Browsing by Subject "Body"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being
    (2012-12-11) Rieske, Tegan Echo; Schultz, Jane E.; Johnson, Karen Ramsay; Tilley, John J.
    The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment.
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    Clay Work as a Mindfulness-Based Practice
    (2019) Vespini, Sarah; Leigh, Heather
    This single subject study sought to explore the potential connection between Clay Work and components of mindfulness using the State Mindfulness Scale for Clay Work (SMS-CW). The study was done by an art therapy graduate student, who was the sole participant of the three week-long study. The researcher was not kept to a time limit when working with clay, and after every session completed the SMS-CW. It was hypothesized that the researcher’s self-reported scores on the SMS-CW taken after working with clay would show a connection between Clay Work and the components of mindfulness measured by this instrument. Key finding indicated the potential for Clay Work to promote similar benefits as mindfulness based practices.
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    Feminine, Like
    (2019) Pierce, Tiffany; Petranek, Stefan
    To help better understand the world around us, we develop shared assumptions about our experiences. These assumptions, or social constructs, are useful because they create order through the use of categorization. Categorization helps us quickly define, organize, and comprehend experiences. The effect of social constructs and their byproducts of categorization should be considered, as they often influence significant facets of our lives. Specifically, our idea and understanding of gender constructs is a fundamental concern because gender impacts many of these important facets. My multimedia thesis work examines the social construction of gender, and the coinciding expectations that are created. The work aims to question the validity of the stereotypes associated with gender in order to explore their limitations. The work utilizes self-portraiture and symbols, often pulled from popular culture, as well as performance to exemplify and exaggerate gender ideals. My recreations of social constructs examine how assumptions can limit our perceptions or potentially restrict our behavior.
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    Mangled Bodies, Mangled Selves: Hurston, A. Walker and Morrison
    (2008-06-16T11:13:30Z) Raab, Angela R.; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Thorington, Jennifer; Marvin, Tom
    Broken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.
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    untitled: color body
    (2018) Tesmer, Casey; Baker, Lesley
    My research poses questions to the audience of how people see color on a body, what subconscious preconceptions that comes packaged with, and the ties of those preconceptions to American culture and how that might affect people's actions in society.