Northwestern Undergraduate Research Journal

NURJ
Volume 18 2022-2023 thenurj.com
The staff of the Northwestern Undergraduate Research
Journal would like to express our appreciation for all
those who recognize and contribute to our endeavors.
Without their support, we would be unable to produce
this edition of the Journal.

We would like to thank Michael Schill, President of

Northwestern University, along with Provost Kathleen
Hagerty and Associate Provost for Undergraduate
Education Miriam Sherin for their generous patronage.
We are especially appreciative of our faculty advisers,
Peter Civetta, the director of the Office of Undergraduate
Research in the Office of the Provost, and Patti Wolter, Helen
Gurley Brown Magazine Professor and Charles Deering
McCormick Distinguished Clinical Professor. Their direction
and guidance has allowed us to create the best version of
the Journal as possible.

The late Professor Allen Taflove, Department of Electrical

and Computer Engineering at N.U., founded NURJ 18 years
ago. Prof. Taflove guided scores of NURJ journalists and
researchers in the pursuit of scholastic excellence, and NURJ
would not be the success it is today without acknowledging
his guidance, wisdom, generosity and legacy.

Cover by Helen Zhu.

Published June 2023.

ISSN 2689-1034
 MASTHEAD
vol. 18 | 2022-2023
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Jenna Greenzaid & Kallista Zhuang
EXECUTIVE MANAGING EDITOR
Abby Hsiao
FACULTY ADVISERS
Peter Civetta & Patti Wolter
MANAGING EDITORS
Rachel Chiu & Morgan Willison
ART DIRECTORS
Nancy Qian & Catherine Wu
DIRECTOR OF OUTREACH
Aden Morvice
DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
Tiffany Lou & Duke Lin
EDITORS
Maggie Rose Baron, Rebecca Chen, Josie Chou, Noah Coyle,
Diana Deng, Lynna Deng, Zaina Karim, Ben Kim, Stephanie
Kim, Andrew Lu, Angeli Mittal, Felicia Mou, Maya Ravi,
Hannah Xu, Hye-won Yoo

DESIGNERS
Annie Chiu, Ellie Garcia, Michelle Kee, Delilah Schmueck

OUTREACH TEAM
Karan Nayak, Metehan Punar, Diana Deng, Zaina Karim,
Mychaela Matthews

DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Tanat Chavapokin, Nayeon Kim
 TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Letters
06 Dedications from Editors-in-Chief Jenna Greenzaid & Kallista Zhuang, and Faculty
Advisers Peter Civetta & Patti Wolter

African American Studies

08 “When did the depictions become worse than the reality?”:
Black Trauma Porn and The Black Horror Genre in Television and Film

Feature
21 Serendipity and Struggle: Reflections on the Social Dynamics of Research

Asian American Studies, Philosophy

24 Defeating the Dragon: Epistemic Injustice Towards Asian/American Women

Feature
36 Understanding and Applying Corporate Personhood:
A Q&A with Professor Nicolette Bruner

40 Education and Social Policy

The Effects of Power Dynamics in University-Community Partnerships

Feature
49 Undergraduate Research on Genomic Organization

Theatre
52 Going On Seventeen: “Type,” the Ingenue, and Teenage Girlhood Onstage

Feature
64 Why do Medical Schools Stress Undergraduate Research Experience?
A Conversation with a Pre-Medical Advisor
 Asian Languages and Cultures
70 Unashamed: Exploring A South Korean Female Tattoo Artist’s Negotiation Of Identity

Feature
83 How We Can Ensure Success in STEM: Professor Marcelo Vinces

English
85 Monstrous Masculinities, Male Angst, and Adolescent Development
in the Twilight Saga

Feature
96 The Center: Where Art and Science Convergent

Comparative Literature Studies

99 God, Absurdism, and Law: Suffering and Meaning in the Works of Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, and Camus

Feature
109 Re-engineering the Planet, Legally

Contributors
112 Biographies and Interviews of Thesis Contributors
 LET TER
FROM THE
ADVISERS Dear Readers:

We would like to welcome you to Volume 18 of the Northwestern Undergradu-

ate Research Journal (NURJ). Volume 18, includes the best senior theses selected
by seven academic departments and seven feature stories exploring the essence
of research and its importance at Northwestern University (N.U.) and globally.
The 2022–2023 issue is the product of a year’s work by the students who
lead and contribute to the NURJ, a student-produced annual print publication.
In addition to this journal, our students publish new research packages on their
website, www.thenurj.com, as well as podcast episodes with research leaders
within and outside the Northwestern University community.
Copies of the NURJ are freely available to students at newsstands at major
campus locations. Additionally, the NURJ is distributed to N.U. Deans, Depart-
ment Chairs, and Program Chairs as well as to academic, advising, and research
offices across campus.
The journal you hold in your hand is a creation by hundreds of minds from
N.U., and the pieces included are from some of the brightest voices of under-
graduate research in the nation, all of which would not be possible without
continuous funding by the Office of the President and the Associate Provost for
Undergraduate Education. We hope you find a spark of inspiration, enjoyment,
or new learning as you read this journal.
And as the founding editor and NURJ advisor for 18 years, the late Profes-
sor Allen Taflove, used to sign off — Now, enjoy learning about the marvelous
research investigations of Northwestern’s top students!

— Peter Civetta & Patti Wolter

Co-Advisers, NURJ

6
LET TER
FROM THE
EDITORS
Dear Readers:

We are excited to welcome you to the 18th annual edition of the Northwestern
Undergraduate Research Journal (NURJ).
NURJ would not be possible without all the incredibly talented researchers and dedicated
NURJ staff writers, editors and designers. For our 18th edition journal, our guiding principle
was to be courageous and bold, pursuing questions and ideas that challenged our perception of
the norm. With this theme, we have carefully selected seven honors senior theses — from Af-
rican American Studies and Asian American Studies, to Theatre and Comparative Literature —
to showcase the intersection of nuance, diversity, and excellence within their respective fields.
The volume also includes seven feature stories from our NURJ print team staff, who discuss
research on a metaphysical level. They pose questions on legally reengineering the planet and
investigate why medical schools stress undergraduate research experience.
In addition to this publication, we invite you to explore Northwestern University’s
(N.U.’s) archives through the NURJ Archives Special Editions, the first of its kind published
last year and housed on www.thenurj.com, and the second of which will come out this fall.
We have released quarterly online packages that feature other undergraduate research in the
N.U. community. You can also learn more about N.U. and Yale University’s histories of racial
(in)justice through the Of Many Strands collaboration, as well as other various collaborations
NURJ has conducted.
None of this would be possible without the generous sponsorship and continued guidance
from all the support from the Office of the President and Associate Provost for Undergraduate
Education. We would specifically like to thank President Michael Schill, for his belief in the
NURJ and his ongoing support, as well as Associate Provost Miriam Sherin, for her continued
support and guidance for the longstanding future of the NURJ; we are eternally grateful.
We would also like to thank all the incredible faculty, staff, and student researchers at N.U.
for their support and trust in the NURJ. Last but not least, we must recognize our outstanding
faculty adviseors, Dr. Peter Civetta and Professor Patti Wolter, who continue to go above and
beyond in their leadership for our organization, and Tori Saxum, the administrative assistant at
the Office of Undergraduate Research.

— Jenna Greezaid & Kallista Zhuang

Co-Editors-In-Chief, NURJ

7
 by Karina Karbo-Wright
“When did the depictions
become worse than the
reality?”: Black Trauma Porn
and The Black Horror Genre
in Television and Film
Department of African American Studies
Faculty Adviser: Barnor Hesse

Abstract
The American film industry is inextricably tied to the history of racism
in the United States; thus, Black representation in film and T.V. has been
a topic of rigorous academic and public debate. Most recently, that debate
has circulated around the topic of “Black Trauma Porn” (BTP). Emerging
on social media in 2016 during the Black Lives Matter movement, Black
thinkers used the phrase “Black Trauma Porn” to articulate the nuanced
complexities of the phenomenon, specifically sharing police brutality videos
and the production of films and T.V. series with similar themes. Many piec-
es have received extreme backlash, and BTP became loaded with negative
connotations, labeling the pieces as exploitative and harmful. However, as
the phrase gained popularity, the analysis of these movies and T.V. shows
became derivative and uncritical, instigating the need to investigate if the
phrase properly articulates what authors were utilizing it for. To interrogate
BTP, it is necessary to explain the impact of film on the spectator and engage
the history of race in Hollywood in order to conclude that BTP is actually a
modernist subgenre of Black horror. This conclusion is supported through
an analysis of white versus Black horror as well as a deep-dive into what
“trauma” and “porn” mean individually and within this context. Reframing
and usurping the phrase BTP provides the beginning to a new framework
for analyzing Black historical horror films and answering larger questions
about Black representation in film and T.V.
8
Introduction
Unlike everyone else I knew, I did not
see Get Out (2017) until two years after its
release. At the time, I could not exactly
pinpoint why I had no desire to see it.
When asked, I would just say that I was
not interested, or that even though I loved
Key & Peele (2012), I did not think this
movie would be my speed. Shortly after,
I read the phrase “Black Trauma Porn”
on my social media, and I felt an over-
whelming sense of relief. It put a word to
the feeling of fear that kept me from the
theater and the uneasiness I experienced
when I saw videos of police violence. In a
way, it served as validation that remedied
much of my guilt toward not watching
movies that dealt with anti-Blackness. It
was not because I did not like Black movies
— Jumping the Broom (2011) and Barbershop
(2002) were my favorite childhood films —
but there was a sense of guardedness that
I had learnt from previous experiences of
watching unsettling media that kept me
from watching certain films. When I saw
the phrase BTP, I felt validated and com-
forted in the fact that I would not watch
Get Out or any other movie of which I was
wary. After this point, any movie or series
I saw labeled as BTP became unwatchable
to me.
The BTP issue has emerged in tan-
dem with the Black Lives Matter move-
ment, beginning in the early 2010s with
the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012
and the success and notoriety of 12 Years
a Slave (2013) shortly afterwards. This is
when the conversation began to emerge.
However, the first articulation of the term
1 Nkumane, Z. (2016). No longer will I partake in Black trauma porn. OkayAfrica.
2 Wear Your Voice Magazine 2016; [Very Smart Bros]. (2016). Yeah, I’m Finished With The Black Suffering Trauma Porn Of Orange Is
The New Black -- by @inomallday
was not until 2016 in a South African ar-
ticle by Nkumane,1 which describes the
conflicting impact of consuming videos of
white supremacist violence against Black
people. The article recognized how these
videos force necessary conversations but
also incite terror among viewers. This
article, along with equally popular articles
entitled “Orange is the New Black is Trau-
ma Porn Written for White People” and
“Yeah, I’m Finished With The Black Suf-
fering Trauma Porn Of Orange Is The New
Black,” was widely circulated across Twit-
ter in the summer of 2016.2 This spurred
a mass increase in the use of the term to
describe the phenomenon at hand: videos,
films, and T.V. shows that depict extreme
violence by white civilians or state officials
against Black people are disseminated for
mass public consumption and/or mass
entertainment, which impacts white and
Black spectators differently, despite being
distributed with the assumption that some
amount of pleasure is extrapolated from it
by the general viewing public.
What followed was a seemingly
correlated increase in the visibility of an-
ti-Black police brutality and the creation
and popularity of films and T.V. shows
that depicted white supremacy and the
Black experience, the most notable of these
being Get Out. The discourse surrounding
this phenomenon focuses on three main
concerns with the purpose and effects of
depicting violence against Black people in
movies and T.V.: the immense violence
inflicted on the Black characters within
these films and T.V. shows is unnecessar-
ily incessant and an exploitative derivative
9
 of real-life Black trauma, the traumatic Holocaust, and the occupation of Pal-
impact of violent anti-Black depictions estine; through the collective trauma of
on Black spectators, and the pornifica- these events, the perpetrators and victims
tion of these violent depictions by white are relationally linked together in what
spectators who are believed to gain some Elm et al. calls a “traumatized society.”4
form of pleasure or gratification from the One of the ways by which a traumatized
visualizations.3 In other words, these ten- society may cope or heal from the trauma
sions exist around negotiations of violence is through cinema, which can give “expres-
against Black people and the subsequent sion to trauma and violence for a wounded
Black/non-Black spectatorship of those [community]” through the visualization
depictions. This centering of Black specta- and actualization it provides.5 As a medium
tors is commendable and unprecedented in of mediated realistic reenactment,6 film
mainstream film analysis, but it seems that can act as a preserver of traumatic history
the nuances that contextualize Black story- and can provide catharsis and healing for
telling are not a part of these critiques. those within the traumatized society who
It is always necessary to interrogate create and view the film. Film can also aid
the terms which we use to critique our in individual and collective7 memory re-
own culture’s creations. In the case here, tention as well as in cultural preservation,
BTP could be used to further censor and revealing levels of history and memory
marginalize the already racially gatekept which, for societies that have experienced
world of film. Black storytelling has im- trauma through destruction, can be vital
mense power and ability to be able to in protecting cultural history. However, it
communicate and negotiate matters of cul- can also be used as a tool of suppression or
ture and identity. I hope that by exploring cover to erase and rewrite history for po-
this phenomenon, this paper will mediate liticized propaganda-like efforts,8 and this
questions of Black representation and bring is most often seen through an analysis of
awareness to the necessity of intentionalityHollywood and its relationship with race.
and analysis when forming opinions on Elm et al. proposes that the horror
Black T.V. and film. genre is one of the best genres for success-
fully encapsulating a historical trauma nar-
The History of Film and the rative on film.9 Horror is able to portray
Horror Genre the tenacity of the violence experienced
There have been many historical instances in historical trauma while also providing
of immense violence which impact entire the cinematic tools to unpack that violence
societies of people, like the Transatlantic within the horror narrative. Through the
10

Slave Trade, World Wars I and II, The analysis of historical trauma film, I believe
that several Contemporary Black stories in
3 Braxton, G. (2021, April 19). Media images of Black Death have a cost, experts say. many viewers are fed up. Los Angeles Times.; Cha-
risma, T. (2021, June 18). Trauma porn and the commercialisation of Black Pain. tmrw.; Giorgis, H. (2021, April 18). Who wants to watch
Black pain? The Atlantic.; Muhammad, M. (2019, June 2). Getting off: What black trauma porn is and why we hate it. Medium.
4 Elm, Kabalek, K., & Köhne, J. B. (2014). The horrors of trauma in cinema : violence void visualization. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
5 Ibid., 4
6 Ibid., 4
7 Ibid., 4
8 Ibid., 4
9 Crouthamel, J. (2016). The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization. Film & History, 46(2), 86–89.
10 Ibid., 4; Bernardi. (2007). The Persistence of Whiteness : Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Taylor & Francis.

10
 “ Film can act as a preserver of traumatic history
and can provide catharsis and healing for those
within the traumatized society who create and

view the film.
film are current iterations of Black horror.
In that account of historical trauma films,
Elm et al. explains the benefit of using
horror to communicate impactful stories
of historical trauma.11 As a tool of com-
municating Black history in the present
U.S. that is largely sculpted by collective
and historical traumas as well as a tool for
critiquing and commenting on white hege-
mony through horror genre tropes, these
contemporary Black stories in film utilize
the genre of horror. In order to character-
ize this thesis, an exploration of the Black
and white horror genres will provide the
necessary groundwork for my argument.
Horror is a genre of “literature, film,
and T.V. that is meant to scare, startle,
shock, and even repulse audiences” where
the “story and characters are just as import-
ant as mood and atmosphere.”12 Because of
the horror story’s ability to “[shock] and
[provoke] with its exploration of the un-
known,”13 it is a great tool for cross-genre
productions and social impact, including
matters of race.14
”
What can be considered horror is
extremely vast because what scares one
spectator may not scare another.15 How-
ever, the staple elements of a horror film
are the central elements of violence and/
or fear.16 Psychologist Dr. Glenn D. Wal-
ters theorizes three main aspects of horror
films that establish the genre and produce
audience attraction.17 The first aspect is
tension. Created by the techniques of film
highlighted in horror — dialogue, sudden
perspective changes,18 unsettling shots that
are either too quick or very slow,19 sound
and music, and lighting — tension comes
through suspense, mystery, intrigue, ter-
ror, gore, and shock.20 Often, this is under-
stood to be “universal relevance,” referring
to the fears “everyone” has — specifically
“the psychology of fear of death and the
unknown, or cultural relevance of social
issues” — but it may refer to personal rel-
evance as well.21 The final result is that
cinema provides us with what Walters
calls “unrealism.” This means that despite
the validity of the content of the piece, the
spectator is still consuming the narrative

11 Ibid., 4
12 MasterClass, & Stine, R. L. (2021, September 7). What is horror fiction? learn about the horror genre, plus 7 classic horror novels you
should read - 2022. MasterClass.
13 Ibid., 12
14 Curtis. (2008). Dark places : the haunted house in film. Reaktion.
15 Clasen, M. (2021). On the psychology of Horror movies. Psychology Today.; The Psychology of Fear: Concordia University, St. Paul
online. CSP Online. (2021, October 21).
16 Jóhann, B. (2020, September 14). A brief history of Hollywood’s racism, sexism, and homophobia. Medium.
17 Ibid., 15; Hess, J. P. (2013, October 23). The psychology of scary movies. Filmmaker IQ.
18 Gormley. (2005). The new-brutality film race and affect in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Intellect; Du Gay et al. 1997 from Erigha.
(2015). Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media’s Potential for Change. Sociology Com-
pass, 9(1), 78–89.; Erigha. (2019). The Hollywood Jim Crow : the racial politics of the movie industry. New York University Press.
19 Ibid., 18
20 Ibid., 15; Ibid., 17
21 Ibid., 15; Ibid., 17

11
 and is not within it. To enjoy viewing
horror films, the spectators must also feel
physically and mentally safe in order to de-
tach themselves from the film.22
While horror films, like all films, are
deeply influenced by the spectator’s reac-
tion, there are also important impacts felt
from the content of these films. As a central
part of social life, films have a specific and
influential role in shaping what emotions
look and sound like;23 horror films have
the unique role of defining what is fear
and what is fearful. In a study on the so-
cial experience of horror films, Renda ex-
plains, “Scariness is not (only) an attribute
of the film content but is said to stem from
cognitive factors such as the individual’s
created through white storytelling from
popular horror writers like Edgar Allan
Poe and pivotal texts like Mary Shelly’s
Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Drac-
ula (1897).26 These stories are not only
populated largely by white creators but also
within the narrative; the stories privilege
white experiences, fears, and losses and
further bolster them as universal.27 Because
Hollywood is a segregated tool of white
storytelling, the horror stories present in
film and T.V. most often follow those of
white individuals; thus, conventional and
mainstream horror is about what horrifies
white people.

“
empathy with film characters or person-
ally held moral beliefs and expectations.”24
This socially constructed factor of fear is
central to horror movies, but the complex If Black stories in
genre’s norms also include the engagement
horror films are
with taboos and rupture of boundaries, the
unfamiliar penetrating the familiar, the narratives “about Black
resistance of typical bounds and flow of experiences and
narrative creations, and the challenging of
Black cultural
the rational.25 It is this intentional disrup-
tion aspect of these norms and the horror traditions” ... then the
films’ oscillations between the spectrum Black horror genre
of good and evil that crafts what is and is
will refer to what

”
not scary. However, as a genre created and
continued by Hollywood, I would like to horrifies Black people.
reframe horror films as the determination
and identification of narratives centering
on what horrifies white people.
I make this assertion because what
is understood as conventional horror was

22
Ibid., 15
23
Renda. (2019). Watching “Insidious”--On the Social Construction of Fear. Qualitative Report, 24(7), 1784–.
24
Ibid., 23
25 Ibid., 16; Ibid., 23
26 Ibid., 12
27 Bogle. (2001). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Fourth Edition.
Burns & Oates Imprint.; Hill Collins. (2014). Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (Revised
tenth anniversary edition.). Routledge.; Ibid., 16; Nittle, N. K. (2021, March 6). The 5 most common black stereotypes in TV and film.
ThoughtCo. The Take (2020) “A History of Black Stereotypes Onscreen” Youtube.

12
 For example, in Scream (1996), the
fear is centered around the killers’ ability
to forcibly enter the house, a space that
is supposed to be safe, and their complete
control over whether the victim lives or
dies, stripping the victim of their agency
over their life. Forcibly entering the home
can be equated to white community’s fear
and consequent disgruntlement with in-
tegration, but the fear stemming from the
loss of agency is most terrifying. This claim
is supported by the role of white women in
the film, who historically have been used
to identify what is most fearful. This theme
can be tracked through almost all (white)
horror films popular in Hollywood, in-
cluding the three listed above — that a loss
of white agency, whether through murder,
paranormal possessions, or psychological
torture, is the real fear. This film is white
horror because the story told features spe-
cific circumstances in which only white
people lose their sense of agency. If cinema
is playing on the fears of white people for
conventional white horror, then the ques-
tion remains: what is Black horror?
Because of horror’s ability to “[shock]
and [provoke] with its exploration of the
unknown,”28 it becomes a ripe place for so-
cial commentary and critique, especially on
matters of race.29 This unique engagement
of commercial value, peculiar narrative,
and fluctuating aesthetic has made horror
extremely useful for debating “dilemmas of
difference.”30 If Black stories in horror films
are narratives “about Black experiences
and Black cultural traditions — a Black
28 Ibid., 12
29 Curtis. (2008). Dark places : the haunted house in film. Reaktion.
30 Ibid., 27
31 Ibid., 27
32 Ibid., 27
33 Bellot, G., Cox, R., & Mckinney, D. (2021, November 10). How black horror became America’s most powerful cinematic genre. The
New York Times.
34 Breznican, A. (2020, August 3). Black storytellers are using horror to battle hate. Vanity Fair. 14 chilling African American horror
novels. UNC Chapel Hill Libraries. (2021, October 28).
cultural milieu and history swirling around
and impacting Blacks’ lives in America”
communicated through the horror genre,31
which conceptualizes the surrounding so-
cial and political worlds through the Black
gaze, either actively or passively critiquing
white hegemony and centering Black sto-
ries, then the Black horror genre will refer
to what horrifies Black people.
In the Black horror genre, Black art-
ists are looking to spark “sociopolitical dis-
courses … through representations about
… Blackness” that “‘speaks’ difference” to
and interrogates whiteness by reversing
white horror’s placement of Blackness as
the “Other.”32 Horror has long been in the
history of Black storytelling and oral tradi-
tions. Black folklore about ghosts and oth-
er mythologies that stretched the African
continent followed enslaved Black people
to the Americas; the oral tradition helped
craft the origins of the Black culture we
know today.33 Memory served as a form of
resistance, and these tales began to trans-
form into stories about revolution and
freedom. Black cultural productions were
working through various newspapers,
films, novels, and storytelling that fea-
tured horror or horror aesthetics.34 What
Black horror cultural productions have in
common is the engagement with the Black
experience throughout Black history.
As it exists in tension with the strug-
gle to tell stories about Blackness, Black
storytelling must make the link between
depicting Black culture within horror
and answer the question, “What horrifies
13
 Black people?” The answer is the horrors
of Black history. For Black people around
the world, because of the immense history
of unthinkable violence and the structural
positions that continue that violence, there
may be nothing more horrifying for Black
people than the past.35 From the brutali-
ties of dehumanization to social death and
physical mutilation,36 slavery began this
cycle of the horrors of Black history. The
Black horror genre through time proves
that what horrifies Black people are the
horrors of Black history. The Black horror
genre in film and T.V. as it stands today
begins to emerge in conversation through
films like Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). The
current subgenre is what is being contested
in the larger argument of this thesis.
The Black horror genre, then, is able
to provide a critique of white hegemony
through film and subverts (white) horror
norms by setting whiteness in Black his-
tory as the antagonist, as proposed by the
theory of historical trauma films.37 The
Black horror genre conveys that Black his-
tory is filled with horror, and these films
are depicting Black history through Black
horror. These issues of the relationship
between the horrors of Black history and
Black horror genre necessitate the interro-
gation of what is being critiqued with the
BTP phenomenon, and what specifically
BTP is supposed to explain.
Black Trauma Porn: Current
Debates and Positionings
The question of Black horror has recently
been taken up by critics who complain
35
Ibid., 3
36
Patterson, 1982.
37
Ibid., 4
38
Jackson, K. (2019, June 11). ‘when they see us’ and the delicate balance of depicting black trauma. Women’s Media Center.
39
Ibid., 3
40
Ibid., 3
41
Ibid., 1
14
of BTP. The issue of BTP is the videos,
films, and T.V. shows that depict extreme
violence by white civilians or state officials
against Black people that are then dissemi-
nated for mass public consumption and/or
mass entertainment, which impacts both
white and Black spectators differently,
despite being distributed with the assump-
tion that pleasure is extrapolated from
it by the general viewing public.38 It has
generated questions about who Black me-
dia is made for.39 Despite existing in films
and T.V. shows throughout the twentieth
century, the argument around the usage of
Black experiences and anti-Black violence
was reignited by Jordan Peele’s social
thriller, Get Out. The pieces depicting
anti-Black violence fit into four thematic
categories which reflect the various pe-
riods of time that indicate major events
in Black history: slavery, segregation/
Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and police
brutality.40 Developed out of those who
were opposed to it, BTP was to refer to a
negative phenomenon.41 However, even
in its first iterations, it was unclear exactly
what BTP carried in its meaning. In order
to understand if BTP is really describing
what it is meant to allude to, I will present
the critiques of the films and T.V. shows
to which it refers and unpack the words
comprising the phrase to decipher if BTP
is the best term to describe the phenome-
non at hand.
There are three main critiques of
what is being called BTP: the incessant
violence against Black characters in these
depictions and the visual exploitation of
Black trauma, the possible harm these de-
pictions have on Black spectators, and the
consumption of these violent depictions by
white spectators.42
The first critique about the BTP phe-
nomenon is the belief that the violence
depicted in these films and series is unnec-
essary and excessive.43 In a comparison of
Little Marvin’s Them and Jordan Peele’s Get
Out, author Maryann Erigha says that Get
Out gets the depictions of white supremacy
right without the violence:
There’s a subtlety with that film, which
is why it was so successful … People
understood the message without the
film having to show physical trauma.
But in Them, the message is being
lost when you take it to that level of
violence. I don’t think you need to see
brutalization happening in order to
understand the brutality of racism or
anti-Blackness.44
Erigha’s sentiment is shared throughout
other films and T.V. shows at the center
of the critique of BTP.45 Film and T.V.
are most often seen as entertainment, so
critics believe that this violence holds a
different weight when presented as “es-
capist fare” because for Black people, “it’s
not entertainment.”46 This critique is what
foregrounds the others.
The second critique is that these
depictions harm Black spectators.47 The
concern is that since the stories reflect real
events in Black life, their presentation as
entertainment is triggering and traumatic
for the Black viewer.48 Author Hannah
Giorgis says that Black films invite more
speculation around intent than white
films, and this will cause Black spectators
to consider the impact of the medium in
a specific, shared way, especially when it
comes to anti-Black violence in horror.49
Thus, “in the case of Them, the sheer inten-
sity and meaninglessness of the cruelty on
display lends credence to arguments that
Little Marvin didn’t anticipate how the
show might affect Black audiences, many
of whom view it as a bloodied funhouse
mirror of an already-horrifying reality,”50
even though according to Marvin himself,
he only thought of Black spectators during
the creative process.51 The critique is deep-
er than just creator intent; the concern is
that Black people are being reduced sole-
ly to their trauma and pain.52 This then
prompts the question of spectatorship and
who these films are for: “‘But as a Black
horror artist, I have to ask myself, Who
would that be for?’”53 This is where the fi-
nal critique rests.
The final critique is that white specta-
tors are granted too much access to depic-
tions of the Black experience and extract
some form of pleasure from the violent de-
pictions.54 If the goal is to generate atten-
tion or gain recognition through increased
viewership, then instances of Black trauma

42
Ibid., 3
43
Ibid., 3; Ibid., 38
44
Ibid., 3
45
Films mentioned in writings on Black trauma porn: Two Distant Strangers, Fruitvale Station, Selma, and The Hate U Give, Lovecraft
Country, Watchmen, Antebellum, When They See Us
46
Ibid., 3
47
Ibid., 3
48
Ibid., 3
49
Ibid., 3
50
Ibid., 3; dir. Marvin. (2021). “Them.”
51
Braxton, G. (2021, April 10). The violence in Amazon’s ‘them’ left execs ‘shaken.’ does it go too far? Los Angeles Times.
52
Ibid., 3
53
Ibid., 3
54
Ibid., 3

