Epp, Michael

For the Road is a study of the modes of transmission of ideas within the Counterculture in its different forms. It is a genealogy of movements that define themselves "against" what is established as "Culture". The philosophy of the Beat Generation does not come out of nowhere and in turn, many recent movements are indebted to the Beat Generation. The goal of this dissertation is to formulate a theory of Counterculture as a whole using various "lenses" such as Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. The foundation of the argument starts with the Beat Generation. The Beats, often perceived as the founding fathers of the Counterculture had predecessors. The first parts of this dissertation deal with the idea of transmission and the way the Beats reformulated the ideas of their predecessors to make these ideas relevant again in the context of the mid-twentieth century. The dissertation then deals with the successors of the Beats who themselves reformulated the ideas that the Beats had once "re-invented" in the context of the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. The dissertation then shifts to a much wider understanding of the notion of Counterculture. The Counterculture has always existed and its incarnations have either faded away or have been co-opted by the impersonal forces of mainstream Culture. The last part of the dissertation, the creative writing project, is an attempt to re-create a Counterculture, one that would always have the potential to be born again while remaining free from the shackles of mainstream Culture. This last part puts theory into practice, using such concepts as Barthes' death of the author and Proudhon's reinvention of the concept of property, including intellectual property.

Author Keywords: Counterculture, Ginsberg, Influence, Kerouac, Outsiders, Revolution

This dissertation focuses on the intersectionality between images posted on social media and social rules in the lives of young people. The findings are based on thirty-four qualitative interviews with young social media users where photo-based methodologies were employed. From these interviews, three key themes emerged: 1) Posting and sharing images are connected to identity exploration and formation, 2) Social rules around embodied emotions affect how youth present their emotions in online photographic material, and 3) The conflation of private and public spaces in the digital sphere complicates how social media users interact with images. While the findings presented are clear, this dissertation aims to take a holistic approach to understanding youth digital culture and avoids coming to conclusions that view social media as "good" or "bad" for youth. This tactic allows the findings to acknowledge the complexities of communicative digital spaces and understand the intricacies of social media in the daily lives of young people (boyd, 2014; Tilleczek & Campbell, 2019). This dissertation discusses both challenges youth face on social media when posting and viewing images, as well as how images can be used to defy social norms.

Author Keywords: Affect, Culture, Image, Social Media, Youth

Crutzen and Stoermer's (2000) announcement of the Anthropocene draws attention to the agentic nature of the nonhuman world as it appears to be striking back against human intervention through an environmental crisis that is threatening humans and nonhumans alike. Their narrative reveals complex relationalities where humans are now revealed to beinseparable from the nonhuman world and both the material and discursive nature of their practices (historical, social, economic, and political) prove to be central to (re)shaping the earth, causing climate change, species extinctions as well as racism, sexism, and slavery. Rising sea levels is an important aspect of climate change that threatens major coastal places with disappearance. My dissertation offers a new approach that uses Karen Barad's (2003; 2007; 2017) agential realism and diffractive methodology to study a place called Lyme Regis – a town in west Dorset, England, threatened with disappearance as a result of rising sea levels caused by climate change – as an agential phenomenon shaped by complex multilayered material-discursive practices (political, economic, scientific, and social). Whereas current research on Barad's philosophy mainly focuses on discussions about the theory: explaining, critiquing, or defending (Gandorfer 2021; Lettow 2017; Graham 2016; Segal 2014; Geerts 2013; 2016; 2021; van der Tuin 2011; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Rouse 2004 and more ), my project is the first ethico-political study of a place, Lyme, that applies Barad's agential realist perspective by engaging the activism of Barad's concept of "re-membering." The processual nature of the concept is particularly relevant today since its nonlinear understanding of time allows me to see how past violent material and discursive practices (racism, sexism, and slavery) at Lyme unfolds in the present troubled time of the Anthropocene. This process of re-membering that I undertake in this study involves concurrently examining the overlapping historical, economic, scientific, literary, and geological intra-acting practices through a method that Barad describes as diffractive reading. I rethink these practices in their relation to material practices and illuminate multiple layers of meaning and relationalities that constitute Lyme as an agential phenomenon, unsettling boundaries between humans and nonhumans, epistemology and ontology, material and discursive practices as well as boundaries between scientific, historical, cultural, and literary aspects of life. Therefore, within the context of the Anthropocene, chapter one rethinks how the scientific discourse (re)shapes nature and demonstrates how prioritizing the needs of human over nonhuman inhabitants in the name of saving Lyme could entail the destruction of both. Chapter two rethinks the dehumanizing and marginalizing effect of the scientific discourse by illuminating the agentic role of Mary Anning and Saartjie Baartman in the apparatus of scientific knowledge production that earned Lyme its heritage status. Finally, chapter three rethinks the entangled nature of scientific and literary practices, arguing for an agential realist account of the sublime that celebrates Lyme as a place of transformative human-nonhuman kinship based on Austen's elaborate depiction in Persuasion (1817). This reading shows science and literature as material-discursive practices operating along the unsettled boundaries between the novel and everyday life, allowing us to rethink Austen's writing as a process in constant flux.

