, 2021-05) Li-Wang, Jennifer; Comer, Krista
    Often, we view feelings as squishy—personal and subjective, therefore private and apolitical. Even within ourselves, our feelings can often seem reflexive and out of our own control. This thesis represents my attempt to hold these squishy feelings and look at them up close, from different angles. In doing so, I hope to see how our affects may not only be personal to ourselves, but also highly communal, performative, and regulated by and within communities. Affects—our feelings, emotions, and moods—are a matter of political and intellectual concern. Different political aims often mobilize our affects and manipulate them to conform to certain desirable shapes. Thus, paying attention to affects—the ways they are evoked, politicized, and ascribed (un)desirability—may help us stay close to our own needs and the needs of our community.
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    Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977
    (2024-06-26) Burch, Paul W.; Wolfe, Cary; Comer, Krista
    In Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977, I devise the biopolitical and critical regionalist framework of “the bad road” to read for moments of textual ferality in early-to-mid century American literature and film. This framework is based around an understanding of transport media—technologies of mobility, infrastructures, adjacent landscapes—as constructs that mediate and include through exclusion. In what follows, I read for the presence and function of transport media in a diverse array of narratives drawn from the pre and post-interstate eras of twentieth century America. Conducting these analyses demonstrates how both transport media, and the narratives that incorporate them, are uniquely prone to rupture and immunitary failure: moments when a protected inside becomes an outside, or an excised other makes an unheralded return. I refer to this dynamic of containment and rupture as the “bad road.” By applying the “bad road” framework to authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and N. Scott Momaday, I unpack how the work of narrating mobility in an American colonial context is particularly fraught as the project of modernization is marked by an irrepressible plurality: cultural, geographic, interpersonal, temporal. By setting my project against the backdrop of a crystallizing culture of the “good road” as mobile privatization, I determine that how an author employs, avoids, or is subjected to, the permutations of the bad road, is intimately linked to their cultural positioning. Reading for these differences is crucial to considering the perils and possibilities of mobility in the United States—past, present, and future.
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    From the Ride'n'Tie to Ryde-or-Die: A pedagogy of survival in Black youth popular cultural forms
    (2008) Benson, Michon Anita; Comer, Krista
    This dissertation investigates key similarities between l9th-century slave accounts and what I call "hip-hop captivity narratives." As a corrective to the negative attention accorded hip-hop, in general, my project identifies particular aspects of slave authors' literary strategies that urban hip-hop artists reinvent in their own music and filmmaking works. My primary goal is to position hip-hop texts as the most recent arrivals in a long-standing African American tradition of instructional, survivalist literature. Such a goal closes two gulfs: one, between "the literary academy" and "the street," and two, between hip-hop generationers' and their Black Civil Rights forbearers' perceptions of social and/or communal progress. The Introduction situates my work within African American Studies and argues a New Historicist approach for the study of hip-hop culture. Chapter One, "The Education of Hip-Hop," argues that more than a form of entertainment, hip-hop is an educational project. I delineate elements that contemporary rap music and film borrow from the slave narrative tradition. Chapter Two, "Sounds from the Underground: The Pedagogy of Survival in Rap Texts," argues that the music of underground and mainstream rappers publicly and privately demonstrates Black youth's cultural ties to one another and to their history, reinforcing the bonds of shared political objectives, such as unity and liberation. Examining Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) through the lens of DuBoisian double consciousness, Chapter Three, "Be a Man!, Get a Job! Stay Black: Dangerous Ghetto Manifestoes in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing," provides a novel reading of some challenges young men experience as they attempt to simultaneously actualize manhood, Blackness, and socio-economic mobility in a post-modern, post-Civil Rights era still fraught with vestiges of the period of slavery. Finally, Chapter Four, "We Ride Together; We Die Together: Thug Misses, Gangsta Bytches, and 'Ryde-or-Die Chicks'," discusses the lyrics and images of female rappers and reads Black female characters in the hip-hop filmic text, Set it Off (1996). Such an exercise highlights key ways young urban women publicly support the actuation of Black manhood within the boundaries of male-dominated popular cultural forms.