15
 are being exploited to satisfy that desire.55
Another concern is that Black experiences
are exploited for the purpose of educating
non-Black people on anti-Blackness and
appeasing white guilt at the expense of
Black consumers, who will be harmed by
seeing their trauma visualized.56 More ne-
fariously, some fear that white audiences,
continuing the traditions of lynchings, are
either sadistically “getting off” on the de-
pictions of anti-Black violence by living vi-
cariously through the white aggressors on
screen, voyeuristically “exploring” Black-
ness, attempting to ease their white guilt,
or gratifying their obsession with moni-
toring Blackness.57 While it is relevant and
radical to center the experience of the Black
spectator and critique that of the white
spectators in an otherwise white-centered
world, what the BTP perspective fails to
examine is the relationship between Black
history and its horrors and the importance
of witnessing and engaging with that.
I am calling into question the very
term and definitions of BTP itself, posing
these pieces of media as necessities rather
than trauma exploitation. I am concerned
with the extent to which the horrors of
Black history are being addressed by the
critics of BTP and whether some of these
critics see these films as developing the
Black horror genre. To discuss these ques-
tions, it is necessary to unpack the words
which comprise the phrase BTP.
Through an analysis of traumatic
film, vicarious trauma, and spectacle hor-
ror, the idea of BTP can be problematized.
The term itself does not encapsulate the
intended meaning because the utilization
of the term does not take into account the
analysis of and historical engagement with
55
Safford, D. (2019). “How to Use Three-Act Structure to Write a Story Readers Can’t Put Down,” The Writing Practice.
56
Ibid., 3
57
Ibid., 3
16
Black trauma and traumatic film, and it
does not critically engage with the entirety
of the Black experience in which vicarious
trauma happens, particularly because Black
history and Black trauma are inextricably
linked. We cannot witness our history
without also vicariously experiencing in-
sidious and collective trauma. This means
that, in tandem with the understandings
of trauma and memory, that Black trauma
is Black history. However, Black history is
not Black trauma. What is then relevant
to the BTP critique is that Black trauma
is Black history, and Black history is Black
horror – thus Black trauma is Black horror,
or what horrifies Black people.
I propose that it is not BTP and the
exploitation of Black trauma taking place,
but a new articulation of the Black horror
genre – that these films are depicting, in
their entirety, what horrifies Black people
in Black history. For this analysis, I’d like
to rename this new subgenre of the Black
horror genre, Black historical horror, to
replace BTP as a title. This new interpre-
tation of the Black horror genre capitalizes
on the new space for Black art in society
and uses the popularity and cultural force
of the cinema industry to depict and dis-
seminate the suppressed realities of Black
history as a necessary liberatory technique
with the contemporary power to unsettle
whiteness and white supremacy.
Conclusion
There is a significance in being able to
provide nuance to Black narratives that
are being analyzed without doing so in
the public sphere. Throughout this thesis,
I have aimed to argue that the BTP argu-
ment is an unnuanced approach to what I
 “Black storytelling is an extremely expansive
discipline, and to analyze it without nuance is
to further subjugate Black narratives.”
have called Black historical horror. I have
discussed the basis for where this argu-
ment emerges from, where I believe it sits,
and the analysis to support it.
The impact of film and T.V. is im-
mense, as is the reality that Black creations
no longer exist within a vacuum. From
this, it is clear that Black thinkers are trying
to conceptualize the benefits and setbacks
of this impact on racial conceptualizations
of whiteness and Blackness. Because of the
current historical positioning in culture
allowing more space for Black films and
T.V. shows, there is contention over what
types of Black stories should be shared.
Out of these tensions, I wanted to see what
exactly BTP is trying to describe and un-
derstand how that might affect the Black
stories being told. In order to do so, this
paper explained Hollywood’s history of
violence against Black characters through
white storytelling in film and T.V. Then,
I discussed how this necessitated the de-
velopment of the Black gaze and a distinct
Black storytelling in film and T.V. This
history provided the necessary background
for understanding the role race has played
in American cinematic history and fore-
grounded and characterized this phenome-
non. This thesis explained the combination
of what is called “historical trauma film”58
and Black film to yield the basis for un-
derstanding BTP to be a new articulation
of the Black horror genre: Black historical
58
Elm, Kabalek, K., & Köhne, J. B. (2014). The horrors of trauma in cinema: violence void visualization. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
horror. By dissecting what the white and
Black horror genres entail and applying
that analysis to the historical trauma film,
I positioned the BTP phenomenon as ex-
isting between the storytelling of Black
horror genre and the horrors of Black his-
tory. Following this, the paper discussed
contentions surrounding the BTP issue
and interrogated how these contentions
related to the interrogation of the terms
“trauma” and “porn.” These examinations
proposed the guidelines for rearticulation.
I found it almost ironic that when I set
out to do this analysis, I personally agreed
with the arguments I worked against. Black
storytelling is an extremely expansive dis-
cipline, and to analyze it without nuance is
to further subjugate Black narratives. The
main conclusion from this thesis is that film
is an incredibly powerful tool that has rev-
olutionary power when used to commu-
nicate stories of Blackness. Experiences of
the representation of Blackness in film and
T.V. and the vicarious trauma that may be
experienced when viewing those represen-
tations may vary widely from spectator to
spectator. However, whether or not Black
critics enjoy or loathe the creation, it is still
necessary to analyze the purpose and im-
pact of the film or series’ message and pon-
der the question: if we don’t tell our stories,
who will? The BTP debate is negating the
tensions between violence against Black
people on the screen, white and Black
17
 consumption of that violence, and what
contemporary Black representation should
or should not look like. By labeling pieces
of Black film and T.V. as BTP, critics are
inflicting unforeseen consequences against
Black cinema, which may severely limit
progress and continue to erase narratives
of the horrors of Black history and Black
trauma. By usurping the phrase BTP and
18
developing a new framework for analyzing
Black historical horror and questions
about Black representation in cinema, this
thesis provides the foundational grounds
for unearthing new answers for questions
of Black representation in contemporary
film and T.V.◆
Appendix: Referenced Films and Television Series

Akil, Salim, dir. 2011, ‘Jumping The Broom’

Atencio, Peter, dir. 2012, ‘Key & Peele’
Bush, Gerard & Renz, Christopher, dir. 2020 ‘Antebellum’
Coogler, Ryan, dir. 2013, ‘Fruitvale Station’
Craven, Wes, dir. 1996, ‘Scream’
DuVernay, Ava, dir. 2014, ‘Selma’
DuVernay, Ava, dir. 2019, ‘When They See Us’
Free, Travon & Desmond Roe, Martin, dir. 2021, ‘Two Distant Strangers’
Green, Misha, dir. 2020, ‘Lovecraft Country’
Lee, Malcolm D., dir. 2002, ‘Barbershop’
Lindelof, Damon, dir. 2019, ‘Watchmen’
Marvin, dir. 2021, ‘Them’
McQueen, Steve, dir. 2012, ‘12 Years a Slave’
Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017, ‘Get Out’
Peele, Jordan, dir. 2019, ‘Us’
Tillman Jr., George, dir. 2018, ‘The Hate U Give’

19
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(2021, November 10). How black hor-
ror became America’s most powerful cin-
ematic genre. The New York Times.
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nytimes.com/2021/11/10/t-mag-
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Bernardi. (2007). The Persistence of
Whiteness : Race and Contemporary
Hollywood Cinema. Taylor & Francis.
Bogle. (2001). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,
Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpre-
tive History of Blacks in American
Films, Fourth Edition. Burns & Oates
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Braxton, G. (2021, April 10). The
violence in Amazon’s ‘them’ left
execs ‘shaken.’ does it go too far? Los
Angeles Times. Retrieved 2022, from
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tainment-arts/tv/story/2021-04-09/
amazon-them-covenant-little-mar-
vin-lena-waithe-violence
Braxton, G. (2021, April 19). Media
images of Black Death have a cost,
experts say. many viewers are fed
up. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved
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latimes.com/entertainment-arts/
tv/story/2021-04-19/them-am-
azon-two-distant-strangers-net-
flix-debate
Breznican, A. (2020, August 3). Black
storytellers are using horror to battle
hate. Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2022,
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hollywood/2020/07/black-storytell-
ers-are-using-horror-to-battle-hate
Livneh, H., & Martz, E. (2014).
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porn and the commercialisation of Black
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86–89.
Curtis. (2008). Dark places : the haunted
house in film. Reaktion.
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Erigha. (2015). Race, Gender, Holly- film. ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2022,
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Production and Digital Media’s Po- common-black-stereotypes-in-tv-
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9(1), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/ Nkumane, Z. (2016,). No longer will I par-
soc4.12237 take in Black trauma porn. OkayAfrica.
Erigha. (2019). The Hollywood Jim Crow : Retrieved 2021, from https://www.
the racial politics of the movie industry. okayafrica.com/black-trauma-porn-
New York University Press. black-lives-matter/
Elm, Kabalek, K., & Köhne, J. B. (2014). Renda. (2019). Watching “Insidious”--On
The horrors of trauma in cinema: the Social Construction of Fear. Qualita-
violence void visualization. Cambridge tive Report, 24(7), 1784–.
Scholars Publishing. Safford, D. (2019). “How to Use Three-Act
Giorgis, H. (2021, April 18). Who wants Structure to Write a Story Readers Can’t
to watch Black pain? The Atlantic. Put Down,” The Writing Practice.
Retrieved 2022, from https:// The Psychology of Fear: Concordia Universi-
www.theatlantic.com/culture/ar- ty, st. paul online. CSP Online. (2021,
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what-is-horror-fiction#what-is-the-
horror-genre
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Nittle, N. K. (2021, March 6). The 5 most
common black stereotypes in TV and
 FEATURE
Serendipity and Struggle:
Reflections on the
Social Dynamics of Research
By Andrew Lu
On the surface, life in a university seems like a straightforward process.
Teach. Research. Publish. However, the reality is that the world of aca-
demia is a beautiful mess of hard work, passion, and luck. Professor Bry-
an Hunter recently moved from Harvard University to teach chemistry
and continue his research in the Hunter Lab at Northwestern University
(N.U.). In this interview, he speaks about his research on sustainability and
reflects on his personal journey thus far.

[This interview has been edited for
brevity and clarity.]
What sort of research does
your lab do?
My lab is interested in sustainability and
renewable energy. What I do on a day-to-
day basis is to look at important reactions
in the world, which are typically [done]
through catalysis. You have some material
or substance which permits a reaction to
happen at a lower barrier, so it’s kineti-
cally more favorable. A lot of these reac-
tions take place at high temperatures and
high pressures, such as the Haber–Bosch
process. These are inherently inefficient
reactions because entropy losses occur in
the process of moving to high tempera-
tures and pressures. So, we’re interested
in converting these reactions into electro-
chemical reactions that are done at room
temperature, with ambient pressure, and
often in solution. To do this, you need to
develop a new class of catalysts — catalysts
that are electro-catalysts. We develop
and produce materials and molecules that
serve as electro-catalysts for a variety of
reactions. Additionally, we’re interested
in water splitting, carbon dioxide reduc-
tion, ammonia production, [and] things
like that.
Do you see many practical
applications for your re-
search?
Yes, we’ve made some major contribu-
tions to water-splitting catalysis. These
have been incorporated and integrated
into water electrolyzers, which are com-
mercially available — that technology

21

is used. It’s not yet used on a large scale
because we don’t have, currently, the de-
mand for a huge amount of clean hydro-
gen. However, I think that there will be
demand for it in the future, and making
improvements to those technologies now
is pertinent and timely.
We’ve patented several things, such
as this catalysis for C-H bond activation
that has applications in pharmaceuticals
and some technology that uses electro-
chemistry in medical settings. We’ve been
able to repurpose some of the catalysts
that we’ve used for water splitting to
generate local pH changes in tissue. Then,
we patented this methodology of being
able to reshape stiff tissue just by passing
an electrical current through it with an
appropriate catalyst.
You patent things because you think
it’ll be useful in industry. You never know
what exactly the impact of your research
is going to be. Particularly for fundamen-
tal research in chemistry, [the] majority
of people are doing basic research, which
is stuff that is one more step removed
from real world applications. But you
never know.
What was your decision be-
hind pursuing graduate edu-
cation?
I knew I loved research, and I had always
had a dream of getting my Ph.D., but it
seemed really far off — it seemed like an
impossible thing to do. I remember in col-
lege, as an undergraduate, putting myself
in that mindset … because of that, I didn’t
go directly to graduate school after under-
graduate degree.
22
I would say up until maybe the sec-
ond semester of my senior year, I wasn’t
sure what I was going to do. I then met a
recruiter for Teach For America, and he
had done the two-year commitment [in]
teaching – this guy was just amazing. He
really inspired me about the mission of
Teach For America and the effect I could
have just out of college. So I applied, and I
got accepted. I taught chemistry in south-
east Los Angeles for two years. While
I was doing that, I obtained a master’s
degree in teaching. And then, somewhere
in that process, I really thought about
what it is that I still wanted to do. I kept
getting drawn back to graduate school. So,
I used an additional gap year to apply to
graduate school, make some connections,
do some research, and by the next fall, I
was enrolled in the California Institute of
Technology working for someone I had
always really admired. Taking those years
off really did some good for me. I learned
a lot about myself.
I think people feel like they have to
be 100% a medical school student or 100%
a chemistry graduate school student in
the future, even as freshmen. It’s okay to
explore many career paths and ultimately
be sure of what you’re doing. Everyone is
different and operates on their own time-
line. There’s nothing wrong with taking
longer — there’s nothing wrong with do-
ing something else and then returning to
something you’re really passionate about.
Why did you choose N.U.?
N.U. is obviously a fantastic school, and
in particular, the Chemistry Department
at N.U. is this jewel. It’s remarkable how
quickly it has grown to being a top 10
department — and certainly I think a top
5 department — in the country. Some of
it’s just that it worked out, timing wise. I
was ready to make an arrangement for my
next step after Harvard University, and
N.U. was hiring during COVID when no-
body else was hiring. They really [wanted]
to grow and improve. There’s no place I
would’ve gone instead.
So there was a mix of ser-
endipity and hard-work that
worked out for you?
A lot of it is serendipity — that’s a good way
to put it. A lot of it is somewhat a roll of
the dice. So much of it is you’re in the right
place at the right time. That’s also a major
source of frustration. You can work as hard
as someone else, but you don’t get lucky. It’s
not like industry, where you get rewarded
for doing a good job. Academia is a little
different. You need to be exceptional at
all times, and even then, you’re just doing
your job. You won’t be rewarded.
There are a lot of things out of your
control. Most of the things in your control
are your attitude and work ethic, and if
you can really work on those things, you
can set yourself up for success. But, there’s
still this aspect of luck. Every part of your
life has a luck component.
Were there any challenges
moving around a lot, pur-
suing your education, and
research?
At the highest level of research, you fol-
low the science. You look at what’s going
to stimulate you intellectually, and you
make the sacrifice. It’s particularly tough
if you’re in a relationship or married or
with somebody close … breaking those
relationships and putting them on pause is
really tough. They call this in academia the
two-bodied problem, which is that you ar-
en’t just worried about yourself. You can’t
just pick up and leave.
That part is really tough. And being
in a new city, especially as a postdoctoral
fellow, which are shorter periods of time
where you’re doing an intense amount of
research — it can be lonely. But I think if
you are enjoying what you are doing, that
brings a lot of comfort. You know that at
the end of the road, you’re going to take a
position that’s a permanent position, and
you’ll finally get to settle down. That kind
of makes that settling down very sweet,
because you’ve earned it.
Any advice for undergradu-
ates seeking research?
If there’s not a spot, don’t take things
personally and don’t let that discourage
you from reaching out to someone else. At
the end of the day, this is a profession of
people. Research doesn’t do itself. There
are personnel-type things that have to
come into play.
My advice to undergraduate students
is to put yourself out there. Do the leg-
work to show that you’ve actually done
some background research and then put it
on them. Ask them if there are opportuni-
ties for you to be involved. Get integrated
into the culture of the group. Graduate
students are your best friends. Get a desk
in the lab and do your homework there
instead of the library so that you get to be
a part of the group. Get the experience of
being a part-time researcher, and that’s
how you know if that’s the life for you.
23
 by Olive Liu

Defeating the Dragon:

Epistemic Injustice Towards
Asian/ American Women
Departments of Asian American Studies and Philosophy
Faculty Advisors: Sanford Goldberg and Ji-yeon Yuh

Abstract
Epistemic injustice, and testimonial injustice specifically, is a type of dis-
crimination that occurs when a person suffers a credibility deficit because of
an identity-based prejudice. This is an issue that affects many marginalized
groups and can have larger repercussions on one’s perception of self, loss of
resources and opportunities, and continued mistreatment, both epistemically
and non-epistemically. My project explores this phenomenon in relation to
Asian/American women, which I identify to be an at-risk group for system-
atic, testimonial injustice. Through the course of this thesis, I discuss how
stereotypes about Asian/Americans, and Asian/American women in partic-
ular, were created and how these stereotypes negatively impact the perceived
credibility of Asian/Americans, both historically and currently. The goal of
this is to problematize the dominant images of Asian/American women and
to show how this idea is not informed by actual Asian/American women
but by dominant and oppressive forces such as white supremacy, patriarchal
power, and Western exceptionalism. Furthermore, I argue that testimonial
injustice against Asian/American women can reproduce and maintain these
negative images and that the discrediting of this group can lead to further,
non-epistemic harms like physical and sexual violence. Because of this, how
we conceptualize justice for Asian/American women socially and politically
is deeply tied to epistemic justice, which serves as a method I discuss for
overall resistance to violent powers.

24
Introduction is necessary to establish definitions and
On Mar. 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long en- frameworks for how social categories,
tered three different spas in Georgia with the such as race and gender, are formed. Fol-
intention to kill. His eight victims included lowing scholars like Micheal Omi, Howard
six Asian-American women: Xiaojie Tan, Winant, and Judith Butler, I propose that
Douyou Feng, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung race and gender are categories that are
Grant, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue. When given meaning by a variety of socio-po-
interrogated by the police, Long said that his litical forces and will fluctuate depending
shootings were an attempt to eliminate the on the change in these influences. As Omi
“temptations” of his “sexual addiction.”1 and Winant write, these social categories
Although Long never admitted that can be understood as “concept[s] that [sig-
his crimes were racially-motivated, it is no nify] and [symbolize] social conflicts and
mistake that his targets were Asian-operated interests by referring to different types of
spas. The perceived connection between human bodies.”3 Similarly, Judith Butler
Asian/American women and hyper-sexu- points out in Gender Trouble that gender
ality is something that has been forged and is not the biological differences in chro-
maintained through long histories of discrim- mosomes, but rather, “the various acts of
inatory laws, American military occupation, gender” that “create the idea of gender” by
and derogatory representations of Asian/ imbuing meaning into certain characteris-
American women in Western media as docile, tics.4 In this sense, social categories allow
submissive, and emotionally uncaring. people to not only identify when others
While violence against Asian/Amer- are a part of a certain group but to also
ican women is perpetrated in many ways, have expectations for how that individual
this project aims to uncover the impacts of should act based on dominant perceptions
epistemic injustice, specifically testimonial of the entire community.
injustice.2 My intention is to understand how However, one’s understanding of these
knowledge production can be discriminatory social categories is not objective. In Truth and
and how excluding and discrediting certain Method, Michel Foucault discusses the cycle
groups can contribute to continued oppres- between power and knowledge, writing
sion and violence. that “truth isn’t outside of power, or lacking
in power … Each society has its regime of
Section 1: On the Relevance truth.”5 In other words, those in power can
of Epistemic Injustice produce and circulate knowledge that justi-
fies their dominance while also derogating
To understand why epistemic injustice is
their inferiors. Such understandings are
a relevant topic to Asian/American wom-
often institutionalized through education,
en and marginalized groups as a whole, it
1 Anna North, “Claims of ‘sexual addiction’ are a distraction in the Atlanta killing”, Vox, March 18, 2021, https://www.vox.
com/22336271/atlanta-shooter-sex-addiction-robert-aaron-long
2 A brief note on definitions - Although I use the language of ‘women’ throughout this project, I also include any non-cisgender
Asian/Americans that may resonate with this experience but do not identify as women, such as myself.
3 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 110.
4 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 3rd Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 178
5 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Method,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 72-73

25
 politics, and other systems, making them
difficult to disrupt and question.
This kind of dominance can be seen
in the idea of controlling images, which Pa-
tricia Hill Collins introduces in her work,
Black Feminist Thought. Controlling images
are negative characterizations of minority
groups that detract from their humanity,
“mak[ing] racism, sexism, poverty, and
other forms of injustice appear to be more
normal, and inevitable parts of everyday
life.”6 In this sense, controlling images
often conceal the truth of the histories of
oppression certain groups have faced by
making their marginalized position seem
self-evident. It is important to note that
these controlling images will probably not
reflect the actual lived experiences of the
group they describe. Thus, one may ask
why these ideas were formed without in-
terruption, despite the actual violence that
they may cause. I believe that these ques-
tions can be answered by explaining the
function of epistemic injustice, specifically
testimonial injustice.
According to Miranda Fricker in her
seminal text, Epistemic Injustice: Power and
Ethics of Knowing, testimonial injustice occurs
when a speaker “receives a credibility deficit
owing to identity prejudice in the hearer.”7
Note that I am focusing on systematic testi-
monial injustice, which occurs when some-
one unjustly discredits their interlocutor, not
because of the content or context of their tes-
timony, but because of their social identities
like race and gender. Here, one can see how
the relationship between knowledge and
power is important to testimonial injustice:
if one is made to believe that a certain iden-
tity group is inferior, they are likely to grant
6 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 1st Edition. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 69
7 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & The Ethics of Knowing. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 28
8 Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011): 242
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 244
26
them less credibility than someone without
such an identity. For instance, if someone
believes that women are less intelligent than
men, they may discredit a woman’s testimo-
ny regardless of its accuracy.
Beyond Fricker’s concept of testimo-
nial injustice, Kristie Dotson points out ad-
ditional kinds of epistemic injustices in her
paper titled “Tracking Epistemic Violence,
Tracking Practices of Silencing.” The first is
testimonial quieting, in which “an audience
fails to identify a speaker as a knower.”8 She
directly links this sort of violence to Hill
Collins’ idea of controlling images, as these
images detract from their perception as
knowers and their level of credibility.9 The
second is testimonial smothering, which
occurs when a person limits their testimo-
ny if they feel that their listener may not
consider their knowledge fairly because of
the content of their account or because of
prejudices against their identity.10
As a group, Asian/American women
are particularly at risk for these different
testimonial injustices because of a history of
racially gendered violence, harmful stereo-
types, and exclusionary policies. Thus, to un-
derstand how epistemic injustice manifests
and affects Asian/American women, I want
to provide a brief analysis of three major
factors that have influenced dominant con-
ceptions of this group: Orientalism, overseas
occupation, and domestic oppression.
Section 2: Camptown
Women, Lotus Blossoms, and
Dragon Ladies
Before delving into the more specific histo-
ries of Asian/American women, I want to
introduce the framework of Orientalism,
which was first coined by Edward Said to ies like San Francisco and turned away for a
describe the relationship between the West variety of reasons, such as being unmarried
(the Occident) and the East (the Orient). Al- or having a job for which they had no previ-
though Said is writing about the relationship ous experience.15 Regardless of whether they
between Europe and the Middle East specif- were sex workers, the testimonies of these
ically, the idea of Orientalism can still offer women were denied based on racially gen-
us a useful framework for understanding dered beliefs against Chinese women.
power and knowledge and how it influenced Having started with my analysis of
the identity of Asian/American women. the Page Act, I now want to move on and
According to Said, the Western conception explore another point in history in which
of the ‘Orient’ or Asia is largely a construc- racially gendered perceptions resulted in the
tion invented by Europe, which he calls the subjugation of Asian/American women:
Occident.11 In essence, the way the Occident Korean camptowns and camptown women
understands the Orient is integral to its in post-war South Korea. The existence of
perception of itself and its superiority, as the Asian women serving and being exploited
Orient defines the West as being an inferior by military troops is not an uncommon
“image, idea, personality, experience.”12 Be- phenomenon: during the era of Japanese
cause of this, people identified as ‘Orientals’ colonization in Korea and World War II,
are perceived as being inherently lesser than many Asian women were forced into sexual
their Western counterparts, an idea that un- slavery by the Japanese military. Even after
dergirds many stereotypes directed towards Japan’s withdrawal from Korea after World
Asian/American women. War II, Korean women continued to work
For instance, the Page Act of 1875 as prostitutes — this time, to fill the camp-
(henceforth referred to as the Page Act), town clubs surrounding the U.S. army bases
while explicitly banning the entry of coerced that had been recently set up after the estab-
laborers, convicted felons, and prostitutes lishment of the U.S.-ROK Mutual Defense
from Asia, implicitly prevented the immigra- Treaty in 1954.16
tion of Chinese women to the U.S. by gener- The Korean War also fueled massive
alizing them as sex workers.13 Using language growth in Korean sex workers because of
like “lewd and immoral” as justification to wartime poverty, the separation of families
deny their entry, the Page Act perpetuated which created orphans and widows, and the
the popular racist sentiment that Chinese socio-political consequences of the war.17
women were impure and hyper-sexual.14 The Katharine Moon points out that many Ko-
role that testimonial injustice played in the reans sought safety in areas where U.S. forces
denial of Chinese women from immigrating were stationed and depended heavily on the
to the U.S. was also premised on these beliefs. bases for economic survival. However, the
Many women were interrogated in port cit- abundance of camptown clubs cannot be
11 Edward Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Edition. (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 2
12 Ibid., 2
13 Page Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 477, Chap. 141 (1875). https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1875Immigration%20Act.pdf
14 Ibid., Chap. 141
15 David Haekwon Kim, “Asian American Philosophy and Feminism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, ed. Kim Q.
Hall and Ásta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) 7
16 Harry Truman, “Statement by the President, Truman on Korea, June 27, 1950,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United
States: Harry Truman, 1945-1953, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/docu-
ment/116192.pdf?v=cd0b66b71d6a0412d275a5088a18db5d
17 Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 28