Author Keywords: Agential Realism, Anthropocene, Diffractive Methodology, Lyme Regis, Persuasion, Posthumanist Sublime

An interesting question arises upon viewing the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz (MGM). The main character Dorothy Gale faces a long arduous journey on foot. Why did she not have a car? Women had formed strong associations with the automobile in its early years, yet they appeared to have weaker associations with the automobile a few decades later. A look back to three other "Dorothies" from the World War I era demonstrates the evolution of women's associations with the early automobile, and how war impacted them. In the pre-World War I years, women drivers appeared in film, while Dorothy Levitt wrote columns for other women on how to drive and repair a car and many other women invented safety technologies for automobiles. During World War I, the pinnacle of recognition for women's driving emerged with the woman ambulance drivers on the front lines. Dorothie Feilding was one of the first women to arrive in Belgium to drive ambulances, often while under fire. Feilding and many women like her were given war medals for their service, and their bravery was touted in newspapers. However, once the war ended, their accomplishments would be erased and ignored. In the post-World War I years, Dorothée Pullinger's experience as CEO of the Galloway factory illustrate how ideas of masculinity and femininity. promoted by governments after the war, impacted women. The Galloway factory in Tongland Scotland, was staffed by women engineers and workers. After World War I ended, these women were pushed out of their jobs. War-induced disability and its economic costs to governments were at the heart of gender inequities and served to displace women from automobile technology. Policies such as Britain's "Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act" set the stage for a script that constructed women's jobs as expendable and marketed ideas of the disabled soldier needing to "re-gain his manliness" by re-entering the labour force at women's expense. As a result, the state imbued a new relational, gendered analytic onto automobile use and production that remains with western society today. Keywords: woman's labour, woman driver, automobile, factory labour, gendered technology, World War I, ambulance, silent film, Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, Galloway, Tongland, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, Munro Flying Ambulance Corps, Dorothy Levitt, Dorothie Feiling, Dorothée Pullinger.

Author Keywords: ambulance, automobile, Galloway, gendering, women, world war I

This thesis examines the ways in which body image is discussed in online settings. There are three different communities discussed: body positivity, proED (pro-eating disorder), and body neutrality. Both body positivity and proED content are fairly popular online, and both have found significant support and followers on various social medias. In this thesis, I argue that both of these types of content cause significant harm to those who engage with them, primarily because both communities (though different in their approaches to body image) work to uphold the thin ideal. I then bring up the third type of content: body neutrality. Body neutrality has not been given the same academic attention as body positivity and proED content, likely due to its relative infancy. In this thesis, I propose body neutrality as a much healthier way to frame body image online because of its completely neutral stance on fat, thinness, and general body image. Though any work relating to social media is quickly out of date, I hope that this thesis provides an overview of body neutrality and how, in its current form, it provides a more balanced approach to online body image discussions.

Author Keywords: body image, body neutrality, body positivity, eating disorders, social media

This thesis examines the impact that digital labour and work from home have across different populations. This work is framed with regards to Marxist-feminism and particularly examines the impact of work from home across different genders. To demonstrate the depth and breadth of the impact that work from home has on worker agency, four unique industries are analyzed: office jobs, gig economy, affect labour, and sex work. Additionally, the lens of critical race theory is invoked to highlight the distinct challenges that BIPOC workers face in the transition to digital labour. This thesis would not be contemporary without addressing the COVID-19 pandemic which was occurring during the time of its writing. This thesis uses those established lenses of gender, industry, and race to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the workplace and home (office). Work from home increases the amount of labour that needs to be performed by each worker in exchange for some flexibility and agency in some domains.