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    Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran
    (2021-04-30) Pladus, Mallory; Hennessy, Rosemary; Comer, Krista
    “Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran” examines the critical omission of the World War II veteran in literary studies. It argues that depictions of an aggrieved, often racialized veteran have been obscured for implying disapproval of a war that has been racially re-remembered and culturally protected as “good.” Retracing the World War II veteran in postwar cultural production elucidates a “problem” figure, for whom “readjustment” was a euphemistic slogan to encompass a variety of social, psychological, regional, racial, and sexual challenges. And yet, representations of anxious reentry have largely been smoothed over and replaced by the meta-narrative of the postwar good life and by canonical war literature focused on individual combat soldiers. As this study focuses on novels by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada, and Louis Chu, it forces the distinction between war and postwar novels, and it analyzes the veteran as a strategic figure for embodying the discrepancies of American racial ideologies in theory versus practice. It reads the work of Flannery O’Connor as lamenting the status of white veterans maladjusted to the racial reform of the postwar South. Read together, reentry novels reveal how postwar writers responded to the war and the movements it catalyzed – such as decolonization, immigration reform, and civil rights – through the figure of the demobilized veteran. At the broadest level, this study identifies a set of tropes for the veteran’s portrayal, highlighting discourses of recuperative sexuality and representative patterns of displacement and removal. And it contends that a study of this kind is necessary given the framing of the field of contemporary literature, expressed through the shorthand of post-45.
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    Pastoralist Ethic and a "Spirit" of Traditionalism: US Cowboys' Livestock, Land, and Kin
    (2014-04-24) Bendixsen, Casper; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Comer, Krista
    What kind of ethical subjects are contemporary US cowboys, or any other keepers of livestock for that matter? Moreover, how are those ethics distinctly representative of the US or its western region and its residents’ sense of character? These questions are particularly relevant to herders enveloped in folk and nationalist mythology, of these the US cowboy is one of the most popular examples. After twenty years of combined experience in ranching, farming, and rodeo as well as more than twelve months of formal ethnographic fieldwork – I submit this report: If cowboys and other herders are any sort of ethical subject, it is as pastoralists – as husbanders to livestock, stewards of land, and the caretakers of kin; and if US cowboys are a particular kind of pastoralist (as ethical subjects), the specificities are established through the practice and rhetoric of regionally identifiable traditionalism. Simply put, if cowboys are virtuous people, it is through their care for animals, land, and family; and if US cowboys are special types of role models, it is because they possess certain characteristics and ambitions that fulfill regionalized cultural categories. This ethnography and the theorizations therein abide by James Faubion’s recent re-presentation of Michel Foucault’s system of ethical inquiry. In doing so, it reveals the complex subject position pastoralists often strive to fulfill. While designed to stand as a case study in an emerging anthropology of ethics, this dissertation does offer corrective insight into theories of pastoralism, traditionalism, and the American West.
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    Weirding Feminist Ecology: American Literature in the Age of Climate Change
    (2023-06-20) McKisson, Kelly A; Comer, Krista; Wolfe, Cary
    Weirding Feminist Ecology analyzes twenty-first century American novels and novellas to make an argument for how this body of literature not only represents changing environments but also produces new conceptual understandings of ecology via more-than-representational weird literary figurations. I bring to the fields of literary and environmental studies the insights of ecofeminism and feminist social reproduction theory to develop my sense of a feminist ecological framework, which understands environments as more strangely interconnected with human bodies and communities. The project addresses issues of climate change and the challenges raised by Anthropocene discourse through this feminist ecological framework in order to rearticulate environmental problems as also social and political, structured by large-scale forces of capitalism and colonialism. Across chapters which take off from different weird literary figurations—unhomely, untimely, unsettling, uncountable—I develop feminist analyses that refigure approaches to sustainability, to linear temporal models of progress, to structures of power that become infrastructures of environment, and to quantifying mass extinction. Ultimately, I address the question of literature’s response-ability in the contemporary context of climate change, when variable environmental conditions and unprecedented climate events defy the predictive patterns and models that the Western world has traditionally used to observe, measure, and understand our ecologies. A feminist ecological framework forwards accountability as one way to address the insufficiencies of current models and the difficulty of navigating the uneven distribution of and responsibility to climate impacts.
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    What leisure? Surfeminism in an era of Trump
    (Springer Nature, 2019) Comer, Krista
    Powerful new feminisms are challenging the rise of the Global Right through mass mobilization, demands for accountability, and innovative opposition, such as #MeToo, the Global Women’s Marches, and #Feminism4the99. The international forum Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture has urged feminist scholars to meet the moment by bridging academic and larger feminist publics and attending to creative, new feminist movements. This paper showcases one such example, surfeminism, a theory and action project working between publics of academia and global surfing. Surfeminism is a worldwide network connecting people, ideas, particular coastal geographies, online and real-time communities and microeconomies in surf industry, with activisms focused on protests of sexism in surf media, access to ocean spaces, environmental health, and women’s racial, economic, and reproductive justice. The paper lays out surfeminist publics through discussion of the Institute for Women Surfers (IWS), a public humanities project in grassroots political education emphasizing relationships, cross-geography alliances, and critical thought. One of the more important and complex claims of surfeminism is for women and girls’ leisure as a feminist political need. A discussion of leisure and its relation to authoritarianisms, as well as ideologies of so-called postfeminism closes the paper.