27
 simply blamed on the circumstances of the
war. Although these factors heavily contrib-
uted to the abuse and exploitation of Korean
women, the attitudes that American soldiers
had toward these women cannot be ignored.
For instance, in her interviews with Amer-
ican G.I.s, Moon reveals that the ideas that
men had about Asian women contributed
to the popularity of militarized prostitution.
One Army chaplain stated that the abun-
dance of sex clubs in Korea was attributed to
“the culture” and that prostitution was “a way
of life for Asians and that some Asians liked
prostitution.”18 Another states:
What the soldiers have read and heard
before ever arriving in a foreign country
influence[s] prostitution a lot. For
example, stories about Korean or Thai
women being beautiful, subservient —
they’re tall tales, glamorized … U.S. men
would fall in lust with Korean women.
They were property, things, slaves
… Racism, sexism — it’s all there. The
men don’t see the women as human
beings — they’re disgusting, things
to be thrown away … They speak of
women in the diminutive.19
Here, one can see how the popularity
of certain stereotypes about Asian/Amer-
ican women shaped the violent treatment
of many camptown women, using their
perceived sexual nature to justify the high
engagement of American men with Korean
women. When considering how this relates
to testimonial injustice, I would argue that the
G.I.s’ expectations of and prejudices against
Asian women encouraged them to discredit
any testimonies of the unethical nature of
camptowns or objections to engaging in sex
work. One particular example of this is the
18 Ibid., 36
19 Ibid., 34
20 Na-Young Lee, “Un/forgettable Histories of US Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Women’s Experiences of Sexual Labor
and Government Policies,” Sexualities, Vol. 2018, No. 21 (5-6) (2018): 763, https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716688683
21 Renee Tajima-Peña, “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writing By and
About Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 309
28
enforcement of laws and policies attempting
to reduce the transmission of venereal dis-
ease (VD). Camptown women were often
accused as the source of infection when an
American soldier got sick and penalized with
little regard to whether or not the accusation
was true.20 Conversely, camptown women’s
testimonies were often disregarded, as preju-
dices about their social identities and profes-
sion discredited them compared to the G.I.s.
In this sense, camptown women suffered
from testimonial quieting, as the controlling
image of them as a hyper-sexual and morally
inferior group negatively impacted the per-
ception of their credibility.
I now want to turn towards other
stereotypes of Asian/American women
depicted in popular media to identify some
additional harms Asian/American women
might encounter, and how histories like
that of camptown women influence ideas of
Asian/American women today. For this pa-
per, I will focus on two stereotypes explored
by Renee E. Tajima in “Lotus Blossoms
Don’t Bleed”: the Lotus Blossom and the
Dragon Lady. The former is characterized
as “a sexual-romantic object” who is “utter-
ly feminine [and] delicate” and “exist[s] to
serve men,” especially white men.21 A popu-
lar example of this is Kim from the musical
Miss Saigon, a Vietnamese sex worker who
is seemingly ‘saved’ from her profession by
an American soldier, Chris. Consistently
characterized as virginal and pure, Kim falls
in love with Chris, only to commit suicide
once she discovers that he has re-married
after leaving Vietnam. This reveals that
Kim’s character exists only as the object of
Chris’ sexual desires, being discarded when
she no longer serves her purpose.
 While the Lotus Blossom presents an
innocent and submissive image of Asian/
American women, the Dragon Lady subverts
this idea, placing Asian/American women in
a position of sexual dominance. She is char-
acterized by her “excessively dangerous sex-
uality” and “Oriental femininity,” which are
weaponized as tools of manipulation.22 Yet,
this overt sexuality often masks the emotion-
ally cold and cruel intentions of the Dragon
Lady, which are often antagonistic against
white and male power. Perhaps one of the
most famous examples of this character is
O-ren Ishii in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Portrayed by
Lucy Liu, O-ren’s cold demeanor juxtaposes
the excessive violence she wreaks through-
out the movie, using her femininity as a tool
to seize power and seek revenge. This char-
acterization may imply that Asian/American
women as lacking fundamental humanity
— they are willing to cross moral boundaries
and weaponize deeply personal things, such
as sex, to get what they want.
Section 3: Epistemic Injustice
and its Effects on Asian/
American Women
Using both the stereotypes and the history
of camptown women that I have previ-
ously explored, I will now sketch out the
justifications one may use when commit-
ting an act of testimonial injustice against
Asian/American women. The Lotus Blos-
som is perhaps the clearer one to dissect:
because they are directly characterized as
shy, submissive, and docile, it is easy to see
why they may be seen as having low credi-
bility. Their perceived tendency is to defer
to their male counterparts, and as a result,
they often have things decided for them and
not with them, thus being treated more like
22 Ibid., 309
23 Elyse Pham, “Here’s how pop culture has perpetuated harmful stereotypes of Asian women,” Today, April 1, 2021, https://www.
today.com/popculture/here-s-how-pop-culture-has-perpetuated-harmful-stereotypes-asian-t213676
property rather than actual human beings.
On the other end, the Dragon Lady is often
perceived to be powerful, and even dom-
inant over men. While this might seem
like it awards them an adequate amount
of credibility, it is important to note that
this power comes from their sexuality and
cruelty.23 Because they use immoral means
to procure their position over others, their
testimony is often seen as untrustworthy
or manipulative.
The negative effects of this are also
seen when American servicemen justify
their involvement with military prosti-
tution by attributing it to the culture of
Asian countries. The implication is that
Asian women are inherently hyper-sexual,
and should be used and treated as such.
When camptown women spoke up about
the violence that they faced at the hands of
G.I.s or club managers, their line of work,
gender, race, and class called their integrity
and credibility into question.
With this information, I offer this
account of what epistemic, and specifically
testimonial, injustice looks like for Asian/
American women: Asian/American wom-
en are likely to suffer instances of testimo-
nial injustice when their audience holds
a prejudiced idea about them that stems
from the controlling images of Asian/
American women as sexual, subservient,
untrustworthy, and passive. These stereo-
types directly detract from their status as
knowers by undermining their credibility,
particularly in situations relating to sex,
intimate relationships, and personal harm.
Furthermore, Asian/American women,
and especially those who are lower-class,
immigrants, or in other disadvantaged
groups, are at risk of smothering their
29
 “ Asian/ American women are likely to suffer instances
of testimonial injustice when their audience holds
a prejudiced idea about them that stems from the
controlling images of Asian/ American women as
sexual, subservient, untrustworthy, and passive. These
stereotypes directly detract from their status as
knowers by undermining their credibility, particularly
in situations relating to sex, intimate relationships,
and personal harm.
testimony because the content of it often
puts them at risk for violence, either in-
terpersonally or from the state. This often
results in epistemic oppression, which
Kristie Dotson defines as the “persistent
epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s
contribution to knowledge production.”24
Because of this consistent exclusion and
silencing, the testimonies and experiences
of Asian/American women often do not
shape the knowledge surrounding them,
allowing for the continued epistemic, so-
cial, and political violence against them.
This account can best be thought of
through the concept of a positive feedback
loop, in which the result of an initial action
causes more of that action to occur. With
testimonial injustice against Asian/Amer-
ican women, the initial event is often the
development of prejudice against them,
including traits that take agency away from
Asian/American women, such as how
the Lotus Blossom trope portrays Asian/
American women as submissive and docile.
This may invite people to think about these
women in a way that dismisses their needs
or experiences in favor of their own.
This leads to an increased potential of
24 Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2014): 115
30
”
acts of testimonial injustice against Asian/
American women, as these views are likely
to detract from their credibility as know-
ers. These instances of testimonial injustice
will likely confirm the original prejudice,
especially because any resistance to the act
will usually be suppressed as a consequence
of testimonial quieting due to a lack of
credibility. This creates a positive feedback
loop of holding prejudices, acting on those
beliefs, denying any resistance to acts of
injustice based on stereotypes, and using
one’s interactions to provide further evi-
dence for these negative views. Addition-
ally, Asian/American women may inter-
nalize these negative images, behaving in
certain stereotypical ways to avoid further
racial violence. This creates another source
that confirms the original bias, normaliz-
ing it as an observation of Asian/American
women and not as a prejudice. As Collins
previously points out, controlling images
make racist and sexist perceptions a part
of everyday life, and not something to be
concerned with.
When assessing the consequences
that come from these acts of testimonial
injustice, I have identified two major types
of harm: psychological and sexual. Both
can be seen in the sexual fetishization of
Asian/American women, which is termed
‘yellow fever.’ Fetishists often justify their
preference for Asian/American women by
citing stereotypes like the Lotus Blossom,
arguing that such women are superior
because of their submissive personality
and hyper-sexual nature. However, in her
paper “Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering,”
Robin Zheng points out that this kind of
fetishization can place a “psychological
burden” on its victims by making them
feel “depersonalized and homogenized” by
reducing their worth to purely their race
and gender.25 As further shown in a study
by Connie Chan, being a victim of fetishi-
zation can lead Asian/American women
to blame themselves instead of seeing how
the problem was “external, based upon cul-
tural and societal stereotypes.”26
While it isn’t initially clear how the
harms of fetishization can be epistemic,
I would argue that people with Asian fe-
tishes are more prone to committing acts
of testimonial injustice when speaking to
a potential Asian partner. Because racial
fetishes often create a homogenized image
of a larger group of people, any discrep-
ancies to this image will often be ignored
or shut down completely. For example,
if someone has an Asian fetish because
they believe Asian/American women to
be more submissive, they may commit an
act of testimonial injustice by discrediting
any objection or issue she has with their
relationship. This can be especially dan-
gerous in sexual situations. As Sumi K.
Cho states:
25 Robin Zheng, “Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetishes,” Journal of the American Philosophical Associa-
tion, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2016): 407
26 Connie Chan, “Asian-American Women: Psychological Responses to Sexual Exploitation & Cultural Stereotypes,” Asian Ameri-
can Psychological Association Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1987): 37
27 Sumi K. Cho, “Asian Pacific American Women and Racialized Sexual Harassment,” in Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian
American Women, ed. Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) 164
Asian Pacific American women are
at particular risk of being racially
and sexually harassed because of
the synergism that results when
sexualized racial stereotypes combine
with racialized gender stereotypes.
Model minority traits of passivity and
submissiveness are intensified and
gendered through the stock portrayal
of obedient and servile Asian Pacific
women in popular culture. The
repeated projection of a compliant and
catering Asian feminine nature feeds
harasser’s beliefs that Asian Pacific
American women will be receptive
objects of their advances, make good
victims, and will not fight back.27
Cho’s point about Asian/American
women being perceived as sexually recep-
tive is especially important in my analysis
of testimonial injustice — because Asian/
American women are constantly charac-
terized as sexually eager and submissive,
any testimony they give that resists this
image might be regarded as untrue. If an
Asian/American woman says no to some-
one’s sexual advances, their denial might
be seen as less credible to someone that be-
lieves that all Asian/American women are
hyper-sexual. As a result, that person may
disregard their refusal and proceed, which
often results in sexual violence.
At the same time, this characteriza-
tion of Asian/American women might
make them seem less credible when talking
about acts of sexual violence against them.
For example, there are often narratives
about how wearing revealing clothing sig-
nals sexual availability to others. Barring
the misogynistic and immoral implications
of this, someone’s testimony of their
31
 assault might lose credibility because of Section 4: Epistemic Justice:
what they wore. For Asian/American How People Can Do Better
women, their very race and gender signal
Through this analysis, it becomes clear
sexual availability to certain people, which
that testimonial injustice can be used as a
may make their account of their assault
tool of epistemic, sexual, and psychological
less believable. This is visible in how mil-
harm. Thus, it is important to develop a
itary prostitution was permitted in Asia
method of epistemic justice as a form of re-
but not in Europe, signaling that the often
sistance. In their book, The Epistemology of
violent and negative treatment of Asian
Resistance, José Medina proposes the idea
women was allowed because of how their
of meta-lucidity, which is the awareness of
perceived hyper-sexuality was attributed
one’s social position and how it relates to
as inherent to their nature. This normal-
the identities, histories, and beliefs of oth-
ization of harm against Asian/American
ers.28 In doing so, one is better equipped
women makes it difficult to speak up about
to identify the gaps in their knowledge or
sexual violence and demand justice.
diagnose certain beliefs as inaccurate or
On top of this, Asian/American wom-
problematic, which will affect how they
en often smother their own testimony about
assign credibility to others in the future.
sexual assault, not only because of the socie-
The goal in doing so is to expand and fill
tal and cultural stigma but also because their
the gaps in one’s knowledge by “pursu[ing]
livelihood, things like immigration status
interventions and transformations aimed
and access to resources, might be negatively
at instilling new attitudes and habits.”29 In
affected. With a low conviction rate, many
other words, it is not enough to become
women, Asian/American and otherwise,
aware of one’s epistemic practices — peo-
may feel as though the social ostracization
ple must work to correct them by directly
and potential trauma are not worth it. This
interacting with the groups that are affect-
is not to blame victims of sexual assault for
ed by their beliefs. This is done through
not speaking out — rather, it is to point out
epistemic interactions, particularly in-
that our judicial system is built in such a way
teractions that create epistemic friction,
that excludes the means for justice for spe-
which can be understood as “experiencing
cific groups of people. Thus, Asian/Amer-
resistance from significantly different
ican women face a multi-layered problem:
perspectives in social interaction.”30 By
their identity is often understood through
attempting to correct one’s own and learn
sexually violent ways, which places them at
new beliefs, people develop a “kaleidoscop-
risk for things like sexual harassment and
ic consciousness that remains forever open
assault. However, their identity might also
to being expanded,” which pushes one to
justify this violence by characterizing all
“acknowledge and engage new perspec-
Asian/American women as sexually eager
tives” in relation to their own knowledge.31
or submissive, discrediting their initial re-
In terms of how this relates to testi-
fusal of sexual advances and their testimo-
monial justice, I argue that practicing this
nies of assault.
kind of reflection with one’s identity and
28 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 213
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 237
31 Ibid., 200

32

“
It is not enough to
become aware of one’s
epistemic practices —
people must work to
correct them by directly
interacting with the
groups that are affected
”
by their beliefs.
willingness to change one’s perceptions
of others will make people more open to
learning about different identities and less
motivated to make assumptions about
other groups. A kaleidoscopic conscious-
ness can also help someone recognize that
some communities have been systemically
excluded from contributing to collective
epistemic resources, as their accounts
might have critiqued and detracted from
the authority that racial, gendered, and
other social powers have. Because of this,
people can assess whether their ideas about
others are harmful and question the validi-
ty of such beliefs, making them more open
to change when they encounter epistemic
friction with them. This can address the
prejudices that inform acts of testimonial
injustice, as Medina’s model pushes people
to question why such beliefs are formed,
how they reify current structures of power,
and how people can rectify these gaps in
their knowledge.
Like epistemic injustice, epistemic
justice can also exist in a positive feedback
loop. As I explained previously, one’s re-
alization that their perceptions of others
are problematic should be followed by
attempts to unlearn these beliefs. For in-
stance, in Section 2, I discussed how Ori-
entalism often characterized Asian people
as less human than their Western counter-
parts. If a person learns about this history,
they should be more critical of the current
idea that Chinese people are responsible
for COVID-19 because they consume
non-traditional animals like bats or dogs.
They might realize that the rhetoric that
the media uses is prejudiced against Chi-
nese people, which should push them to
realize how things like the news reproduce
certain racist biases. Thus, when they view
news articles like those that characterize
Black Lives Matter protestors as violent
looters, they will probably be less likely to
accept this at face value and instead seek
out the experiences of those who were
actually a part of these movements. The
cause (recognizing one’s own harmful be-
liefs) leads to the effect (trying to learn and
repair one’s knowledge about the group
they are prejudiced toward), which leads
back to the cause, increasing the number of
things that one might identify as problem-
atic. Of course, not every individual will
undergo such a process when unlearning
certain prejudices and stereotypes. The
importance of epistemic justice is that it
cultivates a certain sense of curiosity about
how certain concepts came to be and how
others see these ideas and the world.
Conclusion
My intention throughout this thesis has
been to illuminate an issue that many
people face and to give others the language
and tools to identify these types of
33
 The importance of epistemic justice is that it
cultivates a certain sense of curiosity about how
certain concepts came to be and how others
see these ideas and the world.

injustices in their own lives. In doing so,

my work. Thank you both for listening to
I hope that more people will recognize my academic ideas and my anxieties and
how their perceptions of Asian/ American for treating both of them as equally valid
women might be harmful, which will and important. I also want to extend my
encourage them to seek out the stories gratitude towards other faculty members
and histories of these women. By learning in Philosophy and Asian-American Stud-
about these experiences, I believe people ies. To Professor Medina, thank you for
will question and be more critical of the responding to my emails even on sabbat-
oppressive forces that informed their ini-ical and for offering me so much wisdom
tial prejudices, which will hopefully strip
and guidance on how to approach this
these powers of their dominance. This is topic. To Professor Huang, I am grateful
the ultimate future that epistemic justicefor the time, suggestions, and readings
can lead us to. The knowledge that one you offered to me and for listening to me
possesses and uses is constantly changing ramble even during your lunch breaks. To
and responding to different influences Professor Mueller and Professor Nguyen,
and experiences in our lives. We should who provided space for me to present my
consider it a powerful tool that can push thesis and believed in its worth, even in its
us towards a better world — one in which beginning stages. Finally, I am so grateful
we are no longer objects of domination, to my friends and partner, who took late-
but instead are subjects of positive change.
night phone calls, read through my work,
helped me with editing, and allowed me to
Acknowledgments talk their ear off about this project to make
Throughout my academic, profession- sense of it. I couldn’t have done this project
al, and personal journeys, I have always without these people, who have repeatedly
believed in the power of community and shown me what community means and
care. That being said, I am very thankful how we can care for each other.◆
for the community that came to my sup-
port and guided me with patience and
genuine interest in my project. First, my
advisors: Professor Goldberg in Philoso-
phy and Professor Yuh in Asian American
Studies, who not only took the time to
give me thoughtful feedback and insights
throughout my writing but also pushed me
to recognize the importance and value of

34
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35
 FEATURE
Understanding and Applying
Corporate Personhood:
A Q&A with Professor
Nicolette Bruner
By Noah Coyle

36
Professor Nicolette Bruner is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at
the Center for Legal Studies and the Program in American Studies. Her
educational background includes both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in English Lan-
guage and Literature from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining
Northwestern University’s (N.U.’s) faculty, she was a postdoctoral fel-
low with the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at
the University of Chicago and taught in the Department of English at
Western Kentucky University.
Professor Bruner’s research explores how the law shapes the way
we (humans) understand and interact with the nonhuman entities and
systems around us. She is currently working on the book project “Thing
People: Living with Corporations and Other Nonhumans,” which exam-
ines how the legal doctrine of corporate personhood offers a framework
for articulating the rights and responsibilities of other nonhuman enti-
ties, including animals, plants, rivers, and robots.
The following is a conversation with Professor Bruner, which
touched on Professor Bruner’s unique educational background, the con-
cept of corporate personhood, and “Thing People.”

[This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.]

What initially drew you to law, and how does your back-
ground in English tie in with your legal background?
When I went into law school at the University of Michigan, I was hoping to do
environmental litigation: I wanted to protect trees. Over the course of law school, I
realized a couple of things. One was that I didn’t think litigation was for me, and the
other was that a lot of the things that really interested me — particularly what the
legal idea of a person is — were things that I could pursue in a graduate education
context.
I graduated from law school, and then that fall went straight into an English
Ph.D. program. I chose to continue studying at the University of Michigan because
I was able to work under the advisement of another J.D.-Ph.D., Professor Greg
Crane, who worked in English. There aren’t that many of us J.D.-Ph.D.s who
are in English: it’s more common to find J.D.-Ph.D.s who are legal historians.
It was really nice to have somebody who understood the legalese even
as he was encouraging me to refine my skills in literature.

37
 My understanding is that your specific research
interest is corporate personhood. How did you
become interested in this legal principle?
I remember watching this documentary before I even started law school
called “The Corporation,” which was all about corporate personhood. I came
into law school thinking corporate personhood is bad, this is evil, and this makes no
sense. I think it stuck in my mind in part because I knew that there had to be a reason
why it existed, and I wanted to figure out why that was.
In the spring of my first year of law school, I took an upper-level seminar called
“The Concept of a Person.” We talked about a lot of different forms of legal personhood:
children, the seas, etc. I got hooked on this robust philosophical debate, as I realized that
there was this whole body of writing out there where people were trying to understand
what exactly a corporation is — because there’s not a good sense of how it became the way
it was — and how we deal with the fact that it is a legal person. Right after finishing that
paper, I went off and worked in Amazon on this oil case that involved Chevron-Texaco,
where the indigenous inhabitants of the Orientales area had been suing Chevron-Texaco
for irresponsible drilling practices. It was actually Texaco that did it, but when Chevron
merged with Texaco, Chevron inherited the responsibility even though Chevron hadn’t
had anything to do with it. When they bought Texaco, they bought the responsibility
as well as the assets. I just found that fascinating, looking at how this works in terms of
inheritance in terms of multinational corporate power. I just got hooked, and I’m still
hooked.

What is corporate personhood, and how did it come to be?

When we say that a corporation is a person, all that we mean from a legal sense is that
a corporation has certain rights and certain responsibilities to the other members of the
legal community. The way we got to corporate personhood is very, very old. Different
scholars will trace different origins, but we can all agree that when William Blackstone
was codifying English common law in the late 18th century, he wrote about corporations
at the very end of his first volume, which is all about persons. Blackstone explains that
we have corporate persons because it’s seen as “for the good of the public” to have certain
institutions be able to do things like own land and enter into contracts. For example,
with N.U., we have the idea that N.U. can own the land and the buildings upon which it
functions. We don’t grant each successive president with authority and ownership over
that, because then the properties would be each president’s personal assets. We want to
say that the university is something that can own land, and so that is legal personhood.
Originally, the corporate person was only granted by the sovereign to public inter-
est works. In the early republic, you could get a charter from the state legislature to do so,
but you had to show that it was for a public purpose. Ironically, the Jacksonians are the
ones who are responsible for the modern state of the corporation. They didn’t like the
fact that you had to have influence with the legislature to get a charter, so they lobbied

38
to make the status of forming a corporation open to everyone just by filing paperwork.
So, we had what’s called general incorporation, in which each state had its own proce-
dure for granting the corporate person, which led to the gradual loosening of the public
service requirement.
That’s the origin of corporate personhood. Even the people who argue that we
should abolish it will say that they don’t have a problem with a corporation owning
its own property or being able to enter into a contract. What they’re actually arguing
when they say they want to abolish corporate personhood is that they want the corporate
person to have a more narrow set of rights than it now enjoys. I honestly would agree
that a corporation has more rights than it can bear, but I don’t think the answer is to
abolish corporate personhood because I don’t think that’s practical or feasible. We can
use corporate personhood in a way that is more socially just.

Considering “Thing People,” how does corporate personhood

offer a framework for articulating the rights and responsibili-
ties of other nonhuman entities?
In my earlier career, I was mostly just working on corporate personhood, but I was
also interested in Animal Studies. It took me a little while to realize that those weren’t
different interests; they were actually part of the same question, which is how we, as
humans, relate to entities that aren’t human. Part of the way in which we’ve gotten into
the current, distorted state of corporate personhood is that we have expectations of the
corporation that it can’t bear. We cannot expect a corporation to feel: to feel guilt, to
feel empathy. It’s not built like that, but we give it these rights that in a natural person
— which is what the law calls an individual person like you and me — would be balanced
by all of these other responsibilities that we know how to bear, given how individual
human minds work. When we ask corporations to do these things, we end up in trouble.
My argument is that we need to acknowledge that we are interacting with and ex-
pecting things of nonhumans, who then can sometimes expect things from us in return.
I’m not arguing that a dog should have the same set of rights and responsibilities as a
human being, a tree, a lizard, or so on. What I’m saying is that we are already expecting
things from nonhumans and asking them to do things and interacting with them. I think
that if we just clear our minds of the idea that a person has to be a human and that there
are only a few ways to be a person, then we can just understand these relationships we
already have a lot more clearly, as corporate personhood has already opened up the idea
that we can imagine in law a person that’s not a human.

39
 by Nina M. Wetoska
The Effects of Power
Dynamics in University-
Community Partnerships
School of Education and Social Policy
Faculty Advisers: Sepehr Vakil and Terri Sabol
Abstract
This study will examine the power dynamics between undergraduate students
and adult community members, and their effects on mediating these relation-
ships within the realm of university—community partnerships. More specifi-
cally, this paper explores a community engagement program categorized as an
out-of-school learning initiative. This means that the partnership is between a
university entity and an external organization, or in this case, several communi-
ty organizations. The relationships between undergraduate students and adult
community members is an important dimension to investigate because it is vast-
ly understudied and consequential to the outcome of the partnership. Through
the analysis of end-of-the-year surveys, Identity Journals, and Team Lead focus
group transcripts, the data reveals the significant effects of preexisting content
expertise, pre-planning meetings, and resource access. These observations led
to my present research question: How do power dynamics mediate relationships
between Team Leads (T.L.s) and Undergraduate Collaboratives (U.C.s) within
Young People’s Race Power and Technology Project (YPRPT)?
This case study of YPRPT reveals the complexity of undergraduate and com-
munity member relationships within an organization bringing high schoolers,
undergraduates (U.C.s), and community partners (T.L.s) together to investigate
the impacts that technology has on marginalized groups of color through the cre-
ation of investigative documentaries. Successful interactions occurred when the
intrapersonal skills of all facilitators were respected and valued, which was aided
by interpersonal skills such as active listening and a shared sense of teamwork
and purpose. The most cited interaction event mentioned was the collaborative
method of planning sessions. These gave the facilitators time to get to know each
other on both a personal and professional level. This gained knowledge then led
to a sense of trust, limited due to time but still present and evident, and a division
of responsibilities that supported the learning of the participants.
40
 “ “How do power dynamics mediate relationships
between Team Leads (T.L.s) and Undergraduate
Collaboratives (U.C.s) within Young People’s
Race Power and Technology Project (YPRPT)?”