Author Keywords: Covid-19, Digital Labour, Hybrid, Work from Home

This thesis presents a critical history of stand-up comedy alongside rhetorical analyses of specific stand-up routines and performances to argue for stand-up's efficacy as a therapeutic artform. Through analysis of the history, function, and content of satire, this thesis presents stand-up comedy as an artform utilized for more than just simple laughter. Stand-up comedy, as a form and genre, provides the unique ability to engage with difficult subject matter, traumatic experiences, and offense for the benefit of both listener and audience in a way that subverts, therapizes, and equalizes instances of discrimination, trauma, and denigration.

Author Keywords: Abjection, Offense, Satire, Stand-up Comedy, Therapy

Why show things that aren't people acting like people? In the field of animation, it's a surprisingly big "why?", because it's a "why?" that doesn't lead to any sort of doctrine of ontology, of inevitability, of manifest destiny, or of anything like that. But it does lead to another "why?"—"why did anthropomorphic depictions of animals and non-human entities come to define an entire era of American short-form animation?" When we think about 'classic era' cartoon shorts, the first names that come to mind are likely to be those of anthropomorphic animal characters—Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and a list of others so numerous that any machine Wile E. Coyote tried to build to count them all would probably explode. This can make us lose sight of the fact that human characters had their place as well in these films: Bugs and Daffy regularly tangled with Elmer Fudd; the studio that made cartoon stars of Betty Boop and Popeye produced no famous animal characters at all in its heyday. And yet, it's the animals that steal the show in the animated shorts produced by major studios in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Part of their appeal lies in the fact that they were useful and recognizable substitutes for humans. Without making things too 'personal' for the audience, they could be used to examine and deconstruct social practices in the full-speed-ahead period that took America from World War I to the war in Vietnam. Animals weren't the only ones to get a full-on anthropomorphic treatment in these shorts. Machines and other artefacts came to life and became sites of interrogation for contemporary anxieties about the twentieth century's ever-expanding technological infrastructure; parts of the natural world, from plant life to the weather, acted with minds of their own in ways that harken back to the earliest animistic folk beliefs. No matter when or how it's being used, anthropomorphism in animation is a device for answering, not one big "why?", but a lot of little "why?"s. What you're about to read is an exploration of a few of those little "why?"s.

Author Keywords: America, Animation, Anthropomorphism, Cartoons, Deconstruction, Popular Culture

This three-part history explores Web 2.0's ability to make music products a collaborative, ongoing creative process that is reflective of early twentieth century live-music publics, where the realization of a performance was actualized by performers together with their audience in a shared physical space. By extension, I follow the changing dynamic of the producer/consumer relationship as they transitioned through different media and formats that altered their respective roles in music making. This study considers the role that rock ideology, specifically that of the 'indie-rock' habitus, plays in shaping both a rock artist's desired image and a fan-base's expectations. How rock musicians use the internet reveals their own views on authenticity in recorded music and the extent to which they are willing to participate in a public with their audience. Primary case studies used are: Neil Young, Dave Bidini, Beck Hansen and Joel Plaskett.

Keywords: popular music; indie-rock; Web 2.0; rock music collaboration; fan participation; publics; authenticity; habitus; Neil Young; Dave Bidini; Beck Hansen; Joel Plaskett; Song Reader; Scrappy Happiness; Canadian music

Author Keywords: authenticity, fan participation, indie-rock habitus, popular music, rock music collaboration, Web 2.0

The objective of this dissertation is to measure the influence of the contemporary influx of women's involvement in the horror genre in three dimensional capacities: female representation in horror films, female representation as active, participatory spectators and female representation in the industrial production of horror. Through the combined approach of theoretical and empirical analysis, this dissertation examines the social conditions that facilitated women's infiltration of the horror genre. Beginning with psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, it is demonstrated that female filmmakers have challenged horror's traditional images of victimized women through the development new forms of feminine representation in contemporary horror films. Using data collected from a sample of 52 self-identified female horror fans, it is revealed that the purported invisibility of female horror spectators is a consequence of their alternative modes of consumption. Through interviews conducted with four female producers and an examination of their cultural productions, I illustrate that women have reconstituted the horror genre as a space for inclusivity, political activism and feminist empowerment. Cohesively, these findings reveal the contemporary feminist reclamation of horror to be a form of resistance intended to challenge the patriarchal structures that facilitated women's historical exclusion from the horror genre.

Author Keywords: Abjection, Feminism, Film, Gender, Horror, Psychoanalysis