Below you will find a few papers I have written for past classes. Some of them definitely need revising, and I am currently in the process of editing them.
The Queer Potential of Jennifer’s Body
I first encountered Jennifer’s Body on Tik Tok. Creators on the app pitched the story as a cult-status lesbian film that was perfect for a young queer person looking to expand their sapphic movie repertoire. All I knew about the narrative beforehand was that it was a horror-comedy centered around two best friends—Jennifer Check (played by Megan Fox) and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (played by Amanda Seyfried)—who were supposedly into each other. After organizing a Jennifer’s Body watch party with my best friend and her roommates, I was pleasantly surprised by the explicit references to queerness. I was also shocked by the knowledge that others had watched this film and understood the relationship between Needy and Jennifer to be purely platonic. This notion has bothered me since my first viewing, and it is this need to open previous watchers up to the queer potential of this movie that drove me to write this essay.
This paper was written in spring of 2022 for my Advanced Writing in Humanities class. We were asked to engage in a particular discourse, present our own analysis, and evaluate other scholarship.
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How the Representation of Weddings and Marriage in Crazy Rich Asians and Ready or Not Comment on Female Class Mobility
In the spring of 2021, I had the opportunity to take the class, Gender and Film. For this course, we were asked to write a final paper comparing one of the movies we had viewed during the semester and a second film of our choosing. I decided to investigate the role of marriage in Crazy Rich Asians (which we watched in class) and Ready or Not (one of my favorite horror films).
Throughout history, marriage has been one of the only avenues available to women who aspired to alter their socioeconomic status. Women are often confronted with a multitude of challenges when seeking to enter the upper class. The films Crazy Rich Asians and Ready or Not explore how class mobility affects its female characters, specifically how marriage adds extra pressure onto those attempting to assume their new status. Although the two are in separate genres, marriage is an inciting incident in both narratives. I explore how these films punish their female characters for attempting to improve their social class through marriage.
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COMING SOON...
The Earth Talks Back: How Nature Resists Colonial Power in Princess Mononoke
This is an essay I wrote for my Postcolonial Women Writers class in my final semester of college. Nature takes up an undeniable space in many postcolonial works. The oppression of the land by colonial forces oftentimes exists in the background of narratives, while interactions between humans are positioned at the forefront. In this work, I explore how Miyazaki puts the subjugation and destruction of nature by humanity at the center of his film, highlighting how the greed of an empire generates endless cycles of violence. I argue that Princess Mononoke offers us the chance to see how nature responds to colonization when it is given a voice. Additionally, I discuss how its themes connect to other postcolonial texts such as The Pagoda by Partica Powell, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
Crafting a Queer and Feminist Cult Classic: An Analysis on The Craft
Introduction to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies was the one class I took in my penultimate semester of college. I could not pass up the opportunity to write about one of my favorite films for the final paper. In this essay, I am concerned with how the figure of the witch positions The Craft as inherently feminist, how the queer relationships of the main characters fuel their empowerment, and how the conventions of the genre catalyze the disjointed and poorly received second act. I examine The Craft through a feminist and queer lens, exploring how it succeeds and fails the communities it has been embraced by.
The Threat of the Female Body and Feminine Desire in The Witch
The first time I watched The Witch was in my Women in Western Religions: Witches, Saints, and Sinners class freshman year. I was asked to submit a short film analysis which I used to dive into the story's exploration of the monstrous feminine. Two years later, I had the opportunity to write a longer essay about the movie for the course, Gender and Film.
In this essay, I use Barbara Creed's "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection" as well as Linda Williams' "When the Women Looks" and "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess" to unpack how The Witch depicts female desires and the female body as a threat to society.