Methodology
To understand the relationships between
the U.C.s and T.L.s, I examined the
surveys and focus group transcripts that
were collected after the completion of the
2020–2021 YPRPT cohort in June and July
2021. This data will be complemented by
Identity Journals that included reflections
upon weekly meetings between U.C. and
T.L. personnel, from January to June 2021.
YPRPT involved both a program and a
research component. With support from a
National Science Foundation grant, T.L.s
were compensated with $1,350, and U.C.s
were compensated with $675, which was
distributed at the end of the program. I
experienced the YPRPT program as an
U.C., which unfortunately barred me from
viewing the data of my personal T.L.s
due to IRB restrictions, and the research
component as a member of the research
team, which allowed me convenient access
to the data from this population and deep
knowledge about the program’s context.
The data includes a thorough survey taken
at the end of the program by both the T.L.s
and U.C.s, which I designed with the help
of YPRPT’s Curriculum Team, transcripts
from Team Lead focus groups that were
conducted in June and July 2021, and Iden-
tity Journals completed at the end of every
”
weekly session throughout the program.
The use of YPRPT as a case study is in-
tended to extend current scholarship and
address the broader context of undergrad-
uate-community member relationships in
university-community partnerships.
I perceive several concerns regard-
ing sample size and anonymity. Since
the sample is small — 8 U.C.s and 13
T.L.s — identities can be compromised if
not handled carefully. Additionally, this
sample is representative of the population
in this specific case study, but there is
a range of university-community part-
nerships that vary in nature and scale.
Despite these limitations, YPRPT remains
an important case study to use to explore
university-community partnerships. The
out-of-school learning initiative currently
works with community members and
undergraduates and is rapidly growing and
adapting as it progresses through its first
few years.
Analytic Approach
My approach to the analysis of all three
sources, particularly the focus group
transcripts that offered the most in terms
of the amount of content, combined
inductive (drawing conclusions from the
observations) and deductive (drawing
conclusions from one’s logic and previous

41
 premises) reasoning. All the analysis and
notes on findings regarding the sources
were recorded on a Google Docs. I used
a spreadsheet to record qualitative data
because the data sources were not ex-
tensive or lengthy, so a more complex
method such as coding via NVivo could
distract from the content of the data. The
dual reasoning approach began with the
application of inductive reasoning, allow-
ing me to develop a notion about how
the individuals experienced the program.
Next, deductive reasoning required going
into the data a second time, through the
lens of inductive reasoning’s findings,
to determine whether or not there was
any substantive evidence to support the
claims. I created a comprehensive codebook
in Google Sheets after reading through all
three sources of data to be used across all the
sources. This comprehensive method main-
tained cohesion and consistency in coding.
Results
All names are pseudonymized to protect
the individuals’ identities. Team 1’s pseud-
onyms include U.C. 1, T.L. A, and T.L. B;
Team 2’s pseudonyms include U.C. 2, T.L.
C, and T.L. B.
Undergraduate Collaborators’ Views of
Team Leads
Data taken from Identity Journals and
end-of-the-year surveys illuminated the
perception of the T.L.s by the U.C.s. The
overall sentiment was satisfaction with the
pairings of T.L.s and U.C.s. The U.C.s gave
the responses of Great and Excellent to
the survey question, “How would you rate
your overall experience with your T.L.s?”
Three overarching themes included U.C.s’
acknowledgment of T.L.s’ content expertise,
imbalance of preparation responsibilities,
and mixed experiences with communication.
42
Firstly, several times in the docu-
ments, the U.C.s spoke about the preexist-
ing knowledge that their respective T.L.s
brought to the program. U.C. 1 included
the following response in their survey: “My
T.L.s were amazing at their jobs of connect-
ing to students, making them feel welcome,
and checking up on whether they were
engaged. [T.L. B] went above and beyond
with helping out with video production/
editing, and I don’t think I could’ve done it
without them.” The content expertise came
from the prior work experience that T.L.
B had with video production and editing.
The T.L.’s current job is video producing,
meaning they sponsored students who also
took part in video production and editing
and thus had some awareness coming into
the program. Both T.L.s had a connection
with their students that created a comfort-
able environment in which the students
engaged with the material and each other.
Despite both U.C.s being positive
about the skillset and connection with the
students that the T.L.s brought, there was
an imbalance in workload — elucidating
the second theme. U.C. 1 listed several
responsibilities that they took on that the
T.L.s did not. Though they wrote “which
is normally totally cool!”, they continued to
write that they felt rushed, which increased
pressure on the U.C. even before entering
a weekly session. The same U.C. expressed
their frustration with the work distribution
and responsibilities that mostly fell onto the
U.C.s; however, it is unclear whether or
not the preparation work was explained or
available for the T.L.s to complete. Either
way, the imbalance resulted in U.C. 1 feeling
tired, which could have adversely affected
the U.C.-T.L. relationship. However, U.C.
1 did mention that the T.L.s conducted the
communication with the participants and
their parents.
 The third theme revolves around
the myriad of experiences in communi-
cation between the U.C.s and T.L.s. This
communication took place outside of
pre-planning sessions and weekly sessions.
The latter will be discussed in the Collab-
oration Approaches section. As was noted
in statements by U.C. 1, over-communi-
cation was caused by an unclear division
of roles and program progress. They also
noted that overall communication “could
have been smoother.” Contrastingly, U.C.
2 proposes that frequent communication
helped the team in its production of the
documentaries. Additional coordination
was required for this U.C. compared to
the other seven teams due to the multiple
documentaries that this U.C.’s partnership
chose to complete. The strength of their
communication resulted in more oppor-
tunities for the students in the group to
be directly involved in the documentary
creation, whether that be in the form of a
director, producer, or editor.
Team Leads’ Views of Undergraduate
Collaborators
Similar to the U.C.s, the T.L.s selected the
answer choices of Good and Excellent for
the question: How would you rate your
overall experience with your team’s U.C.?
Across the data of all four T.L.s included in
the sample, they most frequently described
their U.C.s in terms of personality charac-
teristics and connection as well as access
to Northwestern University’s (N.U.’s)
resources. An interesting finding was also
that T.L.s talked far less about the U.C.s in
their Identity Journals than the U.C.s talked
about them. They also seldom brought up
their U.C. in the focus groups. Additional-
ly, there were several occasions where the
experiences of the U.C.s and T.L.s did not
align, such as their opinions on the quality
of communication.
When describing the U.C.s, T.L.s
often resort to personal characteristics to
describe their U.C. in contrast with the
U.C.s citing the T.L.s’ strengths while
commenting on their relationship. The
following quote reflects the views of U.C.
1 by one T.L. of Group 1, T.L. B:
My team leader, [U.C. 1], was really
good at encouraging [their group] and
shining the work that they did. And
just giving that boost of confidence …
just shout[ing] them out and say[ing],
“Man, thank you for contributing your
work. Thank you for contributing
your piece.” Like [U.C. 1] was really
great with that.
Some key descriptors revolve around their
connection to the students. The nature of
U.C. 1 encouraged participants to open
up and thus be more involved in weekly
sessions and share more of themselves.
Unlike the T.L.s, U.C. 1 did not know the
other students before the program, which
makes this connection noteworthy. Ab-
sent from T.L. B’s Identity Journals are any
mention of the U.C.’s content knowledge.
The void is intriguing because the U.C. at-
tended weekly meetings in preparation for
the program and continued to attend week-
ly curriculum preparatory meetings run by
members of the Curriculum Team. Despite
this, the U.C.’s genial attitude was the main
takeaway by the T.L.s on their relationship.
On the more logistical side of the
program, the T.L.s acknowledged the
U.C.s’ access to N.U.’s vast wealth of
resources. As students, the U.C.s could
obtain materials from N.U. that T.L.s’ did
not. T.L. B notes this beneficial access as
the following: “[U.C. 1] made sure that our
team succeeded by providing resources
and equipping students with laptops
or by [U.C. 1] utilizing NWU [N.U.’s]
equipment to open USB drives.” T.L. B
43
 recognizes that the U.C. has the privilege
of acquiring equipment from N.U., which

“
was at no cost to the undergraduate. This
was instrumental for this team’s students
to actively participate in the documenta-
ry—making process. All individuals studied
Facilitators as a Support System
commented on the
While examining the data, the most com- appreciation they had
monly cited theme was the concept of an for the other facilitation
internal support system. All individuals
studied commented on the appreciation
team members bringing
they had for the other facilitation team positive energy to the
members bringing positive energy to sessions and taking
the sessions and taking charge when the
individuals were not able to. The findings
charge when the

”
were not unique to one group but were individuals were not
replicated and described in comparable able to.
ways among all of the groups. The follow-
ing two quotes came from Identity Jour-
nals on Week 1 and Week 4 respectively.
U.C. 1: Today was a little overwhelming
— first time co-leading was a little
nerve wracking … I’m so incredibly their fellow T.L.s and U.C.s. The two other
grateful for my co-leads in making facilitators smoothly ran the meetings and
these 1.5 hours go by smoothly and found solutions to issues such as unreliable
keeping up the friendly atmosphere. internet. Facilitators shifted responsibili-
T.L. A: My alarm rang today for TREE ties based on the abilities, both technolog-
[also known as YPRPT] and in the ically and personally, of each individual.
activities of the day, I did not connect Additionally, there were no mentions of
that it was Tuesday for Zoom. I feel the absence of a U.C. or T.L. in any of the
that my co—facilitators had to pull my data sources, which means they did not
weight. I need to be more attentive. recount or mention the absence or disrup-
U.C. 1 felt the support in the form of com- tion of not having a facilitator present at
fort. They did not participate or facilitate the meetings.
any less, but they did lean into and subse-
Role and Involvement Concerns
quently acknowledge the atmosphere and
Both parties, but primarily the T.L.s, lacked
efficient facilitation that the T.L.s provid-
an understanding of their role within the
ed. The quote by T.L. A was an occurrence
facilitation portion and direct involvement
that was cited by three of the four T.L.s.
in the participants’ activities. The most
Whether it was forgetting the meeting,
thorough and explicit examples come from
having weather and car troubles, or not
the T.L. focus group transcripts. A variety
having a reliable internet connection,
of confusion was present, such as the lev-
none of these T.L.s felt unsupported by
el of involvement they should have with

44
the documentary creation and curriculum
knowledge. The latter was an issue for two
reasons: (1) groups that had their sessions
early in the week received the curriculum
(i.e., task list) on Sundays and thus had lit-
tle time to prepare and (2) the U.C.s had
weekly preparation meetings where they
went over the activities and objectives of
the week, while the only knowledge the
T.L.s had was the curriculum that was sent
out on Sundays. T.L. C describes the issue
of involvement level: “And it was just like
... I always struggle with like, how hands-
off we wanted to be? ‘Cause we were pretty
hands-off in the beginning and at the end,
I was like, ‘Oh, actually this group needs
someone who’s like way more hands-on.’”
The selected excerpt and remaining re-
sponses show that there was confusion not
only when directly interacting with the
students, but also when T.L.s and U.C.s
went into their Zoom breakout rooms. As
noted by T.L. C, there was a learning curve
in which teams had to learn what worked
best for them and tailor the facilitation
plan to the students’ needs. Though the
flexibility and adaptability of the facilita-
tion can make the program more suited to
the team, one reason that the program was
successful was because there was not a set
or defined way to interact with the partici-
pants. Neither the U.C.s, who were versed
in the curriculum, nor the T.L.s, who were
not, received information on the level of
involvement they should have had in the
documentary process. The lack of concrete
directions or suggestions led to a feeling of
confusion and disorder.
Discussion and Concluding
Thoughts
In summary, the YPRPT case study reveals
the complexity of undergraduate (U.C.) and
community member (T.L.) relationships.
Successful interactions occurred when
the intrapersonal skills of all facilitators
were respected and valued, and this gained
knowledge led to a sense of trust, limited due
to time but still present and evident. Unfor-
tunately, academic researchers, including the
N.U. students, continue to hold the status of
academic superiority and legitimacy; how-
ever, the T.L.s attempted to mitigate these.
Through expressing their own preexisting
knowledge and expertise as well as a desire
to educate the students, T.L.s voiced and
emphasized the value of their knowledge.
Program Suggestions
Suggestions for YPRPT stem from these
findings. Although the capacity of many
T.L.s and U.C.s is limited beyond the re-
quirements of the program, implementing
a flexible time or avenue for the facilitators
to connect and organize sessions would help
with the formal and informal relationships.
These could also serve as opportunities to
mitigate any issues. As noted previously,
U.C.s can be overwhelmed by the additional
responsibility of logistical planning and cre-
ating necessary materials for the meetings,
but do not always feel comfortable voicing
their concerns. Finding that balance between
program commitments and realistic expecta-
tions pertaining to the facilitators’ capacity is
difficult but deserves more attention.
Additionally, the N.U. students had
primary access to the resources of N.U. and
YPRPT. The relationships that U.C.s built
with the YPRPT team due to their time
spent interacting and being educated by the
team created an imbalance in power. T.L.s
were less likely to reach out to YPRPT than
U.C.s because T.L.s would often ask the U.C.
to connect with the high schoolers as medi-
ators instead. U.C.s also received curriculum
training prior to the introduction of the
community organizations into the program.
45
 “Knowledge of the length and extent of contact is
needed to stimulate and encourage
trust-building.”

Offering a program tailored to the needs university-community partnerships, but it

of the T.L.s would create a more cohesive does highlight the complex nature of the
program and mitigate the issues of role un- undergraduate-community member rela-
derstanding. A training proposal for T.L.s istionship. The small sample size of two of the
to make the program open to any local com- eight teams makes a generalization of the
munity members interested in the YPRPT U.C.-T.L. relationships within YPRPT po-
themes. The proposal is a way to recruit tentially problematic. As the data was collect-
them earlier without the pressure to commit ed before the completion of this thesis, I did
too far in advance. After the completion of not have the opportunity to ask follow-up
the sessions, they would decide if they wouldquestions, particularly in the case of T.L.
like to participate in the program. This willfocus groups. Other than simple clarification
help introduce the T.L.s to both YPRPT questions, there are multiple instances where
program managers and the curriculum and a T.L. used a word related to YPRPT termi-
mitigate the access imbalance between U.C.s nology, but it was not clear whether or not it
and T.L.s. fell into the specific definition. For example,
Understandably, the capacity was limit-
T.L.s used “co-facilitators” and “team leads”
ed during the second iteration of the program,
throughout their responses. These terms
but as it scales, the team will need to grow to
did not pose confusion when in the plu-
fill the gaps in training and assistance offer-
ral form, but when they became singular
ings. A suggestion is to pause at the currentit was more difficult to discern whether
size and try adjusting the program to resolvethe T.L. was referring to their fellow T.L.
issues before scaling any further. One such or the U.C.. This problem arose because
adjustment would be the curriculum, which T.L.s appeared to be substituting the terms
can be improved by bringing together YPRPT “co-facilitators” and “team leads” for each
members, U.C.s, T.L.s, and participants to other throughout responses.
co—produce the lessons. Once these are creat- Future research should aim to test
ed, the facilitators would benefit from having
pre-program approaches to craft positive re-
all the lessons accessible to them in a Google
lationships between these parties. The aspect
Drive. This way, they can plan together more of time spent building these relationships is
than the week before. U.C.s and T.L.s could a worthwhile study. The university-commu-
also educate themselves on the topics before nity partnerships require time spent outside
they are expected to instruct the participants
of one’s primary job or responsibilities. Al-
which will increase facilitation confidence. though YPRPT offered a stipend to under-
graduates and community members, many
Limitations and Future Directions
The use of YPRPT as a case study does not similar partnerships do not have this benefit.
allow for the data to be extrapolated to all Other than paying participants for their time,

46
programs need to find the most efficient
ways to train and build connections between
facilitators. Knowledge of the length and
extent of contact is needed to stimulate and
encourage trust-building. This would ensure
that those involved do not need to overex-
tend themselves, but still experience the
benefits of having a trustworthy and reliable
relationship with their fellow facilitators. ◆

Appendix

End-of-the-Year Survey Questions

Undergraduate Collaborators
• How would you rate your overall experience with your T.L./s? (choices)
• What modes of communication worked well for your team? (Check all that apply) - Selected Choice
• Briefly, how would you describe your overall relationship with your T.L./s?
• Did you experience any challenges working with your T.L./s? (Y/N)
о Please tell us more.
• Are there any highlights or big successes that came about from working together with your T.L./s that you’d like to share?
(Y/N)
о Please tell us more.
• What strategies did you use to divide and share the work between yourself and your T.L./s?
о Consider parts of the work like curriculum prep, coordinating with students and families, mediating conflict, doing
outside research, leading and facilitating meetings
Team Leads
• How would you rate your overall experience with your team’s UC?
• Briefly, how would you describe your overall relationship with your UC?
• Did you experience any challenges working with your UC? (Y/N)
о Please tell us more.
• Are there any highlights or big successes that came about from working together with your UC that you’d like to share? (Y/N)
о Please tell us more.
• What strategies did you use to divide and share the work between yourself and your team’s UC?
о Consider parts of the work like curriculum prep, coordinating with students and families, mediating conflict, doing
outside research, leading and facilitating meetings

47
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 GENOMIC
ORGANIZATION

FEATURE
IN THE BRICKNER LAB
by Josie Chou & Hannah Xu

Winny Liu is a junior majoring in Biological Sciences and

minoring in Global Health Studies. She is an undergraduate
researcher at Northwestern University (N.U.)’s Brickner Lab,
which studies the mechanisms that control how genes are
organized in yeast and human cells.

[This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.]

49
 Q&A
How did you become able to identify which Rap1 regions are
involved in this lab? involved in localizing chromosomes to the
nuclear periphery by locating green dots
I wanted to become involved in biology
from GFP, which is in close proximity to
research because I have always been inter-
the Rap1 fragment.
ested in learning more about the details and
mechanisms of how things work at a cellu-
What are your short-term
lar level, especially in terms of genomics and
mechanisms of transcription. After looking and long-term goals for your
through the department website and read- research?
ing through publications from various labs, I would like to complete my current project
I reached out to the professor and asked to and see if there are any fragments I’m work-
join the lab. ing with now that show significant localiza-
tion to the nuclear periphery. I would also
Could you tell us about your like to improve on literature review, which
research? includes reading scientific papers and incor-
The Brickner Lab studies genomic organi- porating knowledge from literature into my
zation, and my research is specifically on own research. This could also help me with
the mechanism of the transcription factor troubleshooting issues I have in my research
Rap1. Rap1 is essential for yeast cell viability and improve at identifying problems and
because it binds to the chromosomes in the finding new solutions.
cell and pulls them to the nuclear periphery. In the future, the findings from this
Without expression of the Rap1 gene, Rap1 project will likely lead to more questions,
would not perform this necessary function, which I would like to explore further. For
causing the cell to die. example, if I find a region that shows lo-
calization to the nuclear periphery, I can
What do you typically do in explore what happens when those specific
the lab? regions are mutated in endogenous Rap1
and how that affects genomic localization.
The purpose of my research is to determine
These findings would provide more insight
which regions of Rap1, a gene necessary
into the mechanisms and functions of Rap1.
for the survival of yeast, is responsible for
directing chromosomes to the nuclear pe- What have you struggled
riphery. In order to detect these regions,
I insert Rap1 fragments into yeast and tag with most, and what have
them with DNA binding domain LexA. To you found most rewarding?
visualize where these fragments are, LexA As a student, it can be somewhat difficult
is indirectly bound to the green fluorescent to stay on top of the timing of my experi-
protein (GFP). Through imaging, I am ments. Yeast growth is very time-sensitive

50
and yeast cells will die if they are left to grow
for too long, so experiments often need to
be planned by the hour for optimal results.
However, even though I’ve had many issues
come up in my research, I find it rewarding
to identify and address them. I always hope
to succeed in my experiments, but failures
are very helpful for learning, adapting, and
gaining a fuller understanding of what the
research process actually entails.
Do you plan to continue
doing research after
graduating?
I really enjoy research, and I would love to
continue doing research after graduating
from N.U. I’m very interested in translation-
al research, and I’d like to pursue an M.D./
Ph.D. to learn more about the mechanisms
of disease and potential targets for novel
therapeutics. I would also be interested in
drug development and research regarding
how the body interacts with pathology.
What are the most valuable
lessons you’ve learned?
The most valuable lesson I’ve learned is that
research always comes with challenges and
unexpected problems, but the process of
learning adds value to the experience and
allows researchers to develop a deeper un-
derstanding of how their research works.
Do you have any advice to
undergraduates looking to
get involved in research?
Getting involved with research for the first
time can be a daunting experience. There’s
no harm in cold-emailing multiple profes-
sors and labs — it may take a while, but it
broadens the scope of opportunities you can
choose from. Adjusting to research envi-
ronments and research as a whole may also
take time, but having hands-on experience
can help you determine what kind of re-
search you’re most interested in. Research is
time-intensive, so don’t hesitate to look into
other labs if you’re not enjoying the projects
you’re working with. You’ll get the most out
of research when you’re passionate about it!
51
 by Emily Ann Brooks
Going On Seventeen:
“Type,” the Ingénue, and
Teenage Girlhood Onstage
Department of Theatre
Faculty Adviser: John Thomas Rapley
Committee Member: Jeff Hancock

Abstract
Ask the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance or a passerby in
the lobby of Northwestern University’s performing arts center and the qual-
ifications seem consistent: If a teenage girl onstage is a significant character,
then she is an ingénue. And if she is an ingénue, she is innocent, simple, a
specific kind of “pretty,” and a host of other similar requirements.
What does it mean when this is the theatre’s prescription of what young
womanhood looks like? How does it impact artists and audiences? Can we
imagine an engagement with the canon that might embody young woman-
hood in a truthful, inclusive, and positively impactful way? These questions
drove a four-part research process, consisting of investigation of published
writing, discussion with an ensemble of my peers (eight fellow young women
from N.U.’s theatre department), exploration with that ensemble via practice
and performance of a selection of relevant repertoire, and audience surveys.
While this project began out of my own frustrations from “within” the type
— often seen for ingénue roles, they felt limiting — my findings underscored
the extent to which type expectations often exclude many young women
from these roles entirely, frequently with profound consequences. I ultimate-
ly found that traditional images of young womanhood (particularly, but not
exclusively, in older texts) leave much to be desired in their impacts on both
actors and audiences. However, a radically different, positive impact seems
possible through contemporary texts which reimagine teenage girlhood
onstage, and through reinventive interpretation, staging, and/or casting of
more traditional works.
52
Academic and Ethnographic
Research: What Is
The “ingénue” falls within the broader
framework of “types of actors” (like the
leading lady/leading man, villain, etc.).
This framework often represents a point
of frustration in ensemble and community
responses — a frustration shared by Con-
stantin Stanislavski himself. Believing that
“to be able to transform one’s self physical-
ly and spiritually is the first and principle
object of acting art” (17–18), Stanislavksi
viewed typing as a mistaken custom
brought about by the assembly-line, prod-
uct/profit-driven haste of commercial the-
atre (a sentiment echoed by my ensemble).
While ensemble members and many in
the industry recognize certain value in the
concept of type, many of our professional
mentors encouraged methods of engaging
without placing oneself as an actor in a
restrictive box.
But beyond varying opinions on type
as a concept, what defines the type of the
ingénue? The Oxford Encyclopedia of The-
atre and Performance defines an ingénue
as a young heroine, “a youthful actress who
played significant parts,” a “‘female juvenile
lead’ … [for whom] qualities of innocence
and simplicity … were essential.” When
audience members entering our perfor-
mances were invited to provide their own
definition, certain descriptors appeared
over and over again, echoing the encyclo-
pedia and those provided by my ensemble:
“naïve,” “innocent,” “soprano,” “beautiful,”
“optimistic,” “two-dimensional,” and some
version of “centrally, falling in love.” Also
popular was simply the definition “young
female protagonist,” again associating
those previously listed qualities with any
significant young woman onstage.
The question of how the ingénue
ought to sound is one of the most agreed-up-
on, if most arbitrary, qualities. Scholars, my
ensemble, and audience member after au-
dience member reiterated the expectations
that if an ingénue sings, she is a soprano: As
Alexandra Apolloni points out, she produc-
es a “youthful and flexible, lyrical and high,
innocent but flirtatious” sound that makes
her liminality audible (145). Despite a fre-
quent modern expectation shift from high,
more classical singing to a high belt sound,
the lingering expectation of a soprano range
for young female leads was one of the most
frustrating to my ensemble (especially
among the altos).
As teenage girls are inherently in tran-
sition, the ingénue’s liminality was central
in academic and communal discussions.
Carefully walking a narrow line, she is “a
girl on the cusp of womanhood, caught in
an unstable, in-between state” (Appoloni,
145). Teenage girls are almost simultane-
ously infantilized and sexualized, expected
to be attractive women, but also to be pure
and innocent girls (even frequently con-
structed as desirable due to their perceived
purity/virginity). While ingénue stagings
invite us to watch a girl become a woman,
narratives frequently punish the young
woman who crosses a line into sexuality
(particularly with any degree of agency).
In this liminality, we see the centrality
of the physical embodiment of teenage girl-
hood onstage. Appoloni notes how the teen
girl’s body — already constructed as deviant
in western thought for its femininity — is
further marginalized in its incompleteness
while also facing scrutiny as it fails to re-
53
 main that of a girl and not a woman. Ariane
Balizet even proposes that “to be a girl is to
be a body” (89). With this microscope on
the teen girl’s body comes perhaps the most
central finding of this “what is” stage of my
research: The expected particular appearance
of the young female body onstage, particu-
larly the expectation that the ingénue (aka,
most significant young female characters)
can only be played by actresses who are
skinny and white.
Highlighting the impact of the expec-
tation of whiteness, Appoloni notes that
while “white girls … may try to reject an
ingénue image, for young women of col-
or working to embody the ingénue ideal
may be a necessary means of constructing
a respectable image and attaining the so-
cial mobility that that image brings” (147).
Even the ingénue’s balletic movement style
(established by Agnes DeMille in works
like Oklahoma! and Carousel) has contrib-
uted: “Ballet helped ensure that Oklahoma!
was old-fashioned and white” (Cook). The
acceptable body type of a young woman
onstage would also frequently emerge as
significant. Aspects of the ingénue, like be-
ing in love, take on a different significance
when appearance-based expectations
completely bar many from embodying
the experience at all: “My body limits my
job prospects, access to medical care and
fair trials, and — the one thing Hollywood
movies and Internet trolls most agree on
— my ability to be loved” (West, 6). Ryan
Donovan proposes that “the actor’s body
becomes a commodity in the theatrical
marketplace … this mythos provides cover
for the operation of ideologies espousing
bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of ar-
ticles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.
com)” (13). This denial of the full perspec-
tive of young womanhood, even a “ten-
dency to view fat people as somehow less-
54
“
Perhaps the most
central finding of
this “what is” stage
of my research ...
[is] the expectation
that the ingénue ...
can only be played
”
by actresses who are
skinny and white.
than,” is reflected in Broadway’s stunningly
consistent refusal to cast fat performers in
lead roles (especially ingénues) — even those
with no inherent requirement of a specific
body type: “To do so would be to concede
that fat women can play and experience the
full range of representation readily available
to thin people” (Donovan, 4).
Expectations around how young
womanhood can be embodied onstage
significantly impact the artist’s experience:
in the strikingly different processes of em-
bodying classic and stereotypical versus
truthful imaginings, and of course on the
very practical level of casting and employ-
ment. Ensemble members recounted the
complicated experience of carrying gen-
dered expectations into audition rooms,
and one described the sense that choosing
the self-tape take where she looked the best,
rather than performed the best, would best
serve her chances of booking. Many artists
in my audience reported their own frustra-
tions with the restrictions of type, either
wishing to break out of a type into which
they felt boxed, or watching themselves
and their friends feel shut out from certain
roles because of lack of alignment with the
type placed on those characters, especial-
ly noting how the ingénue’s “innocence”
can sometimes mean “a very specific type
— physically, racially.” The effects of ap-
pearance-based employment go deep: One
artist in my audience reported “how I’ve
been cast impacts how I perceive myself
as pretty vs. hot, and how desirable I un-
derstand myself to be.” Another described
how as an Asian woman, the “ideal to be
white girl gorgeous … is suffocating and
often makes me feel unworthy of love.”
While I expected the greatest impact
of ingénue limitations to land upon the
performer, these type-driven perceptions
of self and others are propagated even more
broadly, if to a less profound degree, in
the witnessing of these embodied stories,
whether the audience members are teenage
girls themselves or others taught by these
representations how to think about young
womanhood. As ethnographer D. Soyini
Madison highlights, “Representation has
consequences: How people are represented
is how they are treated” (4). Echoing Don-
ovan’s article, one ensemble member high-
lighted the broadly damaging impact of
appearance-driven casting, and the way it
can lead to implications such as, “You don’t
look like the kind of person who can have
a romantic partner — you are here to make
jokes about how you look and then leave.”
Ensemble members reported growing up
with a variety of relationships to these im-
ages of ingénue-ity they witnessed onstage.
Several described a wish to be the ingénue,
because those were the pretty ones, the
main characters with pretty music to sing
and a happy romantic ending. Others, who
felt that expectations of skinny whiteness
made any hope of playing an ingénue a lost
cause, had responded by looking at ingénue
characters with disdain for their apparent
powerlessness and dependence on men.
While the ingénue’s body can be a
locus of appearance-based exclusion, there
is also hopeful narrative power to be found
in the ingénue’s body in motion in perfor-
mance. The significance of the ingénue’s
expected physical life was highlighted in
ensemble discussion, whether considering
a dance context or how archetype is navi-
gated by the way characters move through
the world/take up space. Stacey Wolf takes
this significance a step further, proposing
a potential space between the way a char-
acter is written (e.g., the textual level of
power, strength, etc., that a character is
supposed to have), and the inherent phys-
ical power of a woman singing or dancing
onstage. Wolf notes how “in many cases,
through music and dance and staging and
scenography, what happens in the perfor-
mance contradicts what happens in the
dramatic text” (239), as in the “single girl
musicals” of the 1960s, in which the female
protagonist is punished for her sexuality,
independence, and actions, but the chore-
ography and blocking “allow the female ac-
tor powerful performance opportunities,”
ultimately celebrating her (55). Taking
as an example the title character of Sweet
Charity, Wolf notes how “the exuberant ac-
tion — the ‘doing’ — performatively brings
feminist possibilities into being” (63).
Similarly, though the text of Carousel feels
hardly feminist — Louise is literally taught
that sometimes domestic violence can “feel
like a kiss” — there is incredible strength
in the performative action of this single
young woman devouring the stage with
virtuosic, athletic movement. This duality
55
 between text and performance, namely
the feminist possibilities to be found in
the “doing,” is why my thesis project had
to perform. It would inspire the major
question driving our rehearsal/workshop
process: Can teenage girlhood and the
roles we get to play be embodied onstage
with that strength, intelligence, complex-
ity, and depth that represent a truthful
and positively impactful performance,
even if the character might not initially
appear so based on the words on the page
or traditional interpretations?
Performance as Research:
What Can Be
Out of this research and
discussion came the
development of the per-
formance portion of this
project. First, I aimed to
share with audiences an
S “the
performance expression of the research
portion of this and discoveries accom-
project”
plished so far by myself
and my ensemble: an ex-
ploration of what teenage girlhood looks
like onstage and what stories it can tell,
from blueprints to exciting contemporary
breaks from precedent. Audience surveys
would also open up this conversation to
the Northwestern community beyond my
ensemble.
Next, and most importantly, this
performance component would serve as
a final step in my research into the pow-
er of performance and artistic process,
investigating whether a more truthful,
empowered version of unsatisfying roles
could be created via a performance’s inter-
pretation (especially by artists of different
perspectives and experiences), staging, and
casting. I aimed to highlight the ways in
which existing trends and messages could
56
be questioned and complicated in a hope-
ful and powerful way, both in the perfor-
mance of classic roles and via innovative
new work. Throughout the show, charac-
ter descriptions of each role (drawn from
real audition postings) introduced each
piece, highlighting significant qualities for
audience members to track, therefore pro-
viding context and keeping the practical
experience of casting present.
Some of the first explicitly teenage
characters I landed upon in my research
were Liesl of The Sound of Music and Louise
of Carousel. Struck by their similarity as
dance-driven Rodgers and Hammerstein
characters, I conceived what would be the
opening of the “Blueprints” chapter of my
performance — a section devoted to those
especially archetypal images that set prece-
dents of teenage girlhood onstage, aiming
both to highlight said precedents and to
explore whether hopeful innovation could
be found for these characters in embodied
performance. As Stacey Wolf notes, “the
compositional, theatrical, and performance
conventions that Rodgers and Hammer-
stein and their colleagues developed in
the 1940s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s remain the
touchstones against which book musicals
are measured.” Among those conventions
was the blueprint for the musical theatre
ingénue: her sound, behavior, and perhaps
most significantly, her physical life, via
iconic dance sequences. In what I would
informally call my “R&H
Dancing Ingénue Med-
ley,” I explored the strik-
ingly consistent trends
in the stories of Liesl,
Louise, and that original
S “R&H Dancing
dancing ingénue, Laurey
Ingénue
Medley” of Oklahoma!. Each of
their songs, ballets, and
stories (solidly situated
in the balletic vocabulary established by
Agnes DeMille) not only revolves around
relationship with a male love interest but
leads eventually to some abandonment by/
loss of said love interest, shown to devas-
tate the ingénue (Rolf becomes a Nazi, the
Carnival Boy discards Louise for being
too young, and in Laurey’s nightmare her
Curley is replaced and then killed by Jud).
I highlighted this via inclusion of “Sixteen
Going on Seventeen” (a fitting opener with
its explicit discussion of so many archetyp-
al ingénue qualities), a romantic Laurey/
Curley pas de deux excerpt from Oklahoma! ’s
“Dream Ballet,” and a slightly condensed
version of Carousel’s “Louise Ballet.”
During the “Carnival Boy”/Louise pas de
deux, Liesl and Rolf as well as Laurey and
Curley re-entered to perform identical
waltzes in parallel, and when the Carnival
boy abandoned Louise, audiences watched
the abandonment of Liesl and Laurey as
well.
Including young
women of Wiliam Shake-
speare, whose writings
have carried a unique de-
gree of cultural authority
from high school class- S “young women
of Wiliam
rooms to massive stages Shakespeare”
for centuries, was essen-
tial to this chapter. While
his tragic heroines like Juliet and Ophelia
have long been considered emblematic of
girlhood broadly (Balizet 26–27), ensemble
members reported a stronger interest in
characters like Rosalind and Viola (who
survive the play, and — disguised as men
— are allowed a unique level of power,
action, and voice). To incorporate both a
classic ingénue and one of his many “young
women dressed as a man,” I paired two
monologues speaking to very different ex-
periences of romance: Juliet’s “Gallop apace
you fiery-footed steeds” speech, and Viola’s
“Aye, but I know/too well what love wom-
en to men may owe.” Cutting between
Juliet’s hopeful, impatient anticipations
of love consummated (expressed in the
privacy of her room), and Viola’s defense
of a woman’s capacity for love (delivered
in the guise of a boy to the man she loves)
illuminated the differing actions and ex-
pressions allowed under different presen-
tations of gender, while also highlighting
shared core experiences.
The similarly iconic in-
génue blueprint Nina of
Checkov’s The Seagull was
also investigated, and a
traditionally specific im-
age was also complicated S “Nina of
Checkov’s The
via the sharing of her Seagull”
final “I am the seagull”
monologue among three
different performers.
Chapter Two of the performance,
“Variations on a Theme,” explored a va-
riety of images of young
womanhood built upon
those blueprints, inno-
vating or deviating but
not completely rein-
venting the trope. The
“Chava Ballet Sequence” S “Chava Ballet
from Fiddler on the Roof Sequence” from
represented the “dancing Fiddler
Roof”
on the
ingénues” of the next gen-
eration of leading theatre
makers (figures like Jerome Robbins, Jerry
Bock, and Sheldon Harnick) and explored
the journey of growing up that is key to
so many teen girl stories. Although the se-
quence is nominally a reflection on Chava,
I was struck by the centrality of her love
interest to Robbins’ original choreography
for the film, particularly the emphasis on
this figure carrying her away from the joy-
57
 “ A message worth flagging is sent when one
of the only culturally authoritative theatrical
teenage girls to deviate radically from ingénue
expectations of pleasing passivity and
innocence is also very explicitly the villain.

ful childhood the text of the song

describes. In my interpretation, I aimed to
reclaim the ballet as Chava’s story and to
emphasize her agency in the choice to leave
behind her past for the man she loves.
Next was one of the most oft-cited exam-
ples by my ensemble of
narrative punishment of
an ingénue who crosses a
line into sexuality: Wend-
la of Spring Awakening,
presented in a quartet
S “Whispering”
arrangement of her solo
“Whispering.” A very
different manifestation of
requirements for ingénue
purity was presented in
a speech from Abigail
Williams of The Crucible,
a frequent piece of high
S “Abigail school required reading
Williams of The
Crucible”
and a theatrical image of
teenage girlhood grant-
ed cultural capital and
authority perhaps second only to Shake-
speare. Even posted character descriptions
for this role specify Abigail as everything
a teenage ingénue is not supposed to be:
strong-willed, passionate, keenly aware of
her own power, ruthless in her pursuit of
getting what she wants, possessing a fiery
temper, and most importantly an unapol-
ogetic, present sexuality. These character
”
descriptions also explicitly label her as the
antagonist. Of course, certain action she
takes (deceptions that lead to the deaths of
several members of her community) might
merit the title, but a message worth flag-
ging is sent when one of the only culturally
authoritative theatrical teenage girls to de-
viate radically from ingénue expectations
of pleasing passivity and innocence is also
very explicitly the villain.
As suggested by my ensemble, many
of our theatrical representations of teenage
years come in musicals
following the high school
experience, represented
in this performance with
“One Perfect Moment”
S “One Perfect
from Bring It On. Because
Moment” from most of the characters in
Bring It On” this genre are teenagers,
type here is expanded
only to a broader cast of still-archetypal
characters (like the “mean girl” and her
posse, the quirky best friend, and the still
ingénue-esque protagonist like Bring It
On’s Campbell).
Chapter Two con-
cluded with a medley of
the young female char-
acters of musical theatre
giant Stephen Sondheim.
S “medley” Although perhaps more
known for his mature

58
female characters, each young woman
Sondheim did write exists in interesting
dialogue with the trope of the ingénue. A
Little Night Music offers three distinct imag-
es of young womanhood: Frederika, barely
into her teens and eager be taught about
the world and womanhood by the older
women in her life; Petra, the young maid
who rejects ingénue expectations of purity
and propriety in her belief that “there are
mouths to be kissed before mouths to be
fed”; and Anne, the 18-year-old trophy
wife and almost-parody of the virginal (so-
prano) ingénue who cannot bring herself
to sleep with her new (and much older)
husband. Though bearing that stereotypi-
cal marker of the trope, “it is not that she
is so chaste and pure, but that the relation-
ship, as are most of the others in the play, is
inappropriate” — she can only call this love
“disgusting,” “insane,” and “a humiliating
business” (Hanson, 18). Cinderella of Into
the Woods, also at first glance an archetypal
soprano ingénue, deviates from the classic
ingénue wish for “nothing more than to
fall in love, get married, and live happily
ever after” (Hanson, 26) — throughout Act
One, she is not sure that a rich, handsome
Prince is what she really wants (Hanson,
26), and by Act Two she has left behind
that dream in pursuit of a life “somewhere
in between” the binaries of the ingénue
story. Her frequent scene partner, approx-
imately teenage Little Red, is allowed a
journey in which loss of ingénue innocence
is not punished but is instead rewarded
with strength and insight found. Sweeney
Todd’s Johanna, on the other hand, was
brought forward by my ensemble as the
classic ingénue: a pure, innocent, explicitly
blonde soprano locked in a cage in need of
saving. Sondheim’s innovation in Sweeney
Todd comes in the broader world and sto-
ry in which Johanna lives, a dark one in
which her archetypal ingenuity is far from
condoned as ideal young womanhood
(and which requires from her exceptional
strength and resilience).
The dilemmas and philosophies of
these young women are posed and shared
in medley until the peak archetype-ality
of their unison chorus of
Johanna’s “Green Finch
and Linnet Bird” can be
stood no longer, and with
a group arrangement of
“Everything Else” from
Next to Normal, we break S “Everything
Else” from Next
into Chapter Three: Re- to Normal”
imaginings. In the discus-
sion of theatrical teenage girls who did feel
truthful, Natalie of Next to Normal was an
ensemble favorite, whose striking contrast
to traditional ingénue Johanna is evident
from her first lyrics: “Mozart was crazy/
flat fucking crazy/batshit, I hear” would
never be acceptable conversational content
for “if I cannot fly, let me
sing” Johanna. Perhaps
even more radical in the
teen-girl repertoire is Fun
Home’s Medium Allison,
whose ballad “Changing
My Major” breaks prece- S “Changing My
dents in its unapologetic, Major”
joyous celebration of
not only sexuality but
queerness, also bringing
the unfortunately rare
perspective of a female
composer. Included next
were excerpts from “Ev-
erlasting” and the “Story
of Winnie Foster Ballet” S “‘Everlasting’
from Tuck Everlasting. and the ‘Story of
Winnie Foster
While a contemporary Ballet’”
iteration of the tradition-
al ingénue dream ballet trope, this piece
59
 represents a significant shift: It is truly fo-
cused on Winnie and her journey, and cele-
brates her growth from young ingénue-ity
to adulthood on her own terms. Adult
Winnie ends the ballet confidently and
joyfully onstage with only her younger self,
reflecting on her journey. I aimed to give
the Rodgers and Hammerstein ingénues
the hopeful ending they had been denied by
bringing them back to share with Winnie
in this concluding moment of supported,
independent, and confident hope.
The performance
ended with an excerpt
from the play that in-
spired the entire thesis:
Sarah DeLappe’s The
Wolves. With the excep-
S “Sarah tion of a briefly-appear-
DeLappe’s The ing “soccer mom,” every
Wolves” character in the play
is a 16-or 17-year-old
girl, and there is not a typical “ingénue”
among them. Instead, each is beautifully
complicated, in-process, and real, evident
even from the brief character descriptions
DeLappe provides: one is “brainy, morbid,
budding elitist, thoughtful,” and another
“intense performance anxiety, perfection-
ist, high achiever” (DeLappe, 2). Perhaps
most striking is the physical life that this
play inherently highlights. Requirements
of poised prettiness are tossed out the
window: Clad in soccer uniforms, pony-
tails, and minimal makeup, appearance is
the least of these girls’ concerns. Technical
ballet vocabulary is replaced with soccer
drills. In a small excerpt capturing the cha-
os, conflict, and joy of the team, the casual,
energized, overlapping chatter of my en-
semble on rehearsal breaks was strikingly
mirrored onstage.
The performance concluded with
an experiment in audience engagement.
60
Upon entering the the-
atre, audience members
were asked to provide
their definition of an in-
génue, written on a sticky
S “audience note and placed in a small,
engagement” glittering box that lived
on the edge of the stage
throughout the show. On the way offstage
from their final scene, one ensemble mem-
ber grabbed the box, and we returned to
the stage together to open it. A handful
of definitions were read aloud, inviting
(hopefully) newly poignant reflection
after the performances of the last hour,
and placed on a dry erase board where the
question “What is an ingénue?” had been
inhabiting a corner of the set. Next, the
dry erase board was flipped to reveal the
question “What are we?,” and my ensem-
ble adorned it with qualities of themselves
that they valued (many absent from those
ingénue definitions) with a joy and chaos
reminiscent of the last scene they per-
formed. The communal gathering orches-
trated by the performance allowed the col-
lection of audience experiences with type
(reflected in research discussions above)
along with post-performance reflections,
including realizations of the prevalence
of ingénue tropes and excitement around
roles that deviated from it, discovery of
greater depth and new perspectives on cer-
tain characters, and “thinking about who
we are rather than what we should be.”
Finally, a post-performance ensemble
discussion allowed further reflection on
artist experience and the power of perfor-
mance. Several ensemble members noted
the evolution of their experience — even
on a physical level — over the course of
the performance itself, reporting decreased
performativity in the way they inhabited
their bodies as they moved from balletic
sopranos to soccer-playing teens. Riley
Glick (who played as Winnie and others)
was struck by the transformation of agency
over the course of the show: from a young
woman sitting in a chair being informed
of her deeply stereotypical ingénue qual-
ities in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” to
the earnest self—discovery and truth of
“Changing My Major,” to the chorus of
voices in The Wolves. While Ruby Gib-
son (who played as Medium Allison and
others) anticipated the joyful honesty in
the experience of singing “Changing My
Major,” she was surprised to find in the
journey of the performance the presence of
some of those truthful qualities in earlier
roles as well, reflecting the history that led
to such roles as Medium Allison.
Ensemble members reported an
evolution in their conceptions of more
traditionally archetypal characters. The
significance of physical life in hopeful re-
mounting of such roles was highlighted,
both by those to perform the roles and
those to witness them: As staging and
performance brought each one to life in-
dividually and placed them in conversation
with each other, Ruby felt prompted to
take the golden-age era characters more
seriously as women with things to say (not
just women to whom things happened).
Even within perceived confines of ballet
vocabulary or choreography, Ruby and
Riley noted the power of dance as an es-
cape, a way for characters to come off the
page and gain depth, a language for them
to express themselves clearly regardless of
text. In the physical experience of dancing
Louise, Elyse Yun found multiple aspects
of the ingénue experience manifested: the
loss of independence as she literally gave
more and more of her weight to her dance
partner over the course of their pas de deux
but also the empowering hope for growth
over the course of Louise’s journey, finally
found in an expansive physical gesture and
moment to confidently stand and be seen
in her re-entrance at the end of the Win-
nie Foster ballet. She shared that it was this
anticipation of an ultimate story of growth,
joy, and independence that allowed her to
play Louise’s moments of abandonment
and despondence without feeling that she
was doing the character a disservice. Em-
ily Zhang was one of many to describe a
powerful journey of learning not to judge
the archetypal characters she portrayed;
playing Juliet, she reported a process of
recognizing that even those traditionally
ingénue, “weak” traits associated with the
character can simply be the real feelings of
a teenage girl, and that a character need not
be anti-feminine to be strong.

“The characters could be messy, good and bad,

kind and unkind, and even reflect those aspects of
stereotype that can be a part of the real teenage
experience, because as an ensemble, they could
reflect the full real range of the experience of
teenage girlhood.”

61
 The impact of connection and com-
munity on interpretation and experience
of this performance was raised as influ-
ential by several ensemble members. The
experience of friends watching friends
perform roles they might generally dismiss
as stereotypical afforded a new perspective:
A deeper awareness of the multifaceted
humanity of the actor playing the role en-
couraged a recognition of the multifaceted
humanity of the character as well, and an
understanding of any dreaminess or en-
chantment experienced in the moment
as not character-defining. Such necessary
bringing of one’s full self to such roles,
combined with knowledge of the thought
and conversation going into the perfor-
mance, allowed ensemble members like
Ruby and Emily Z to more guiltlessly enjoy
such performances while carrying recogni-
tion of imperfections in the material.
The importance of intentionality
in both performance and casting of such
traditional roles was underscored. Emi-
ly Z suggested that perhaps we have had
enough of the same kind of skinny, blonde,
straight, white Juliet (or Cosette, or Nina,
etc.) and that exciting, revolutionary reviv-
al of such blueprint characters might come
in the placing of “non-traditional” bodies
(BIPOC, disabled, fat, etc.) in such roles.
Echoing the value of such casting, Morgan
Frost (who played Campbell and others) re-
counted that she found it invigorating and
fulfilling to embody these roles that, as a
bigger person, she had felt she would never
be allowed to play. But despite the hope to
be found in reinventive performance and
casting of more traditional ingénue roles,
the greatest excitement universally cen-
tered around those contemporary works
that reimagined teenage girlhood onstage
beginning at the textual level. The unique-
ness and specificity of contemporary char-
62
acters was appreciated; “Changing My Ma-
jor” was a favorite for its joy and truth and
the explicit agency and growth afforded in
“Everlasting” was highlighted. The sense of
power in numbers harnessed by The Wolves
was widely celebrated: its characters could
be messy, good and bad, kind and unkind,
and even reflect those aspects of stereotype
that can be a part of the real teenage expe-
rience, because as an ensemble, they could
reflect the full real range of the experience
of teenage girlhood.
Conclusion
What does — and what might — teenage
girlhood look like onstage? And why does
it matter? Over the last year, I have found
answers to these questions in study of
published work, ethnographic research,
and exploration through practice and per-
formance. Each method of investigating
the status quo yielded similar findings: tra-
ditional expectations largely ask any signif-
icant young woman onstage to fit into the
ingénue box, even though its narrow and
exclusionary expectations of behavior and
appearance may be potentially damaging
for both artists and audiences. However, as
suggested by published writings and sup-
ported by actor and audience experiences
in performance, there is hope; pieces like
Next to Normal, Fun Home, and The Wolves
that present a reimagined, nuanced, real-
istic image of teenage girlhood can trans-
form artist experiences and communicate
powerful, positive messages, and even
many traditional texts carry potential in
embodied performance via intentional and
re-inventive casting and interpretation.
In writing The Wolves, Sarah DeLappe
shares that she “was interested in creating
a world where teenage girls could define
themselves” (Amina). The very nature of
theatre allows a unique kind of definition,
as identities are constructed and charac-
ters are defined by the speaking, singing,
moving bodies we watch onstage. So why
shouldn’t this medium allow the fullness
of young womanhood to be defined and
expressed truthfully? When any body is al-
lowed to be seen and celebrated onstage in
its full humanity — sweet, loving, anxious,
and imperfect as well as driven, powerful,
funny, creative, and so much more — the
experience of artists and audiences can
be transformed as we tell new stories of
inclusion and empowerment. ◆

Bibliography

Adrian, Allison, et al. “‘Authority, Abil-
ity, and the Aging Ingénue’s Voice’
.” Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music:
Performance, Authority, Authenticity,
Routledge, New York, 2016.
Balizet , Ariane M. Just Say Yes:
Shakespeare, Sex, and Girl
Culture, Women’s Studies,
44:6, 815—841, 2015. DOI:
10.1080/00497878.2015.1045687
Banes, Sally. Dancing Women: Female
Bodies Onstage. Taylor and Francis,
2013.
Booth, Michael R. “ingénue.” The
Oxford Encyclopedia of The-
atre and Performance. : Oxford
University Press, January 01, 2005.
Oxford Reference. Date Accessed
24 Feb. 2019 <http://www.
oxfordreference.com.turing.library.
northwestern.edu/view/10.1093/
acref/97801986 01746.001.0001/
acref—9780198601746—e—1903>.
Booth, Michael R. “lines of business.”
The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Theatre and Performance. : Oxford
University Press, January 01, 2005.
Oxford Reference. Date Accessed
20 Mar. 2019 <http://www.
oxfordreference.com.turing.library.
northwestern.edu/view/10.1093/
acref/97801986 01746.001.0001/
acref—9780198601746—e—2319>.
Cook, Susan c. Pretty like the Girl:
Gender, Race and Oklahoma!,
Contemporary Theatre Re-
view, 19:1, 35—47, 2009. DOI:
10.1080/10486800802547260
DeLappe, Sarah. The Wolves. Samuel
French, 2016.
Donovan, Ryan. “‘Must Be Heavyset’:
Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and
Broadway Bodies.” The Journal of
American Drama and Theatre (JADT),
6 Nov. 2019, https://jadtjournal.
org/2019/05/13/must—be—heavy-
set—casting—women—fat—stigma—
and—broadway—bodies/.
Gordon, Joanne Lesley, and Laura
Hanson. “Broadway Babies: Images
of Women in Sondheim.” Stephen
Sondheim: A Casebook, Garland, New
York, 2000.
Henry, Amina. “The Wolves Teacher
Resource Guide.” Lincoln Cen-
ter Theatre, 2017, www.lct.org/
media/filer_public/5a/ea/5ae-
a35bb—2492—4865—b701—b007ff-
34cb78/thewolvesstudyguide.pdf
Madison, D. Soyini. Critical Ethnogra-
phy: Method, Ethics, and Performance.
SAGE, 2020.
Shia, Jonathan. “Sarah DeLappe Finds
New Depths to Teenage Girls.”
The Last Magazine, 16 Dec. 2017,
thelast—magazine.com/sarah—
delappe—debut—play—the—wolves—
pulitzer—finalist/ .
Stanislavsky, Konstantin, and Eliza-
beth Reynolds Hapgood. “Types
of Actors.” Stanislavski’s Legacy: A
Collection of Comments on a Variety
of Aspects of an Actor’s Art and Life,
Routledge/Theatre Arts Books, New
York, 1999.
Stearns, Marshall Winslow, and Jean
Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of
American Vernacular Dance. Schirmer,
1979.
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Wolf, Stacy Ellen. Changed for Good: A
Feminist History of the Broadway Musi-
cal. Oxford University Press, 2011.

63
Why Do Medical Schools
Stress Undergraduate

FEATURE
Research Experience
A Conversation with a Pre-Med Advisor
By Felicia Mou

Brian Keiller (he/him/his) is the Associate Brian Keiller

Director of Health Professions Advising
(HPA) at Northwestern University. Orig-
inally from Scotland, Keiller has lived and
worked in multiple countries spanning from
Australia to Japan. He earned an M.A. from
the University of Aberdeen and an M.Ed. in
Higher Education from the Loyola University
of Chicago. At HPA, he developed the pre-
med shadowing program. For more than five
years, he has advised pre-med students on
their journey to medical school.
I got the chance to get his expert per-
spective on the pre-med research experience.
To learn more about pre-med research,
schedule an appointment at https://www.
northwestern.edu/health-professions-advis-
ing/services/get-advising/index.html

[This interview has been edited for brevity and

clarity.]

64
NURJ: What are your short-term and long-
term goals for your research?

I moved into pre-health advising to support students on

their goal of becoming health professionals throughout
their undergraduate and alumni experiences. While I had
some clinical training as a combat medical technician,
which helped me lean into pre-health advising, I have
come to deeply appreciate the impact that a highly moti-
vated student can have as a health professional or future
physician, especially when supporting under-served com-
munities who may not have the same access to or trust in
health services.

NURJ: How can you help with a pre-med

student’s research experience?

As a pre-health advisor in HPA, I support students’ re-

search experiences primarily through sharing information
and helping them connect to resources and opportunities.
For example, I encourage students to sign up to N.U.’s Of-
fice of Undergraduate Research (OUR) newsletter and to
attend one of their many workshops to better understand
services and generous funding opportunities here. I also
encourage students to discuss research interests with the
Office of Fellowships advisors and faculty advisors across
the schools and college, to tap into their experiences or
research opportunities.

65
 NURJ: How is research applicable to a
pre-med student’s future as a physician?

Research is all about applied discovery and intellectual

curiosity, which are skills readily applied to the under-
graduate experience, as well as to the practice of med-
icine or other health professions. Having an under-
standing of research processes can also help students
appreciate scholarly articles which they encounter a lot
in medical school. So, whether the student has chosen
to research in a bench science setting, a public health
setting, or through the arts and humanities, having
knowledge surrounding research allows the student to
appreciate a powerful tool for discovery, change, and
growth for themselves, other researchers, communi-
ties, and, ideally, our larger society.

NURJ: How important is undergraduate

research compared to other application
factors?

Formal research experiences may not be required by

medical schools; however, these experiences are highly
prized and can add to the competitiveness of the student’s
application. Other factors include extracurriculars, clinical
and non-clinical volunteering or paid work, as well as the
GPA and MCAT score. All of these factors will be con-
sidered through the universally adopted holistic review
approach taken by schools, which is very ‘Gestalt’ in that
the sum is greater than any one part.

66
NURJ: Where should a pre-med student
start their research experience?

For students who did not have a research experience in

high school, they can get started by connecting with the
OUR which does a wonderful job of demystifying research
and making it accessible to all of our students. Students
can also discuss the best time to start research with their
HPA advisor.

NURJ: How would you advise a pre-med

student to make the most out of their
research experience?

Students can make the most of research through actively

reflecting upon their own growth from the experience.
For example, research can be tough, laborious, even
frustrating at times, but taking time to think of one’s own
growth and development, that of the research team’s, and
the overall application of the research can produce valu-
able insights to share in the medical school application.
With this entry in mind, I would encourage students
to journal throughout their undergraduate experiences,
whether researching, volunteering, working, etc.

67
 NURJ: What specific resources does N.U.
offer to support undergraduate research?

N.U. is resource-rich when it comes to supporting under-

graduate research. Whether it is our industrious faculty
members with a knowledge of research or conducting
research, or our well-funded ecosystem of grants, or our
dedicated staff in the OUR, N.U. has really earned its place
as a top U.S. and international research institution.

NURJ: What is the biggest challenge you

see pre-meds students face in terms of
research?

The biggest challenge facing students relating to research

that I recognize varies depending on the student. For
some students, the barrier might be not understanding
what research is or avoiding it as it is not something they
have done. So, there can be an air of mystery to research.
The time commitment for other students can present
a perceived barrier too, especially if they have heard of
other students putting so much time into research. For
other students, it is the perceived cost of doing research
instead of paid work to pay bills, etc. These barriers are
readily addressed by connecting with the OUR to seek
more information.

68
NURJ: What sets the pre-med research
experience apart from others?

From a medical school perspective, any formal research

experience that a student has undertaken will be well
received. For some students, being listed as an author
on a publication is seen as a trophy which can set them
apart from others. Being able to speak about any research,
however, as a growth experience and how that experience
better prepares them for success in medical school and as a
future physician is in itself a trophy.

NURJ: In your opinion, how should pre-

med students approach research?

In a perfect world, if students can find a research oppor-

tunity that truly interests them, it will be easier to identify
the alignment of their interests and values with those of
the research and researchers.

69
 by Kiana Staples
Unashamed: Exploring A
South Korean Female Tattoo
Artist’s Negotation of Identity
Department of Asian Languages and Culture
Faculty Adviser: Jeong Eun Annabel We

Introduction fraction of the stares I had expected.3

Like many other countries across the Rather, I encountered tattooed Ko-
globe, South Korea’s tattoo culture con- reans serving me at restaurants or
tinues to grow rapidly, with its tattooed walking past me down the street, and
population reaching three million in even heard whispers behind me from
2021.1,2 Walking down the streets of Koreans who, after noticing my inked
Seoul in areas like Sinchon and Hongdae, skin, started discussing their own pos-
it is not uncommon to see both Korean sible first tattoo designs.
and foreign young adults marked with As opposed to other countries,
tattoos of various sizes, styles, and subject however, Korea currently criminaliz-
matter. As an exchange student studying es the practice of tattooing for those
abroad at Ewha Womans University without medical degrees. Yonhap News,
during the Fall 2021 semester, I observed a major South Korean news agency,
Korea’s booming tattoo scene firsthand, refers to Korea as the “only nation in
seeing tattooed Korean youths on a daily the world” where tattoos are still ille-
basis. I also visited five different tattoo gal.4 In 1992, South Korea’s Supreme
studios while in Korea, getting a total of Court decided that due to risks such as
six tattoos. My foreign body, adorned infection, tattooing would only be legal
with patchwork old-school American when performed by those with certified
tattoo designs, attracted only a small medical training.5 Even nurses who
1 Friedman, The World Atlas of Tattoo.
2 Yonhapnews, “T’at’u 300man.” 4:58.
3 The term “patchwork” refers to tattoos that exist together as separate, individual pieces rather than tattoos combined
into a single cohesive “sleeve” design.
4 Yonhapnews, “T’at’u 300man.”2:14.
5 Kukka—bŏpnyŏng—jŏngbo—sent’ŏ (National Legal Information Center), “Pogŏnbŏmjoe—Dansoge—Gwanhan—t’ŭk-
byŏlchoch’i—Wiban (Violation of the Act on Special Measures for the Control of Health Crimes).”

70
can give patients injections do not meet
the qualifications to legally tattoo others.6
Those caught tattooing without the proper
medical license could be fined as much as
$40,000 USD and sentenced to anywhere
between two years and life in prison.7 De-
spite the growth of Korea’s tattoo scene
as well as the demands of tattoo artists,
in March 2022, the Constitutional Court
in Seoul upheld the current laws making
tattooing illegal.8 Many tattoo artists and
enthusiasts continue to protest against
these laws, and the perception of tattoos in
Korea is shifting from a potentially harm-
ful medical practice to a legitimate form of
artistic expression.9,10
Under current tattoo-related legisla-
tion, the majority of Korean tattoo artists
are working illegally in an underground
scene. Combined with their other identi-
ties, such as nationality, gender, and class,
Korean tattoo artists’ profession shapes
their existence in Korean society. Despite
the abundance of tattooed bodies in Korea,
there are historical associations between
tattoos and crime dating back to Korea’s
Koryŏ dynasty (918—1392 CE), informing
perceptions of tattoos that Korean tattoo
artists cannot fully escape. The Korean
state has continued to criminalize the tat-
too artist profession long after the end of
penal tattooing, creating a lasting negative
stigma against tattoos in South Korea.
While there is an existing scholarship
dedicated to Korean tattoo culture and his-
tory, the majority of it is published in Kore-
an and centers on male experiences, wheth-
er it be the punishment of male criminals,
the tattoos of war veterans, or the lives of
men working in South Korea’s current tat-
too scene.11 However, historical accounts
of tattooed women in Korea do exist, and
female tattoo artists contribute to South
Korea’s contemporary tattoo culture.12 Due
to the absence of both English and Korean
language scholarship on tattoos in Korea in
general, especially that which significantly
addresses the role of women in Korean tat-
too culture and history, I designed a research
project which emphasizes the narratives of
individual South Korean women — tattoo
artists “C,” “H,” and “Y.”13 Though this single
thesis is far from comprehensive, my hope
is that the role of women in shaping Korean
tattoo culture will continue to be recorded
over time, expanding the current scholar-
ship on tattoos in Korea.
This paper serves as my exploration of
the South Korean female tattoo artist iden-
tity through an analysis of oral history nar-

6 Yonhapnews, “T’at’u 300man.”2:51

7 Chung, “Tattoos, Still Illegal in South Korea, Thrive Underground — The New York Times”; Kukka—bŏpnyŏng—jŏngbo—sent’ŏ
(National Legal Information Center), “Pogŏnbŏmjoe—dansoge—gwanhan—t’ŭkbyŏlchoch’i—bŏb, je—5—jo (Act on Special Mea-
sures for the Control of Health Crimes, Article 5).”
8 Chung, “Tattoos, Still Illegal in South Korea, Thrive Underground — The New York Times.”
9 Tattoo Artist “H”, Oral History. H noted in her interview that among tattoo artists in the industry, there are differing opinions on
the positive and negative aspects of current legislation on tattoos. There is also a Tattoo Artists’
10 Yonhapnews, “T’at’u 300man.”
11 Kim, “Han’guk Hyŏngbŏl Munsin—Ŭi Paljŏnsa—Wa Hyŏndaejŏk Ŭimi—e Taehan Sogo (A Study on the History of the Develop-
ment and Modern Meaning of the Korean Punishment Tattoo)”; Mun, Munshinyuhŭi: chigŭm, han’gugŭi t’at’u munhwa (Tattoo Game:
Now, Korea’s Tattoo Culture); Namgung, Han’gugŭi munshin: t’at’uisŭt’ŭga chŏnhanŭn iyagi (Korean Tattoos: A Story Told by Tattoo Artists).
12 Namgung, Han’gugŭi munshin: t’at’uisŭt’ŭga chŏnhanŭn iyagi (Korean Tattoos: A Story Told by Tattoo Artists). Although pictures and
accounts of men are more prevalent in this text, there are several instances in which Namgung describes tattoo practices that were
adopted by both men and women in Korea, such as jŏmsangmunsin, or dot—like tattoos that symbolized tight bonds between friends
(see pages 163—76).
13 Due to the illegal nature of the tattoo artist profession, I refer to each tattoo artist using a single initial.

71
 ratives. While I interviewed three artists,
the following pages will focus on the oral
history of Tattoo Artist “C.” By analyzing
her responses, I aim to demonstrate what
her individual narrative reveals about dif-
ferent experiences of South Korean female
tattoo artists. Focusing on the experiences
and knowledge of C, I argue that South
Korean female tattoo artists negotiate their
understanding and display of their bodies
in the context of Korean tattoo history and
culture, which continues to associate tat-
toos and tattooing with crime.
Oral History: negotiations of identity as a female South
Tattoo Artist “C”
C was the first tattoo artist I decided to
interview for my project. I first discovered
C while searching Instagram for Korean
tattoo artists who specialize in an tradi-
tional American-inspired tattoo style. As
soon as I found C’s account, I admired her
use of bold colors as well as her distinct
designs. She not only tattooed old-school
motifs such as eagles or panthers, but also
custom designs. After months of admiring
C’s online portfolio, I decided to book an
appointment with her during my time
studying abroad in Seoul and got a small
tattoo of one of my household cats. Al-
though I could not complete our interview
in person while I was in Korea, C was en-
thusiastic when hearing about my project
and was more than happy to participate in
a remote interview.
C covered an array of topics while
answering my questions; many of her re-
sponses subverted my expectations regard-
ing the gender dynamics of Korea’s tattoo
culture and industry. I prepared multiple
questions that directly addressed how C’s
14 Tattoo Artist “C,” Oral History.
15 The corresponding Sino characters in this instance are 文身. However, to specifically indicate the practice of criminal punish-
ment through tattooing and not tattoos more generally, 黥 is used (as in ‘黥刑/경형’).
72
female gender identity might relate to her
craft as a tattoo artist — if she experiences
discrimination that her male counterparts
do not, how she is perceived differently
than tattooed men in Korea, and how
marginalized communities and activism are
related to South Korean tattoo history and
culture. To my surprise, however, C would
often respond by telling me that there was
no such clear difference between men and
women in many cases, and she incorporat-
ed gender into her responses in ways that
I had not anticipated. Instead, I found that
many of C’s responses reflected her own
Korean tattoo artist — how she perceived
tattoos in relation to Korea’s tattoo history
and the way that Koreans negatively view
heavily tattooed women. I focus on two
themes present in her responses: historical
associations between tattoos and crime
in Korea, and C’s negotiation of her own
body and identity in relation to shame (or
lack thereof).
I began by asking C about the sto-
ries she has heard about Korea’s tattoo
history. C started by recalling the practice
of penal tattooing in the Chosŏn dynasty
(1392—1897 CE), noting that tattoos were
used to punish criminals. According to C,
the wounding of one’s skin by engraving
these letters was “the most shameful insult”
that one could receive at the time.14 The
Korean word for tattoos, munshin, could
be translated as letters engraved onto the
body (mun meaning letters or writing and
shin meaning body).15 Korean scholar Kim
Hyŏng-jung traces such punishment back
to Korea’s Koryŏ period, in which penal tat-
toos became legalized. These tattoos would
permanently mark a criminal’s face or body
with letters indicating the type of crime
committed.16 Particularly due to the grow-
ing influence of Confucianism in Korea at
the time, wounding of the body received
from one’s parents was viewed as a betray-
al of filial piety.17 Chosŏn dynasty rulers
favored harsh tattoo punishments, deliber-
ately marking criminals’ faces to make their
past crimes visible to the public.18
When recalling Korea’s tattoo his-
tory, C immediately began with the cruel
practice of penal tattooing, focusing on
strong associations between tattoos and
crime; however, she was not specifically
prompted to do so by my questions. In
fact, when I conducted my second oral
history interview a month later with artist
“H,” I got a response comparing pre- and
post-social media tattoo culture, centering
on technological development rather than
criminality.19 However, it cannot be denied
that since the end of the penal Chosŏn dy-
nasty tattoo punishments, tattoos continue
to be associated with the illegal activities
of gangsters and prostitutes, which C also
mentioned in her personal timeline of Ko-
rean tattoo history.
The image of tattooed gangsters in
South Korea, while considered outdated
by some, does not come from a place of
mere speculation.20 i-D’s mini-documen-
tary features Grace Neutral speaking to a
self-identified current gang member, Mr.
Kim, who has just received a large back tat-
too. Mr. Kim estimates that “if 100 [gang-
sters] have tattoos, then only one would not
have one.”21 Associations between tattoos
16 Kim, “Han’guk Hyŏngbŏl Munsin—Ŭi Paljŏnsa—Wa Hyŏndaejŏk Ŭimi—e Taehan Sogo (A Study on the History of the Develop-
ment and Modern Meaning of the Korean Punishment Tattoo),” 31–32.
17 Kim, 31.
18 Kim, 37.
19 Tattoo Artist “H,” Oral History.
20 Yoon, “[T’at’u 300man Shidae]①.”
21 i—D, “Grace Neutral Explores Korea’s Illegal Beauty Scene [FULL FILM].” 27:59.
22 Glietsch, “The Korean Tattoo Culture,” 20.
23 Glietsch, 20–21.
24 Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification.
and gang activity in Korea became preva-
lent in the 20th century due to Japan’s col-
onization of the peninsula. Tattoos received
by Korean gang members were heavily
inspired by the tattoos of Japanese Yakuza
gang members.22 While, as Mr. Kim men-
tions, gangsters do not intentionally expose
their tattooed flesh to the public as a form
of intimidation, South Koreans continue to
associate tattoos with gangsters’ criminal
activity in the 21st century.23 Although C
did not directly express a connection be-
tween the historical associations of tattoos,
shame, and crime with the criminalization
of her own career, she recognizes that the
practice of marking the body that is central
to her profession was once used by the state
as a form of corporal punishment.
C also related the shameful practice
of wounding the body through tattooing
to the current tattoo legislation in South
Korea. Intentional damage to the physi-
cal body was viewed as shameful, causing
tattoos to continue to be illegal in South
Korea and viewed by the government as a
dangerous medical procedure rather than
an art form. This notion of purposefully
“damaging” one’s own skin through body
modification is similar to beliefs in North
American cultures. Body modifications like
tattoos which involve voluntarily hurting
one’s own skin have often been compared
to forms of self-harm or addiction, making
heavily modified bodies taboo.24 Through
her own retelling of the origins of Korean
tattoo history, C continued to draw con-
73
 “
nections between tattoos and criminality
in pre-modern and modern Korea.
At some point in the middle of our
interview, I decided to ask C about the tat-
toos on her own body, and whether or not
she felt the need to cover up her tattooed
skin in South Korea. Knowing that C is a
visibly tattooed Korean woman, and also
considering associations between both
tattoos and crime and tattooed women and
prostitution, I was curious about C’s per-
ceptions of her own body.25 When I asked
C if she ever hides her tattoos, however,
she expressed that she felt it was unneces-
sary as they were not shameful to her.
STAPLES: So, when you go home [to
your family], do you usually show a
lot of your tattoos? Or do you prefer to
hide them?
C: Oh not at all, I don’t want to hide
them. [Having tattoos] isn’t a shameful
thing, so I don’t want to hide them …
but even so, if I go to a place where
there’s a lot of older people, if I end up
going [to a place like that], then I might
try to hide them a bit. Not in public,
but in a place with lots of older people,
when I go somewhere like a wedding, I
hide them, but [otherwise] I generally
don’t hide them.26
What struck me in C’s response
was the immediate connection she made
between hiding one’s tattooed body and
the concept of tattoos being shameful, or
pukkŭrŏpta. Though there are multiple
words that can be translated as “shameful,”
pukkŭrŏpta is the same Korean word that
C used to describe penal tattooing prac-
tices in pre-modern Korea. When writing
this question, I perceived it as more of a
25 During our interview, C made a couple references to prostitution (sŏngmaemae). See i—D, “Grace Neutral Explores Korea’s Illegal
Beauty Scene [FULL FILM]” and Yonhapnews “T’at’u 300man” for other mentions of prostitution in relation to tattooed Korean
women. None of the three women I interviewed knew the origin of associations between prostitution and tattoos in Korea.
26 Tattoo Artist “C”, Oral History.
27 Tattoo Artist “C”, Instagram direct message to author.
74
Despite the historical
association between
tattoos and shame,
and the South Korean
government’s continued
refusal to reform
tattoo legislation
and stop requiring
medical licenses in
order to tattoo, C
has not consequently
understood her own
”
skin and body to
be shameful.
question of deciding whether to respect or
subvert normative expectations depending
on the context of a situation. C, however,
partially understood my question as asking
whether or not she is ashamed of display-
ing her own tattooed body in public. A
few weeks after the interview, I decided
to message her privately and ask if she had
ever experienced feelings of shame show-
ing her tattoos or if she ever felt it was
inappropriate to have them uncovered. C
confirmed that she has never felt ashamed
of showing her tattoos in public settings
and only opts to cover them when she is
around large numbers of elders.27
C’s responses did not contain infor-
mation about how Korean society’s per-
ceptions of tattoos were communicated
to her personally. Compared to the other
artists I contacted for interviews, C is
much more heavily tattooed, with colorful,
old-school inspired designs covering her
arms down to her wrists; I would expect
that C herself may face criticism for having
less delicate, small tattoos. However, C
answered me with general observations
of Korean society and history for most of
the interview. As I reflect on my interview
with her, I am left wondering how C might
understand her own identity as a South
Korean female tattoo artist in relation to
her narration of Korean tattoo history and
culture. How could C’s understanding of
the criminalization of her career, as well as
the historical role of tattooing as a form of
corporal punishment in Korea, shape how
she views herself? As a female tattoo artist
in South Korea, C faces complex obstacles
in Korean society and must interpret her
own identity and body within a particular
cultural and historical context.
I find it most encouraging that de-
spite the historical association between
tattoos and shame, and the South Korean
government’s continued refusal to reform
tattoo legislation and stop requiring med-
ical licenses in order to tattoo, C has not
consequently understood her own skin
and body to be shameful. Rather, even
in the historical and current context of
South Korea’s tattoo history and culture,
C views her tattoos as something that
does not need to be hidden in the public
eye and rarely chooses to censor or police
her own tattoos. Although C’s experiences
are nuanced and her identity negotiated,
I find it significant to recognize her view
of her own tattooed body, separate from
historical and contemporary perceptions
of tattoos and tattooing in Korea.
28 Tattoo Artist “C,” Oral History; Tattoo Artist “H,” Oral History; Tattoo Artist “Y,” Oral History.
29 Tattoo Artist “C,” Oral History; Tattoo Artist “Y,” Oral History.
Identity Negotiation: C’s
Understanding and Display
of Her Tattooed Body
All three women I interviewed reported
some instance of covering their tattoos in
certain settings. However, each artist qual-
ified these statements, expressing that they
do not “hide” (sumgida) or want to hide
their tattoos from family or the public,
but that they might “cover” (karida) them
up or choose to not show them in certain
contexts.28 C particularly emphasized that
this covering of tattooed flesh is not an
act of shame, for having tattoos is nothing
shameful to her.29 While I find it encour-
aging that C does not view her tattoos as
shameful, it cannot be ignored that she
makes a conscious choice to cover her tat-
toos in certain social contexts. If C is un-
ashamed of her tattoos, why cover them in
any situation? Certainly, C’s choice to limit
the display of her tattoos around elders
alone does not necessarily indicate that she
feels a sense of shame as a heavily tattooed
South Korean woman. How, then, could
we (or should we) interpret the negoti-
ation of identity through the covering of
tattoos? How is this different from “hiding”
one’s flesh? And, finally, considering that
this covering is not done out of shame,
what are some other emotions that may be
driving this action? Although all of these
questions cannot be fully answered, I do
think they are significant in understand-
ing the unique identities and experiences
of each artist. I find that in these social
situations, C does not hide her tattoos in
shame but rather practices an intentional
negotiation of identity that relates to her
own understanding of tattoo history and
culture in Korea.
75
 This concept of negotiation is dis-
cussed by scholars who interviewed North
American women with tattoos using oral
history methods similar to mine. Scholars
Michael Atkinson and Victoria L. Pitts
both express that their interviewees’ bodies
should be understood not as sites of agency
or conformity alone but rather as sites of
an ongoing negotiation.30 As Victoria L.
Pitts notes, “Women’s marked bodies ex-
emplify both the praxis of culturally mar-
ginal body projects and the limits of that
praxis. As I see it, they highlight the female
body as a site of negotiation between pow-
er and powerlessness, neither of which are
likely to win fully.”31 Considering this defi-
nition, I suggest that C’s body is also a site
of negotiation, being displayed or covered
according to context rather than sites of
complete subversion of or submission to
Korean societal norms.
Moreover, through examining all
three oral history narratives, I find that
the negotiation of one’s tattooed body and
flesh is incredibly nuanced and varies on an
individual level. Each negotiation is per-
sonal and is not only based on larger social
hierarchies or norms but also on personal
identities, relationships, and interactions. In
addition to the works of Atkinson and Pitts,
I also frame my understanding of identity
“ However, I find that covering or even hiding
parts of the body, whether influenced by shame
or some other emotion, can also function as an
exercise of agency.
30 Atkinson, “Pretty in Ink”; Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification.
31 Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification, 81.
32 Deaux and Ethier, “Negotiating Social Identity,” 301.
33 Atkinson, “Pretty in Ink,” 229.
76
negotiation around Deaux and Ethier’s defi-
nition: “agentic identity work carried out in
response to contextual demands.”32 Essential
to this definition is the agency of the identity
negotiator, as well as the demands which ne-
cessitate a negotiation of identity. Given C’s
responses, it is clear to me that her covering
of tattoos is a conscious choice that depends
heavily on contextual elements; thus, I
would like to frame her as an agent rather
than an object of discrimination.
To some, exercising agency exclusively
looks like uncovering one’s flesh and show-
ing it at all times for the world to see. As
scholar Michael Atkinson notes in his own
oral history interviews with tattooed Ca-
nadian women, several believe “that tattoo
body projects intended for social resistance
must be visible to be effective”; otherwise,
if the tattooed body remains concealed
in certain circumstances, “no discernable
challenge to established understandings of
the body can be established.”33 However, I
find that covering or even hiding parts of
the body, whether influenced by shame or
some other emotion, can also function as
an exercise of agency. While the act of cov-
ering one’s own body is not total resistance
against forces of gender and legal oppression
faced by South Korean female tattoo artists,
it should also not be characterized simply
”
as an act of conforming to societal norms.
Rather, the different ways in which each
woman I interviewed intentionally covers
or uncovers her tattoos can be understood
as acts of agency negotiated to fit within
current social and legal boundaries.
One of my most interesting findings
was that the three women I interviewed
chose to negotiate their identities in very
specific, distinct social contexts. Contrary
to what I had expected, there was no clear
distinction between the artists’ negotiation
of identity in public versus private spaces,
around young versus old people, inside or
outside of the family, etc., that was con-
sistent across all three narratives. Rather,
each woman negotiates the display of her
tattooed flesh, as well as her identity as a
tattoo artist, in relation to specific individ-
uals or groups with whom they interact.
In other words, they negotiate differently
depending on the relationship between
their individual, intersecting identities,
and their own everyday social interactions.
As stated previously, C said that she
does not cover up her tattoos in front of
family or in public but will sometimes cov-
er them if she is suddenly around elders at
an event like a wedding. The social and cul-
tural contexts which inform C’s negotiation
are not broadly defined such as public or
private, or between friends versus in front
of strangers. Instead, C specifically identi-
fied elders as the group of people in front
of whom she conceals her tattooed body.
Moreover, C stated that she covers her tat-
toos when she ends up going to places with
many older people and gives a wedding as
an example of a setting in which she may
encounter elders and negotiate the display
of her tattoos accordingly. This suggests
that C generally does not cover her tattoos
in circumstances where she might encoun-
ter smaller, sporadic numbers of older
people, such as when she is simply walking
outside or going to the store. The formality
of a large gathering and ceremony such as a
wedding also seems to influence C’s nego-
tiation of her tattoos. C asserted that when
she chooses to refrain from showing her
tattoos, she does not do so out of shame.
Combined with her consideration of her
relation to others’ ages, it is possible that C
instead negotiates her display of tattoos as
a way to show respect for elders.
Looking at all three cases of identity
negotiation together highlights how de-
cisions to negotiate identity vary across
individuals. While the method of covering
up tattoos and the language used to describe
this act are similar throughout all three oral
history narratives, the contexts which each
woman feels demand this negotiation are
very different. The differences in contexts —
the nuances of the spaces and people which
necessitate a distinct display or covering of
one’s tattooed body in Korean society — also
suggest that motivations behind identity ne-
gotiation can differ from person to person.
Covering one’s tattoos in certain contexts
becomes a conscious negotiation influenced
by care, respect, and/or the consideration of
others’ gaze. Care and concern for family,
respect for elders, and a consciousness of
what is expected of mothers in particular
settings — practiced by artists Y, C, and H,
respectively — shape South Korean female
tattoo artists’ daily existence within the
Korean tattoo industry and Korean tattoo
culture more broadly.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the three oral history narra-
tives told by South Korean female tattoo
artists C, H, and Y inform current un-
derstandings of women’s roles in Korean
tattoo history and culture by providing
nuanced accounts of the evolution of Ko-
77
 “The differences in contexts — the nuances
of the spaces and people which necessitate
a distinct display or covering of one’s tattooed
body in Korean society — also suggest that
motivations behind identity negotiation can
differ from person to person. Covering one’s
tattoos in certain contexts becomes a conscious
negotiation influenced by care, respect, and/or
the consideration of others’ gaze.”
rea’s tattoo scene as well as the gendered
dynamics within it. Moreover, these nar-
ratives demonstrate how each individual’s
understanding of Korean tattoo culture is
distinct. The timelines, social perceptions,
and gender dynamics connected to Korean
tattoo culture are presented differently by
each artist. Together, these unique narra-
tives also suggest that each artist negoti-
ates her own tattooed identity in specific
contexts related to her own understanding
of Korean tattoo history and culture.
The full version of my thesis aims to
answer questions relating to both the in-
terpretation of oral history more broadly
and what each individual narrative reveals
about different experiences of South Ko-
rean female tattoo artists. When looking
at the oral history process itself, how does
each woman narrate Korean tattoo culture
and history in relation to her own personal
identities and experiences? How can we
read their narratives in a way that values
what they chose to say but also acknowl-
edges and carefully considers what was left
out of their accounts? When considering
the specific content in each narrative and
how all three narratives are distinct yet
34 Exploring the differences between the body and flesh and how they relate to gender ended up being outside of the scope of this
78
connected, what can we discover about
the different roles and experiences of fe-
male South Korean tattoo artists? How do
these artists make sense of their own iden-
tities as women in South Korea working
in an illegal industry, and how could
their perceptions of Korean tattoo culture
inform how they present themselves to
Korean society?
Interviewing C gave me a sense of
direction for the rest of my senior thesis
project, leading me to the concept of iden-
tity negotiation and shaping the questions
that I would later ask artists Y and H. Af-
ter completing all three narratives, I found
that each woman not only narrates her own
understanding of Korean tattoo history and
culture as well as how they shift over time;
she also situates herself within contempo-
rary Korean society and reveals how gender
dynamics do or do not exist in Korea’s tat-
too scene. Ultimately, each artist tells a story
not only of the evolution of Korea’s tattoo
culture but also how historical and cultural
context shape the display of their tattooed
bodies and flesh in Korean society.34
Given the small scale of this project
and the depth of information available
from only three oral history narrators, I
imagine there is great potential for success
in using oral history to record more wom-
en’s perspectives of tattoo history and cul-
ture in Korea. As Namgung Ho-sŏk notes
in his retelling of Korean tattoo history,
current archives privilege particular narra-
tives, such as that of penal tattooing prac-
tices in the Koryŏ and Chosŏn dynasties,
while leaving out other possible functions
of tattoos over time.35 While our ability to
make up for the missing pieces of written
records is limited, making an effort to col-
lect narratives from current tattoo artists
and tattooed people in South Korea will
diversify future historical records. Con-
sidering the absence of women’s voices in
particular, I hope to continue communi-
cating with other South Korean women
about Korean tattoo culture in the future.
Through oral history projects such as this
thesis, the roles of marginalized people’s
roles in Korean tattoo culture can be ex-
plored and recorded in depth.
In present-day Korea, tattooing is
still a criminalized act; yet it has become a
marker of individuality and agency. Since
the Koryŏ dynasty, tattooing has trans-
formed from a form of state control of the
body and flesh to an underground indus-
try operating against the law. In his own
research on tattoos, Korean scholar Kim
Hyŏng-jung characterizes the state’s crimi-
nalization of tattoo artists, as well as differ-
ent forms of discrimination tattooed Ko-
reans face from the government and older
generations, as a method of modern tattoo
punishment that evolved from the penal
tattoos executed in the Koryŏ and Chosŏn
dynasties.36 With this in mind, what does
it mean for South Korean female tattoo
paper; however, it is an important consideration that I plan to incorporate into future research.
35 Namgung, Han’gugŭi munshin: t’at’uisŭt’ŭga chŏnhanŭn iyagi (Korean Tattoos: A Story Told by Tattoo Artists).
36 Kim, “Han’guk Hyŏngbŏl Munsin—Ŭi Paljŏnsa—Wa Hyŏndaejŏk Ŭimi—e Taehan Sogo (A Study on the History of the Develop-
ment and Modern Meaning of the Korean Punishment Tattoo),” 44.
artists to strategically negotiate the display
of their tattooed flesh? To wear the marks
that have marked slaves, criminals, gang-
sters, and prostitutes throughout Korean
history? To mark their flesh and the flesh
of others through a criminalized practice?
To enjoy the freedom of a freelance career
despite the constant danger of a fine and
prison sentence?
Through this thesis, I have at-
tempted to partially answer the first of
these questions, but the rest require fur-
ther research. As I contemplate what fu-
ture research on this topic will look like,
I return to the ways in which these three
artists’ responses to my questions subvert-
ed many of my expectations, particularly
in relation to gender dynamics. Although
I expected that one or possibly even all of
the artists would find ways in which their
female identities shaped their work as tat-
too artists, none of them had reflected on
how their work might connect to their Ko-
rean womanhood. This makes me wonder
if my focus on gendered differences — such
as varying perceptions of men and women
with tattoos, different challenges faced by
male versus female tattoo artists, etc. —
was an effective way to frame my oral his-
tory questions. If these gender dichotomies
of male/female and masculine/feminine
experiences within Korea’s tattoo culture
are not the most helpful aspect of Korean
tattoo culture to analyze, what questions
would be more productive? The difficulty
of centering women’s voices and a gendered
analysis while also capturing the significant
elements shaping Korean tattoo culture be-
came very apparent through this research.
79
 Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to ac-
knowledge and thank C, Y, and H for
sharing their stories with me and allowing
me to make them the centerpiece of this
paper and my larger honors thesis project.
I am so thankful that they gave me their
time and were open and honest while
answering my questions, and I am even
more grateful that they were patient as
I undoubtedly made mistakes speaking
Korean. As my project continues to trans-
form and at times face setbacks, I thank
every tattoo artist who responded to my
requests for interviews, even if they were
unable to accept the offer.
I would also like to thank my peers
Sydney Smith and Joyce Giboom Park for
helping me translate these interviews live
while they were busy with their own work.
As fellow seniors at Northwestern Univer-
sity, I know they were struggling to com-
plete their own important deadlines when
80
they agreed to work with me. I absolutely
could not have completed these interviews
and this paper without their help.
Finally, I would like to thank all of
my advisors at Northwestern University,
inside and outside of my department. Pro-
fessors Jeong Eun Annabel We and Pat-
rick Noonan in the Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures were both instru-
mental in the different stages of develop-
ing this thesis project and paper. I cannot
express enough how appreciative I am of
their compassion and guidance at all times
while working on this project. My advisors
working at the Mellon Mays Undergrad-
uate Fellowship Program at Northwest-
ern University were also there to support
me whenever I felt myself losing focus.
Professor Geraldo Cadava, Senior Project
Coordinator Stephanie Marin, and Ph.D.
students and fellows Oscar Ruben Cornejo
Casares and Alexandria Keith — thank you
all for everything. ◆
Appendix

Oral History Questions

TATTOO PRACTICE/HISTORY: 타투 문화/역사
___ 씨가 들으신 옛날 한국 타투 문화에 대한 이야기를 좀 알려주세요.
What are some stories you have heard about old tattoo practices in Korea?

__ 씨 생각에, 오늘날의 세대의 타투이스트들은 개척자들입니까? 20—30년 전부터 지금까지 한국 타투 씬이 어떻게

바뀌었습니까?
Do you see your generation as a pioneer? How do you think the tattoo scene has changed from 20—30 years ago?

한국에서는 특히 타투하는 여성들에 관련한 역사가 있습니까?

Is there any special history relating to women getting tattoos in Korea?

예전부터 한국의 타투 씬과 연관된 다른 소외된 공동체나 사회운동이 있습니까? 보통 타투하는 사람또는 타투이스
트들이 소외된 공동체(외국인, LGBT, 여성 등)의 일원입니까?
Are there other marginalized communities or social movements which are historically connected to Korea’s tattoo scene? Are tat-
tooed people and/or tattoo artists usually members of other marginalized communities (foreigners, LGBTQ+ community, women,
etc.)?

KOREAN PERCEPTION OF TATTOOS: 한국 사회의 타투, 타투이스트에 대한 인식

시간이 지남에 따라 한국의 타투 문화와 한국 사회의 타투, 타투이스트에 대한 인식은 어떻게 달라졌습니까?
How has Korean tattoo culture and Korean society’s perceptions of tattoos and tattoo artists changed over time?

오늘 한국 사회에서 타투는 일반적으로 어떻게 인식됩니까?

How are tattoos generally perceived in Korean society today?

___ 씨 생각에, 타투를 한 여자에 대한 한국인들의 인식은 타투를 한 남자에 대한 인식과 다릅니까? 그렇다면, 그 이
유는 무엇입니까?
Do you think that Koreans perceive women with tattoos differently than they perceive men with tattoos? If so, why?

여성 타투이스트들은 한국 사희에서 어떤 특별한 도전에 직면하십니까?

Do female tattoo artists face particular challenges in South Korean society?

저와 더 나누고 싶은 것이 있으시면 말씀해주세요.

Please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to share with me.

Possible Follow—ups
__씨의 성주체성이 어떻게 타투이스트로 하는 일을 형성하고 있습니까?
How do you think your gender identity has shaped your work as a tattoo artist?

__씨의 여성 타투이스트들이 __씨의 그러한 경험을 일반적으로 겪습니까? (한국에서는?)

Do you see that as a common experience for women tattooists (in Korea)?

타투가 많이 있는 여자들이 ‘매춘부’로 인식되는 이유를 아세요? 왜 한국에서 타투라는 것은 성매매와 연관돼요?
Do you know why tattoos are associated with prostitution in Korea?

보통 자신의 몸에 있는 타투를 숨깁니까? 자신의 타투가 부끄러운 것, 혹은 타투를 보여주시면 부적절하는 것을 느

껴 본 적이 있으십니까? ___ 씨는 타투를 절대 보여주시지 않은 친구나 친척이 있으십니까?
Do you usually hide your tattoos? Have you ever felt ashamed of your tattoos or felt it wasn’t appropriate to show them? Is there
anyone in your life who you always hide your tattoos from like a relative or friend?

81
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 How We Can Ensure

FEATURE
Success in STEM:
Professor Marcel Vinces

By Zaina Karim

83
 raising questions about
what different variations
of class structures might lead
to more students persisting
in STEM fields. Traditionally,
biology classes are taught with a
lecturer speaking, students quietly
taking notes, and then the students taking
two midterms and a final. However,
when asked about this approach, Vinces
In the fall of 2021, 4,204 students
emphasized the much more effective
at Northwestern University
learning outcomes of “problem-based
(N.U.) were enrolled in the
learning, where instead of the professor
Weinberg College of Arts and
just talking and the students taking notes,
Sciences. A significant portion of
students are given problems in the class,
these students pursued, and continue
often in groups.” This, he said, causes
to pursue, majors in biological or
students to “engage more deeply with
pre-health-related fields, making
the material,” and provides the practical
participation in an introductory biology
foundation needed to retain information
class inevitable. For many, starting biology
and apply knowledge on exams.
courses at N.U. will be the first experience
While problem-based learning
that they have with a collegiate level of
is better for students in the long run and
biological sciences, and therefore, hold
leads to improved performance later,
great importance for a student’s attitude
it might cause a degree of discomfort
toward success in biology and beyond.
in the moment. In looking at students’
With this in mind, it would behoove N.U.
perception of their own learning,
students, faculty, and administrators to ask,
students felt like they were learning
“What can be done to ensure the optimal
more when being lectured, rather than
outcome of introductory biology classes?”
doing problems and engaging in project/
This is exactly what Professor Marcelo
problem-based learning. Although
Vinces, a Weinberg academic advisor, has
students who use problem-solving and
worked to answer during his time at and
group skills to acquire information encode
before N.U..
knowledge on a deeper level, they often
By closely examining and
feel uncertain about their own retention
evaluating the teaching and student
because they are not being explicitly
reception of introductory biology
told the information. In his research,
courses, Professor Vinces and his
Vinces worked to identify a way that
colleagues at Oberlin College were able
this initial resistance to problem-based
to pinpoint the distinction between
learning, what he described to be a type
unsuccessful “teacher-centered learning”
of “culture shock,” could be remedied.
and constructive “problem/project-based
Eventually, with student survey reports
learning.” Many students made the decision
and interviews, he was able to identify
not to continue science-related degrees
that through gradual acclimation and
following introductory biology courses,
realization of the benefits, students

84
 Through gradual acclimation and realization
of the benefits, students grow comfortable
with the approach and persist longer in
biology and other STEM fields.
grow comfortable with the approach
and persist longer in biology and other
STEM fields. With continued exposure
to practice problems, group work, and
opportunities to earn better grades,
students will soon become intrinsically
motivated to participate in class, work
with others, and push themselves to
showcase their expertise. One way in
which this can be implemented is by
giving students rewards for participation,
group work, and practice, and then
gradually transitioning them to taking
part in these activities for their benefit
and without reinforcement.
It is crucial for N.U. not to neglect
this issue. Weinberg advisors such as
Professor Vinces experience firsthand
the struggle that some students endure
with courses such as Introductory
Biology. Vinces mentioned that students
in separate sections of a single class at
N.U. have expressed dissatisfaction with
References
Northwestern University. Data USA. (n.d.). Retrieved March 15, 2023, from https://datausa.io/profile/university/northwest-
ern-university/
the fact that their peers had instructors
offering a higher frequency of graded
assessments such as homework and
quizzes, as opposed to their own
curriculum that relies on midterms and
a final examination. He continued by
stating that some classrooms exhibit a
“climate where students can more easily
ask questions.” These disparities can
be easily addressed at our school with
communication between teachers and a
focus on the benefits of demonstrative
and problem-based learning. With the
addition of the recently acquired grant
aimed towards furthering research on
various types of learning settings, N.U.
can work towards these improvements in
Introductory Biology, and all classrooms.
85
 by Juliet Jacques
Monstrous Masculinities,
Male Angst, and
Adolescent Development
in the Twilight Saga
Introduction
Over the past two decades, the Twilight
series has become a staple of popular
culture, with an enormous and dedicated
fanbase. The “vampire versus werewolf”
or “Edward versus Jacob” debate is almost
universally recognizable, especially among
fans of 2010s Young Adult (Y.A.) media.
However, fans and critics alike miss a
crucial element of analysis (or obsession)
in Twilight. Inseparable from this study
of masculinity is the related issue of ra-
cialization, which is especially salient for
werewolf and love interest Jacob Black
— Edward’s chief rival in the franchise
from both a romantic and species (coded
as racial) standpoint.
Twilight may at first appear as an un-
usual object of literary analysis. The saga
has attracted no lack of criticism, ranging
1 See Melissa Click’s Bitten by Twilight for a comprehensive collection of essays on Twilight’s influence on fandom culture, Holly-
wood teenage idols, and the commodification of literature.
86
Department of English
Faculty Adviser: Nick Davis
all the way from its depiction of unhealthy
teenage relationships to the quality of its
writing. However, the series has had a
profound impact on the entire Y.A. genre
of popular culture. Many scholars cred-
it Twilight as paving the way for other
popular franchises such as Fifty Shades of
Grey, which originated as Twilight fanfic-
tion, and other teenage romances such as
The Hunger Games, which has continued
Twilight’s revival of the Y.A. genre’s in-
terest in tropes such as love triangles and
strong, independent, teenage heroines.1 It
is clear that the series has had an enduring
effect on popular culture, cementing it as a
cornerstone of Y.A. literature. Due to the
immeasurable impact of both the original
novels and the multimedia phenomenon
they launched, Twilight deserves its own
field of scholarship. Millions of readers
and viewers have seen and internalized the
saga’s surprisingly new themes surround-
ing gender roles and masculinity. Literary
analysis of Twilight’s language, character
construction, recurring metaphors, and
Gothic antecedents can uncover the spe-
cific themes and messaging that have made
Twilight such an enduring, influential, and
beloved series. Furthermore, it can help us
to understand the way that Y.A. literature
engages with and reshapes representations
of adolescent masculinity.
Analysis of the Current State
of Twilight Scholarship
The field of Twilight scholarship is quite
young, with scholarship beginning around
2010 after the first of the novels were
published in 2006 and the first film was
released in 2008. Even so, in the decade
since the start of the field, there has been
enormous growth in scholarship and
perspectives surrounding Twilight, with a
growing confidence in approaching this
series through various modes of literary
analysis. Thus far, Twilight scholarship has
followed two main avenues: close-reading
analyses that examine the language and
rhetoric of the texts independently as well
as more sociological approaches that think
about elements of the series in conversa-
tion with the success and reception of the
franchise. The field is, in general, con-
flicted about how much these approaches
should overlap or rely on each other. It
appears as if the inclination to analyze the
Twilight novels as literary texts separately
from their corresponding cultural impact
only came later in the 2010s. After all, it
2 It is interesting that many of the first books on Twilight were published by McFarland, including a third book, Wilson’s Seduced by
Twilight. The publisher is especially known for its books on popular culture and media.
takes courage to admit to studying this
series as literature.
The first books and essays written on
Twilight focus heavily on the sociological
and cultural aspects of the series. For ex-
ample, Amy Clarke’s The Twilight Mystique
(2010) and Parke and Wilson’s Theorizing
Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake
in a Post-Vampire World (2011) explore
the overall series through the lens of its
recent success.2 The essays in these books
are often reflexive in that they think both
about how Twilight is influenced by popu-
lar culture norms and stereotypes as well as
how it influences them in return. Thus, in
these earlier books, it is harder to separate
literary analysis from sociological analysis.
These articles act almost as primary sourc-
es because they differ so much from the
intricate, detailed analyses of language and
theme that come later. In fact, early authors
such as Benning (2011) acknowledge that
they are writing at the very beginning of
the field and suggest many potential topics
for later authors. These older articles often
cover both a sociological analysis of the
readers and culture surrounding Twilight
as well as more literary elements of the text
itself, particularly genre tropes and influ-
ential literary predecessors. However, this
seemingly comprehensive approach actu-
ally weakens the literary analysis because
scholars are unwilling to look at Twilight’s
language and themes for their own merit,
separately from the ensuing reception and
sociological aspects. To better understand
the success and appeal of the series and its
legacy in Y.A. fiction, we should also view
the textual elements themselves as insight-
ful and intentional.
87
 Indeed, as more articles were writ-
ten and published, the field became more
varied and more accommodating of
close-reading methodologies. For exam-
ple, Anne Morey’s collection Genre, Recep-
tion, and Adaptation in the ‘Twilight’ Series
(2012) looks and reads much differently
from earlier collections in its willingness
to analyze the literary aspects of the series
separately from the sociological. Claudia
Bucciferro’s collection The Twilight Saga:
Exploring the Global Phenomenon (2014) also
demonstrates this growth, though it is no-
table that studies of Twilight remain con-
fined to para-academic publishers and not
major university presses. Overall, these
later books divide the two types of analysis
more than previous collections — a trend
that only grows throughout the rest of the
decade. Morey’s introduction separates the
articles by subject matter: first looking at
genre and narrative within Twilight, then
turning to the reception of Twilight as a
cultural phenomenon, and finally study-
ing adaptation and film. Significantly,
Morey emphasizes the importance of
studying novels in the romance genre — a
well-established practice within literary
and cultural studies, especially in the
wake of Janice Radway’s foundational
text Reading the Romance (1991), but not
previously applied to Twilight, at least in
print. As with Morey’s, Bucciferro’s book
is divided into sections for articles on spe-
cific areas of study, such as fandom and
reception, gender in Twilight, and looking
beyond the franchise. This last section is
particularly interesting, as it recognizes
Y.A. novels as their own genre that de-
serves analysis by examining common
3 Examples of this common tendency include Torkelson’s Violence, Agency, and the Women of Twilight (2011), Rocha’s Wife, Mother,
Vampire: The Female Role in the Twilight Series (2014), Durham’s Blood, Lust and Love: Interrogating Gender Violence in the Twilight
Phenomenon (2011), and similar critiques cited later in this thesis.
4 Ashley Benning’s “How Old are You?” Representations of Age in the Saga (2011) argues that the lack and ineffectiveness of parental
figures in Twilight allows Bella the independence to come of age.
88
themes and tropes across a varied section
of series and franchises.
Other clear patterns emerge as schol-
arship on Twilight evolves. Early literature
focused on critiquing antifeminist and mi-
sogynist aspects of the series, arguing that
Bella was forced to submit to a dominant
patriarchal culture.3 After this initial ap-
proach, and likely in response to the cul-
tural backlash and hatred for the series, an
opposing, postfeminist movement arose,
wherein scholars began to look at the
ways in which Bella could still represent a
progressive, autonomous character. These
two reactions formed the basis for the field
of scholarship, but authors then quickly
moved beyond these “good” and “bad” bi-
naries, and scholarship began to be more
detailed, intricate, and creative. Twilight
scholarship became more diversified as
authors looked beyond the more obvious
aspects of the series, such as the portrayal
of unhealthy teenage relationships, to take
a more nuanced look at gender roles and
relationships, albeit with a predominant
interest in the female gender. Scholarship
also began looking at Twilight as a coming-
of-age series or bildungsroman in which
Bella finds her place and identity in the
world.4 Whereas earlier authors wrote
broadly about the series, later authors
began filling in the gaps, finding more
intricacies and subtleties. For example,
Nicole Willms, writing in Bucciferro’s
collection, discusses race, masculinity, and
rivalry in the series, and Sara Day, as a
contributor to Morey’s anthology, argues
that Bella’s increasing passivity can be un-
derstood through the lens of what she calls
“narrative intimacy” and her weakening
 “
relationship with the reader as the series
progresses. Both of these articles lay the
key groundwork for readings I pursue later
in this thesis.
The Limits of Current
Approaches to the Study of
Gender and Masculinity
Within this emerging field of Twilight
literary scholarship, one subfield looks at
portrayals of gender and masculinity using
two common approaches. The first refer-
ences Gothic tropes and historical charac-
teristics in relation to gender and sexuality.
For example, Budruweit (2016) argues
that Twilight sanitizes Gothic monsters,
instead making women’s uncontrolled
bodies into the primary sites of the “mon-
strous.” In contrast, Moruzi (2012) gives a
postfeminist reading of Bella, arguing that
the incorporation of Gothic characteristics
intensifies the romance, adding danger
and allowing Bella to explore her desires
and identity, which can be messy without
being monstrous. Moruzi argues that as-
pects of Edward such as self-discipline, in-
experience, and “vegetarianism” (Twilight’s
language for vampires who refuse to feed
off humans) shift the power dynamics of
their relationship, obligating the male part-
ner to the stereotypically feminine task of
relentless self-monitoring, and by contrast
allowing Bella more control and autonomy.
These two examples demonstrate
the common elements scholars often de-
fer to when talking about the Gothic in
conjunction with Twilight. These generic
tropes, whether physical (blood), moral or
behavioral (self-control), affective (desire),
or specifically sexual (including queerness,
5 There is a large, in-depth body of literature on this Gothic tradition, especially for Twilight’s 19th century vampiric counterparts
as Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Just a few of the essays on this topic include Craft’s “Kiss Me with those Red
Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1984), Signoretti’s Repossessing the Body – Transgressive Desire in “Carmilla” and
“Dracula” (1996), and Schaffer’s “A Wilde Desire Took Me”: The Homoerotic History of Dracula (1994).
Beyond short-changing
the texts under review,
these Bella-centric
approaches to the
series lead scholars
to ignore masculine
characters’ questions
and anxieties about their
own performance of
masculinity and the way
male identity relates to
the supernatural.
“
or an alleged lack of queerness) can be cat-
egorized as disparate yet closely connected
aspects of the Gothic, all of which center
the body in some way. Desire for blood and
desire for sex always go hand in hand in this
tradition: The act of desiring and drinking
blood is often erotic, representing other
sexual desires, usually those deemed devi-
ant.5 For example, scholars such as Moruzi
(2012) and Lindén (2013) argue that the
desire for blood is replaced or subordinated
by the desire for sex in these more recent,
Y.A.-style reinterpretations of vampirism.
However, this approach again fails to look
at major, masculine characters such as Ed-
ward as individuals who confront other
conflicts and wrestle with their own stages
of development, separate from their ro-
89
 mantic relationships. Thus, critical lenses
such as postfeminism and others that pre-
vail in Twilight scholarship may not do full
analytical justice to these characters.
Within this Gothic approach, schol-
ars also look at Twilight in terms of its po-
tential historical influences from 19th-cen-
tury British novels and their often Byronic
heroes. Common comparisons in studies
such as Nancy Reagin’s Twilight and Histo-
ry (2010) include the love interests from
Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Eyre (1847),
and Wuthering Heights (1847).6 These texts
are often chosen because of overt refer-
ences in the Twilight novels. However,
scholarship too often conflates Twilight’s
themes and internal dynamics with those
of its famous predecessors without paying
enough attention to their differences or,
once more, thinking more forwardly about
masculinity and male characters. In other
words, while literary-historical analysis
foregrounding 19th-century antecedents
of Twilight is an interesting and fruitful
approach, there is a gap in that literature
connecting these historical perspectives
with how Edward thinks of himself, his
masculinity, and his quasi-filial relation to
his vampire “creator,” Carlisle. In addition,
there is a dearth of scholarship that reads
Twilight with its more monstrous, Gothic
predecessors, an issue that will be discussed
more in Chapter 2. Because Bella is the pri-
mary narrator, scholars are more likely to
think critically about her actions and moti-
vations while taking Edward’s at face val-
ue, even if he is Twilight’s clearest anchor
within the Gothic tradition specifically and
perhaps in 19th-century character tropes
more broadly.
6 For a variety of articles on this topic, see Parke and Wilson’s Theorizing Twilight (2010), specifically the second part of the col-
lection titled: Once Upon a Twilight: Fairy Tales, Byronic (Anti) Heroes, Post-Feminist Romance, and Growing Up in a Twilight
World.
90
The other common approach to
looking at gender and masculinity moves
away from literary and cultural paths to
argue that characters such as Edward are
most interesting for how they embody the
characteristics and desires of current soci-
ety. This approach, whether or not it re-
flects the sociological and reception-based
tendencies in early Twilight criticism, also
considers the way Twilight both influences
and is influenced by societal values. For
example, Christensen’s article Blood Absti-
nent Vampires and the Women Who Consume
Them (2013) argues that these 21st-century
vampires represent a desirable Other, an
antiseptic epitome of consumer culture in
explicit contrast to Gothic messiness. In
Twilight, the Cullen family is inhumanly
beautiful and perfect: a collective para-
gon, to which other characters, as well as
readers, aspire. In Mukherjea’s My Vampire
Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculini-
ty, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranor-
mal Romance (2011) she argues that these
vampire boyfriends present a “perfect” mix
of masculinity, embodying white, old-fash-
ioned, gentlemanly, and protective values
without crossing a line into patriarchal
creepiness or overtly controlling behavior
(in Twilight alone, Bella describes Edward
as “perfect” over 30 times). Characters such
as Edward also juggle values from multiple
eras and classes. This combination allows
female characters to perform patriarchal
norms of femininity while also gaining
freedom from societal values and explor-
ing their own independence. Once again,
articles like these omit any focus on mas-
culinity or male angst, instead centering
anxieties around postfeminism and how to
be feminist. The two examples I have cited,
though seemingly very different, get close
to the issue of men’s anxiety around mas-
culinity and growth, specifically Edward’s,
but never actually address it. Christensen
focuses only on the 21st-century aspects
of vampires, without thinking about their
influences from previous eras. Mukherjea
acknowledges that characters like Edward
are juggling values from multiple eras but
focuses only on how that confusion affects
their romantic partners. They argue that
Edward and other male characters always
portray masculinity “perfectly” without
considering how this pressure to perform
may affect them internally, even though the
original novels clearly indicate that struggle.
fallibility and confidence of cis-heterosex-
ual men. Much of Edward’s inner conflict
centers around his own relationship with
vampirism, aging, and eternal adolescence,
rather than being focused solely on Bella.
Distancing our analysis of Edward from Bel-
la’s perspective will reveal his own deep dis-
comfort and insecurity, foregrounding his
intense self-scrutiny rather than Bella’s sec-
ond-hand and often idealized observations.
In reality, as a very old vampire, Ed-
ward is navigating both these historical
values and current ones. The messiness
of these past and present pressures reveals
how some forms of masculine and patriar-
chal anxieties have not changed completely

“
As a subject of analysis, masculinity regularly
receives less focus than women and
feminism, with particular gaps around cis,
straight, masculine characters. By paying
attention to these gaps and studying these
types of masculinities, we can gain a better
understanding of how these characters
internalize and perpetuate toxic patriarchal
norms, but also offer alternative masculinities
that already exist.

Midnight Sun further confirms that there are

more elements at play in the series than Ed-
ward’s relationship with Bella.
Beyond short-changing the texts un-
der review, these Bella-centric approaches
to the series lead scholars to ignore mas-
culine characters’ questions and anxieties
about their own performance of mascu-
linity and the way male identity relates
to the supernatural. More broadly, these
interpretive angles perpetuate patriarchal
assumptions and norms around the in-
”
for men over this long historical timespan.
The past and present often unstably coexist
for Edward, although Twilight criticism of-
ten does try to partition the past from the
present. We need to look at how maturity is
portrayed within an unchanging but eter-
nal vampire body and how Edward views
his maturation in relation to both humans,
such as Bella, and other vampires, like
Carlisle. Edward’s relationship to growth
is fraught because his expected character
development and societal pressure contrast

91
 with his allegedly “perfect,” unchangeable,
and impermeable exterior. In other words,
as Edward’s life changes and society chang-
es around him, his appearance cannot also
change in parallel. The mythology around
vampires as unchanging and set in stone
both physically and psychologically at
the age they are “turned” (when they are
bitten) contributes to his general anxiety
and insecurity about his inhumanness and
inability to change. Because scholarship
focuses on Bella’s relationships and char-
acter growth, we are currently missing an
understanding of how Edward has his own
anxieties around morality and masculinity
and how being a vampire not only “freez-
es” his development, but also prompts his
constant uneasiness and self-questioning.
This pattern within Twilight scholarship
also points to a broader gap in masculinity
scholarship within the field of gender stud-
ies as a whole, including its engagement
with literature. As a subject of analysis,
masculinity regularly receives less focus
than women and feminism, with particular
gaps around cis, straight, masculine char-
acters. By paying attention to these gaps
and studying these types of masculinities,
we can gain a better understanding of how
these characters internalize and perpetuate
toxic patriarchal norms, but also offer al-
ternative masculinities that already exist.
To gain a fuller understanding of Ed-
ward and the diverse — and perhaps con-
tradictory — ways masculinity is presented
within the series, we need to think of him
as an independent and fallible character
rather than only as an ideal romantic inter-
est for Bella. This, of course, is inherently
difficult because Bella’s voice offers our
only direct access to Edward’s headspace
until Midnight Sun directly engages his per-
spective. But even before that point, when
we consciously step back from Bella’s nar-
92
ration and cast doubt on her omniscience,
the first Twilight novel does offer ways to
take stock of Edward’s feelings and conflicts
in ways that are not solely about Bella. By
decentering Bella, even in the texts she nar-
rates, we can glean suggestive information
about Edward’s other relationships, such as
the father-son or perhaps creator-creature
relationship with Carlisle, whom he often
looks to as a role model.
In tandem with this new approach,
we need to turn to other, often ignored
Gothic aspects to understand Edward as an
independent, three-dimensional character.
As mentioned earlier, Twilight scholarship
always reverts to Gothic vampiric tropes
associated with sex and desire. Instead, we
should also look at Gothic elements such
as the interior versus the exterior, the du-
ality of identity, and the monster within.
Midnight Sun’s emphasis on the monstrous
Gothic solidifies Twilight’s connections to
foundational novels like Dracula, as well as
revealing its nods to other kinds of Gothic
novels, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890).
Twilight’s complex masculine love
interests and characters are at odds with
the traditional heroes of romance novels
by even being allowed to grow and change,
rather than offering a fantastical, uniform,
and “perfect” symbol of masculinity. Twi-
light’s massive, global readership means
that the themes and characters within the
series have an incalculable influence on
fans, pop culture, and the genre of Y.A.
fiction. Studying Edward well outside the
terms of his romantic relationship with
Bella serves not just to help us better un-
derstand his character, but to provide a
whole new lens through which to under-
stand all masculine characters in the series.
 “Twilight’s complex masculine love interests and
characters are at odds with the traditional heroes of
romance novels by even being allowed to grow and
change, rather than offering a fantastical, uniform,
and ‘perfect’ symbol of masculinity.”

Although it is easy to see Edward and Jacob are willing to give characters credit for in a
as the pop cultural movement tends to por- seemingly banal, generic teenage romance
tray them, and which is exacerbated by the novel. As Nina Auerbach argues in her
films, particularly New Moon and Eclipse, foundational book Our Vampires, Ourselves
they are so much more than two dimen- (1995), “every age embraces the vampire
sional, hypersexualized, and idolized love it needs” (145).8 Edward is certainly one
interests.7 As the franchise has emphasized of the most prominent vampires of this
and commercialized the love triangle, generation and so analyzing his own trials
the characters themselves are forced into and tribulations with adolescence, matu-
stereotypical roles to portray hegemonic, ration, and the performance of masculin-
toxic representations of masculinity. In ity will perhaps help us understand why
parallel, the seemingly equal competition so many people gravitate toward Twilight,
and dislike between the werewolves and and what about the teenage experience in
the vampires is unbalanced and entirely the 2000s has made it such an influential
due to the actions of the Cullens. When we and beloved series.◆
take a closer look at the novels, we see a
much more complex version of these char-
acters, many of whom do not fit into the
masculine tropes that critics often assume
the series to be arguing for, as well as a
more nuanced portrayal of race.
Ultimately, all the masculine char-
acters in Twilight, both supernatural and
human, are part of a complex system of
social dynamics, each navigating their own
relationship to masculinity and patriarchal
norms, and each invites and deserves more
attention and investigation than we often

7 See Cunningham (2012) for a thoughtful analysis of the changes between the novels and their adaptations. Beyond the ways the
movies alter the narratives, even the promotional campaigns rewrite the modes and relations of different masculinities as I have
outlined them in this project. For example, the hugely prevalent posters advertising the films feature Edward and Jacob looking
brooding and dark, with Bella posed in between, directly in the spirit of the patterns Radway set forth but which Meyer compli-
cates.
8 Auerbach is an omnipresent, influential authority in the field of vampire studies. Her detailed and wide-ranging book documents
and analyzes literary vampires from the 19th and 20th centuries, using the varied representations of vampires throughout the
decades as a lens to study cultural history. This quote in particular is cited ubiquitously in vampire scholarship, and so this thesis
would not be complete without following in this tradition.

93
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Peters, Fiona. “Looking in the Mirror:
Vampires, the Symbolic, and the
Thing.” Vampires: Myths and Meta-
phors of Enduring Evil, 2006.
Rocha, Lauren. “Wife, Mother, Vampire:
The Female Role in the Twilight Se-
ries.” Journal of International Wom-
en’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014.
Waling, Andrea. “Rethinking Masculin-
ity Studies - Feminism, Masculinity,
and Poststructural Accounts of
Agency and Emotional Reflexivity.”
The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol.
27, no. 1, 2018, pp. 87-201.
Zurutuza, Kristian Pérez. “The Vampire
as the Gender and Racial Construc-
tion of Western Capitalism’s White
Masculinity in English and American
Gothic Literature.” International
Journal of Arts & Sciences,, vol. 8,
2015, pp. 541-49.
95
 FEATURE
The Center: Where Art
and Science Converge
by Maggie Rose Baron

Professor Aggelos
Katsaggelos

Dr. Maria Kokkori

96
 In one of the thousands of art muse-
ums around the world, an onlooker stands
in front of an oil painting and notices tiny
blisters on the surface of the artwork. The
surrounding paintings may be affected in a
similar way, but to a degree imperceptible
to the human eye. In either instance, the
study of these damages is vital to the choic-
es that conservation scientists make to
protect and restore works of art. So, what
causes the bubbles that form beneath the
surface of oil paintings?
The Center for Scientific Studies in
the Arts (hereafter referred to as “the Cen-
ter”), a collaboration between Northwest-
ern University (N.U.) and the Art Institute
of Chicago, tackles these kinds of questions
through the incorporation of technologies
from a range of fields including materials
”
science, engineering, and chemistry.
To serve the
cultural heritage
and general
community
… but along
the way, [we]
establish scientific
methodology that
can be of use
in many other
fields: scientific
fields, fields of
”
investigation.
Professor
Aggelos Katsag-
gelos, co-director
of the Center and
professor of Elec-
trical and Computer
Engineering at N.U., says
the Center’s goal is “to serve
the cultural heritage and general
community … but along the way, [we] es-
tablish scientific methodology that can be
of use in many other fields: scientific fields,
fields of investigation.”
The Center’s research is object-based,
which Senior Scientist and Associate Re-
search Professor Maria Kokkori describes
as “an art historical method that centers
physical study of a work of art as a primary
text.” This kind of research, Kokkori says,
“can provide information about the chem-
ical composition … as well as insights into
artists techniques, and damages and repairs
over an artwork’s lifetime.”
Take the oil painting question.
Through the use of X-Ray and fluores-
cence techniques, as well as the chemical
analysis of the materials used by artist
Georgia O’Keeffe in her oil paintings, re-
searchers determined that the blisters in
these paintings are caused by metal soaps
that form through chemical reactions in
the paint.
The discovery prompted the research-
ers to develop a hand-held tool that can
map works of art for these protrusions to
determine the conditions that may cause
them to change. The project, while
inspired by a physical work of art,
impacts far more than simply the
understanding of soap bubbles
on a single O’Keeffe painting.
Projects have ranged from
the investigation of different
painting pigments and techniques
97
 to the discovery of ancient Roman writing
hidden in bookbinding. With each project,
the Center expands the breadth of knowl-
edge in areas of conservation science and
develops new technologies and techniques
for broader applications.
According to Kokkori, the Center
provides training and mentorship in con-
servation science to students and early-ca-
reer researchers in an effort to “lead the
next wave of advances” in the field.
The advancements are bolstered by
the Center’s collaborative nature. While
the scientific techniques, technologies,
and expertise are mostly housed within
N.U., outside institutions can also tap into
these resources to explore their own ques-
tions and projects. According to Katsag-
gelos, the Center aims to “democratize”
the technology by giving museums and
libraries access to N.U.’s physical instru-
ments as well as the algorithms devel-
oped by Center researchers.
” of problems … that one can address.”
The Center is, quite fittingly, at the
center of a range of disciplines. They might
seem unconnected in other contexts, but
without each and every field included
within the institution, the Center’s work
would not be possible.
“This field of conservation science
and the Center … is a unique contribution
to sometimes make the invisible visible,”
Kokkori says. “But also to make us think, in
a broader, different way, what our knowl-
edge, no matter from which discipline we
are coming from, can contribute to expand
our knowledge on the study of art.”
Currently, the Center is funded by
the Mellon Foundation. However, as that
funding draws to a close, the faculty at
the Center are working to keep it thriv-
ing long-term. According to Katsaggelos,
establishing permanent faculty positions
within the Center may be key to its future.
“We can be here for the very long run,”
Katsaggelos says. “It’s endless, the number

The [disciplines] might seem

unconnected in other contexts, but
without each and every field included
within the institution, the Center’s

”
work would not be possible.

98
 by Violet Decker
God, Absurdism, and Law:
Suffering and Meaning in
the Works of Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, and Camus
Department of Comparative Literary Studies
Introduction
There are three powers, only three
powers on earth, capable of conquering
and holding captive forever the
conscience of these feeble rebels, for
their own happiness — these powers
are miracle, mystery, and authority.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The
Brothers Karamazov
In “The Grand Inquisitor,” a story told by
the character of Ivan Karamazov in The
Brothers Karamazov and one of Dosto-
evsky’s most celebrated passages, Christ
is reprimanded for his choice to give
human beings free will. In turn, says the
Inquisitor, humanity is destined to suffer:
“Without a firm idea of what he lives
for, man will not consent to live and will
sooner destroy himself … There is nothing
more seductive for man than the freedom
of his conscience, but there is nothing
Faculty Adviser: Jonas Rosenbrück
more tormenting either” (Dostoevsky
254). Through its transforming characters,
religious and judicial themes, and elaborate
musings of life and death, Dostoevsky’s
novel is an account of both the depths and
heights of humanity when faced with an
existence of freedom. 77 years later, Albert
Camus’ monological novel The Fall draws
upon these same themes of freedom,
judgment, and faith to also showcase the
madness that results from total freedom
and the dissonance between the legal
system and man’s true nature. Each work
calls to find reconciliation between these
disparate needs — though we desire feeling
as though our lives embodied freedom
and had meaning, we require some kind
of unifying system to live under, without
which we find existence lacking all sense.
Ultimately, Dostoevsky points to faith in
Christ and practicing active love as the
only solution to this paradox. Camus urges
99
 an acceptance of the paradox with no
finality (“the Absurd”) as fuel to continue
man’s instinct towards art and rebellion
— a mindset that will best allow for both
progress and relief.
Both Dostoevsky and Camus stand
in a relationship with one of modernity’s
most trenchant thinkers of the links be-
tween suffering, freedom, and meaning:
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzschean propos-
als, notably the exigency to find meaning
in suffering and the will to power, create a
foundational claim for our need for limit-
ing systems despite the blatant inadequacy
and self-denial found in judicial and reli-
gious frameworks. His assertion that one
must undergo personal transformation in
order to reach self-fulfillment and meaning
further the notion that preconceived sys-
tems limit this search, and it is this notion
to which Dostoevsky and Camus both re-
spond in their literary works.
Nietzsche
Freedom and The Three Metamorphoses
Nietzsche’s The Three Metamorphoses out-
lines his basis for a meaningful existence
— the continual creation of new ideals Mercy
and ways of life. Nietzsche affirms that
this must come from personal experience:
“Breaking with the norms of the past is
meaningful for us only if we had previ-
ously valued them … Otherwise, we are
merely dressing the norms of the past in
new clothing” (Gordon).
Central to this transformation is his Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals
depiction of three distinct stages of de- It is paramount to note Nietzsche’s rec-
velopment: the camel, the lion, and the ognition that the law operates in tandem
child. One begins as the burden-seeking
camel, both consciously and unconscious-
ly searching for experiences that give rise
to suffering. This asserts existence, while
starting the drive to find meaning in suf-
fering, which for Nietzsche is the major
intent of life and a bandage for the wounds
of total freedom.
The camel then becomes a lion when
a more aggressive, freedom-seeking ethos
comes to the forefront. The lion demands
victory and becomes its own master: “‘Thou
shalt’ is the name of the Great Dragon.1 But
the spirit of the lion says ‘I will’” (Nietzsche,
2006, 17). The lion embodies an intent to-
wards freedom, creation, and autonomy
that moves beyond the search for suffering.
Finally, the lion becomes a child by
reclaiming humility and a childlike sense
of wonder that can give rise to new poten-
tialities: “Why must the preying lion still
become a child? The child is innocence
and forgetting, a new beginning … a first
movement” (Nietzsche, 2006, 17). It is nec-
essary, then, to access a childlike spirit in
order to free oneself from the chains of ex-
ternal systems and allow for new creation.
Mercy remains … the prerogative of the
strongest … Whenever a community gains in
power and pride, its penal code becomes more
lenient, while the moment it is weakened or
endangered the harshest methods of the past
are revived.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of

1 The Nietzschean concept of “the Great Dragon” is those values and beliefs culturally upheld that are given to us as moral and
right, without demanding personal experience to find agreement with them. They serve as temptation of the natural inclination
for a guiding framework — but “the rebel resists this temptation by embracing uncertainty” (Illing 34). He recognized that in these
pre-existing frameworks that have a hold on morality, law, culture, religion, and science, there does exist something mankind
needs in order to survive: a limiting model in which to point our creative, intellectual, and emotional energies. However, without
continuing to reflect on and modify these frameworks through personal introspection and experience, they render society and the
individual stuck and suffering.

100
with its nation’s current social and polit-
ical landscape. Because the law operates
as a universal system, its treatment of the
individual depends not squarely on the
accused’s behavior or circumstance, but
on a larger framework embodying aspects
outside of any individual’s control. The
above quote recognizes that the legal sys-
tem asserts dominance over its members
in times of strife by minimizing leniency
and exercising its domination in full.
In such scenarios, despite the law’s
supposed aim of enforcing universal safety
and morality for the betterment of society,
this notion of separateness and disconnect
permeates the courtroom and legal system:
the courtroom as separate from the exter-
nal world, the judge as separate from the
criminal, and the accused as separate from
the accuser. If mercy is given more fre-
quently in times of political and social ease,
there is a split between the framework of
law and the assertion of universal and hu-
manistic values.
The Will to Power and Morality/
Law/Religion
According to Nietzsche, he who wants to
be a creator of good and of evil, must first
destroy all values.
— Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on
Man in Revolt
The self-exploration and individual per-
spective involved in breaking past “the
Great Dragon” is, in essence, the asser-
tion of the self. Those already in power
achieved their position through the will,
and therefore, it was a solitary act that then
makes it impossible to ensure that societal
laws can account completely for the good
of the universal. This is why Nietzsche
stresses the importance of individual re-
flection and rebellion against pre-existing
2 “To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure” (Nietzsche, 1956, 198).
systems. By doing so, one asserts their own
will to power, which Nietzsche sees as a
major solution to the paradox and distress
of freedom.
This driving force is a major element
of both The Brothers Karamazov and The
Fall. Dostoevsky’s characters in particular
“are engaged in a desperate and unending
struggle to disentangle their own image of
themselves from the world’s image of them
as preliminary to achieving an attitude to
themselves independent of the world’s at-
titude” (Jones 100). In both novels, charac-
ters attempt to assert their own existence
and dominance by seeking superiority and
action both within and against the legal
system. The desire both for and against
justice is therefore seen as a mere illusion
that is fundamentally the will to power.
Rebelling against these systems, which
affirm the collective but destroy the indi-
vidual, is an assertion of our consciousness
and autonomy as individuals.
Suffering and Meaning
Nietzsche asserts that we enjoy both
experiencing and inflicting suffering,2 for
it operates from our will to power. For
example, monks suffer through self-denial
and thereby gain a prideful kind of pleasure
in which they view themselves worthy of
judging others for not living by the same
asceticism. Through this lens, the powers
which Dostoevsky writes could “conquer”
people’s consciences are really frameworks
that give meaning to suffering. They
attempt to impose meaning onto our per-
plexing experience of freedom and pain.
In actuality, “what makes people
rebel against suffering is not really suffer-
ing itself but the senselessness of suffering”
(Nietzsche, 1956, 205). With this in mind,
the frameworks (religious, legal,
101
 intellectual, and creative) may be consid-
ered a sort of bearable comprehension for
meaningless suffering. Nietzsche claims,
for example, “the ascetic ideal arises from
the protective and curative instinct of a life
that is degenerating and yet fighting tooth
and nail for its preservation” (Nietzsche,
1956, 256). By accepting religious ideals,
one can find a reason to live despite an
otherwise miserable or ill existence.
Nietzsche also insists that suffering
best finds release in mechanical or creative
activity. Note how the specific environ-
ments of a prisoner in jail, a criminal in a
courtroom, or a novice in a monastery are
subdued and involve little movement or
mental stimulation. Without any release,
one may be more inclined to search for
meaning in the framework of legal or
religious ideas. Religion and law may then
serve as “safety valves” for overwhelming
emotion and suffering (Nietzsche, 1956,
276): it places limits on existence to make
sense of the body and current circum-
stance. This necessitates living by creation
rather than denial: “Nietzsche … belonged
to the party which envisioned a society
where judges would no longer rule, but
where artists/creators would reign” (Du-
vall 551).
Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov and the
Characterization of Existential Strivings
In The Brothers Karamazov, the character of
a cold, loveless, and ultimately murdered
father Fyodor Karamazov can be seen as
the depths from which his sons attempt
to escape. His three sons Dmitri (who
chooses to live by instinctual passion and
3 Nietzsche expressed similar sentiments when speaking of all beliefs and systems we follow: “how can we ever hope to find what
we have never looked for? … Our thoughts should grow out of our values with the same necessity as the fruit out of the tree” (Ni-
etzsche, 1956, 150). The ideal path for both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky ought not to be one of ease and following, but the intractable
and strong desire to empirically discover our own values, which calls upon the gamut of emotional and practical experience.
102
desire), Ivan (who chooses to live solely
by rational and intellectual thought), and
Alyosha (who follows the path of faith as
a novice monk) present three different
guiding life frameworks.
Dmitri, the eldest, pursues excesses
and pleasures of life. It is notable that he
refers to his own self as the “fallen man”
(Dostoevsky 107), and similar to what
will be examined later in Camus’ The Fall,
this references the Bible’s Genesis story of
man being relegated from innocent and
faithful to disobedient and distanced from
God/unity.
Dostoevsky critiques this choice by
presenting Dmitri’s arrest for the murder
of his father. The impulsive way of life
Dmitri has chosen leads to his inevitable
downfall, for though it satisfies the self’s
desire for pleasure and joy, it neglects the
full portrait of life and other people. This
results in ostracism and more suffering,
and Dostoevsky uses Fyodor’s murder and
the legal system to flesh out this realization.
Because he has not in fact committed the
act, this storyline accomplishes two other
distinct aims of Dostoevsky’s work: one, to
display the inexorably nonsensical and cru-
el nature of the justice system, and two, to
demonstrate through Dmitri’s transforma-
tion — which takes place after the accusal
and his time of suffering in the legal system
— that the move from disbelief to faith can
only be transcended through suffering and
must come from personal experience.3
When Dmitri is finally declared
guilty, he proclaims, “I swear by God and
by his terrible judgment, I am not guilty
of my father’s blood! Katya, I forgive you!
Brothers, friends, have pity on the other
woman!” (Dostoevsky 753). It is greatly
significant that Dmitri first calls out to God
when he learns of his fate, for the novel

“
starts with him living solely for himself.
Additionally, he speaks of the others in-
volved in the murder case to show his ex-
istence is now one more aligned with unity
than separation.
Dostoevsky’s style often points to the The superiority of any
multifaceted aspects of man, sometimes system can only be
showcasing opposites actually existing rightfully known and
more in tandem than typically considered.
Phrases such as “the kind of hatred that is recognized when one
only a hair’s breadth from love” and “do personally rebels against
you understand that one can kill oneself it or experiences its

from a certain kind of ecstasy?” exempli-
fy his point that systems relying on strict
rules and judgments, specifically the legal
system, cannot possibly accurately account
for the complex and contradictory states
of human nature (Dostoevsky 114, 115).
The act of imprisonment itself can then be
concluded to be a type of judgment that re-
stricts man’s character into something that
can never reflect the multiple traits and
emotions within.
Meanwhile, Dostoevsky’s “furnace of
doubt was itself receiving its most memo-
rable fictional expression in the person of
Ivan Karamazov” (Jones 25). Ivan, the mid-
dle brother of the family, experiences a tur-
bulent struggle regarding the acceptance of
God. He rejects viewing the nature of the
world through the lens of faith primarily
due to his inability to reconcile the atroci-
ties and suffering of life with an all-loving
and all-powerful God. This rational dis-
belief within Ivan makes him a character
of metaphysical rebellion.4 He seeks unity
between all, similar to people of faith, but
has justified a move away from religion be-
cause of it, and instead pursues the avenue
4 This term first appears in Camus’ The Rebel over 70 years later, but distinctly defines a man protesting not against a specific or
temporary condition, but against his inescapable condition of living and the whole of creation — a protest against the intrinsic
sufferings of existence: “Camus was drawn to figures like Ivan Karamazov because he understood metaphysical revolt as a negation
of reality” (Illing 206).
”
breakdown.
of intellectualism and reason. He similarly
does not understand the tenets that Christ
preached, such as universal love, stating, “I
never could understand how it’s possible to
love one’s neighbors … occasionally from a
distance, but hardly ever up close” (Dosto-
evsky 236). This kind of impersonal focus
on the collective as opposed to the unique
individual is the same philosophy found in
the legal system.
The novel hints that intellectualism
leaves much to be desired, which explains
Ivan’s lengthy grappling with this subject
and eventual descent into madness. He rec-
ognizes the “absurdism” of reality, yet after
the arrest of his brother, he cannot find
peace in man-made attempts to reconcile
this absurdism. Dostoevsky makes a point
of characterizing Ivan as a man of youth

103
 “ By choosing an imposed collective value system,
we sacrifice the individual search for and
understanding of truth and meaning.
who revels in this, even stating, “By the
age of thirty, I will probably drop the cup
[give up on life], even if I haven’t emptied
it, and walk away … But until my thirtieth
year, I know this for certain, my youth will
overcome everything” (Avramenko 230).
Though seemingly self-assured, Ivan has
not found a guiding principle that he is
confident will support him through his life.
Serving as a foil to Ivan’s stark practi-
cal intellectualism, Alyosha is the youngest
son who chooses to go in the direction of
faith and live in a monastery. In a pivotal
scene, he is told by his elder Zosima to at
once leave the monastery in order to see
and experience more of life:5 “You will have
to endure everything before you come back
again … You will behold great sorrow, and
in this sorrow you will be happy” (Dosto-
evsky 77). He is told that leaving will equip
him with the right experiences and suffer-
ing to further unite him with mankind and
deepen his faith. It becomes clear through
the journeys of each character in the novel
that Dostoevsky does not wish for religion
to be a dictatorial system like the legal sys-
tem: it is necessary that the universal love
he sees as emblematic of Christ is realized
on a personal level.
The Necessity of Collapse and Tragedy
Karamazov or Nietzsche only entered
the world of death because they wanted to
discover the true life. So that by a process of
inversion, it is the desperate appeal for order
that rings through this insane universe.
5 “The elder sent me to reconcile and unite” (Dostoevsky 196).
6 Grushenka, a young and vivacious woman in the novel, “falls into one of those illnesses that, in Dostoevsky’s works, are at once
104
”
— Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on
Man in Revolt
Due to Dostoevsky’s notion that personal
experience and transformation is necessary
to experience Christ, we see each brother
undergo a collapse of the previous self and
ideology in some way to attain something
larger. This is referenced not only through
characterization but also through smaller
anecdotes and quotations: “Othello’s soul
is simply shattered and his whole world
view clouded because his ideal is destroyed”
(Dostoevsky 380). Destruction is implicat-
ed in the novel as a necessary ingredient to
enlightenment and personal connection
to universal love. Dmitri’s imprisonment,
Ivan’s breakdown, and Alyosha’s encour-
agement to leave the monastery all involve
religious experience following a collapse
of the ideologies that have carried each
brother to adulthood. This also builds on
Nietzsche’s encouragement to practice
personal rebellious thinking, for the supe-
riority of any system can only be rightfully
known and recognized when one per-
sonally rebels against it or experiences its
breakdown.6 All characters are forced to
undergo a transformative event in order to
directly experience this kind of universal
love, or Christianity.
Camus
Camus and the Absurd
While Dostoevsky sees religion as the
preferable opposition to law, Camus places
religion in the same category as the law:
seeking to confine mankind when our
very nature resists that at every turn. He
renounces this false consolation, turning
instead to the only sort of solutions he
believes would prevail: “Art and rebellion
will only die with the death of the last man
on earth” (Camus 1951, 270).
His concept of the Absurd is no more
aptly demonstrated than in The Fall, where
Camus points out the contradictions and
inadequacy of the justice system to account
for man’s true nature. The novel, referenc-
ing the Genesis story, demonstrates the
crumbling of the illusion of the moral and
obedient self; the protagonist Jean-Baptiste
Clamence, a retired lawyer, comes to terms
with his true nature, which lies at odds
with justice.
Once an esteemed lawyer and judge in
Paris, Clamence grapples throughout the
novel with an event in which he had the
opportunity to save a woman from death
after witnessing her jump from a bridge,
but chose not to. Clamence hides behind
a veneer, acting as someone who imposes
morality and fairness upon all of society.
Yet again, this references the concept dis-
played in The Brothers Karamazov: that by
choosing an imposed collective value sys-
tem, we sacrifice the individual search for
and understanding of truth and meaning.
Our response to the absurd can be total ni-
hilism, extricating oneself through pre-ex-
isting systems, or rebellion and art.
Clamence lives with neither grace nor
justice yet acts as though he is enforcing
the latter. He kills without directly partak-
ing in the action of killing and embodies
the Nietzschean concept of the will to
the sign of intense spiritual conflict and the harbinger of renewal. After five weeks of suffering, during one of which she is uncon-
scious, she emerges ‘very much changed’” (Paris 129).
7 “When I see a new face, something in me sounds the alarm. ‘Slow! Danger!’ Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my
guard” (Camus, 1956, 11).
power. The criminal and the judge, much
like the rebel or intellectual and the intel-
lectual or religious ascetic, are divided in
their aims. One works within a system, and
one attempts escape by living by their only
personally relatable value: the assertion of
their self-consciousness and existence.
Away from the court, Clamence expe-
riences a total lack of unity with, and fear
of, people around him.7 He states that he
has desired his job in order to feel superior:
“If fate had forced me to choose between
work at a lathe or a roofer, don’t worry,
I’d have chosen the roofs and become ac-
quainted with dizziness. Coalbine, ships’
holds, undergrounds, grottoes, pits were
repulsive to me” (Camus 1956, 24). This
admittance is noteworthy because Cla-
mence’s job is supposedly one that instills
equal treatment and punishment as well as
works to maintain a moral and just society,
but he himself desires domination. When
Clamence does not go after the women,
this strengthens his admittance of feeling
so comfortable being both literally and
metaphorically above others that he does
not mind if others are harmed or even
killed in the process of getting him there.
Further, in order for Clamence to continue
acting as the role of judge he depends on a
continual supply of others who are to “fall”
and be punished: one cannot exist without
the other.
The Fall as Legal and Ascetic Critique
Clamence is presented as a protagonist
who has full awareness of himself and his
motives. He contrasts heavily with the
character of Ivan, who professes “I made
up my mind long ago not to understand”
(Dostoevsky 243). Whereas one witnesses
105
 at first glance the battle between good Zosima claims that “as soon as you
and evil in The Fall, the battle appears sincerely make yourself responsible for
to be between the devil and God in The everything and for all men, you will see at
Brothers Karamazov. once that it is really so, and that you are
However, “Clamence seems to speak to blame for every one and for all things”
for Camus in denouncing the religion of (Avramenko 20).10 Clamence does precise-
Christ as a merciless cult of Judgment, ly this, and by acknowledging his baseness,
which has made of the cross a kind of he finds personal redemption that allows
judge’s gavel” (Sharpe 155). Clamence him to then play the part of a judge. The
has accepted his duplicity and has full justice system, however, while claiming
self-awareness of the gulf between his true to seek unity, separates people from each
self and the imposed rules and morality other, puts guilt only on the trespasser, and
his career has him follow. Because of this locks him away, enforcing an overarching
awareness, he hoists himself to a position disconnect that gives rise to more univer-
in which he sees himself as a rightful judge. sal suffering and search for meaning. The
He knows, as preached by Zosima in The characterization of Clamence shows his
Brothers Karamazov,8 that he is equal to the true nature to operate entirely outside of
criminal. By acknowledging his own du- this belief system — he represents an un-
plicity and guilt, he makes the move from derstanding that human nature is bigger
being a singular to universal figure, and can than the systems it finds itself existing
then by his logic judge others, because he is under. This proves to be his true salvation.
simultaneously judging himself. It is pre- He goes so far as to say that Jesus, too, was
cisely this awareness that seems to make a not altogether innocent, which is why he
mockery of both the justice system and re- accepted his crucifixion.
ligion. Clamence’s reflections allow him to For Camus, artistic creation and the
stand outside both systems, asserting that act of rebellion both operate as ideal guid-
the only truthful and knowable element is ing frameworks for humanity and best
his own drive and consciousness. solve our desires for structure, meaning,
and individual freedom. What Dostoevsky
Conclusion sees as a call to faith, the absurd “anguish
Clamence’s ability to see the totality and of ignorance and indecision” (Dostoevsky
duplicity of himself offers a self-knowledge 392), is precisely what Camus proposes we
not demonstrated by any character in The embrace in order to reconcile our unan-
Brothers Karamazov.9 He is able to assuage swerable questions. And what Dostoevsky
himself of guilt by fully understanding would interpret as the “blows of fate [that]
himself. Camus presents this as a possible are the means by which God manifests his
means to “salvation” (salvation meaning, power” (Paris 130), Camus sees as absurd-
in this sense, freedom from the awareness ism, which is precisely the space of limbo
of Absurdity). and puzzlement that acts as a catalyst for
8 “Make yourself responsible for all the sins of men” (Dostoevsky 320)
9 The only instance that bears resemblance is when Fyodor claims, “It always seems to me, when I go somewhere, that I am lower
than everyone else and that they all take me for a buffoon — so let me indeed play the buffoon, because all of you, to me, are lower
and stupider than I am” (Dostoevsky 86). While he does not acknowledge his own duplicity or contradictory nature, he immerses
himself in the ‘play,’ giving himself over to the illusory mask of his personality.
10 Recall Fyodor, also, openly admitting his ‘wickedness.’ This self-awareness appeared to absolve him of any shame or self-hatred.

106
 “The fixed nature of law and religion can be
alleviated and ultimately changed through rebelling
in order to experience and understand what these
systems lack.”
rebellion and creation. While Dostoevsky
has his characters go through contradic-
tion and suffering to create a new person,
in The Fall, there is no certain transfor-
mation other than Clamence accepting
an irreconcilable discordance between the
truth of the self and the desire for higher
value and morality. “After prolonged re-
search on myself,” he says, “I brought out
the fundamental duplicity of the human
being” (Camus, 1956, 84). It becomes im-
possible, Clamence demonstrates, for us to
be accurately embodied in any generalizing
system of strong boundaries, for we are
contradictory by nature. Absurdism paves
the way for a morality that is moreso a
“creative action” as opposed to a given set
of unchangeable tenets (Bowker 170). Be-
cause of this, it can also work in tandem
with new ideas and progress and is not
constrained by itself.
Both rebellion and art still operate de-
pendently on a system, which is why they
are successful means to assuage the suffer-
ing and chaos found in freedom. “The first
thing that a landscape painter does is to
square off his canvas” (Camus, 1951, 225):
they still represent a need for unity and a
coherent system. They provide limitations
and order, which relieve us of the burden
and perplexity of total expansive freedom.
They reflect parts of ourselves back to us,
marking our existence and value while
supplying us with a sense of unity.
These solutions are a never-ending
process. The duality that exists within us
can therefore find expression and relief in
rebellion and art: art says, “Be like me, the
Original Mother, who, constantly creat-
ing, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flux
of appearances” (Nietzsche, 1956, 102).
In this way, the continual creations of art
and rebellion are more pure and accurate
manifestations of the self. They seek to be
expressions of truth, not implementations
of constraints.
The paradox of justice lies in its desire
for unity and peace despite its denial of all as
intrinsically connected. The characters who
reject this interconnectedness are doomed
to isolation, anxiety, and despair, but the
recognition of this brings enlightenment,
peace, and reconciliation. The fixed nature
of law and religion can be alleviated and
ultimately changed through rebelling in
order to experience and understand what
these systems lack, and the expression of
difficult and complex truths through liter-
ature and art. Without choosing mystery,
we choose to avoid full realization of the
self. The goal must not be to encourage vi-
olence, generalizations, or limitations, but
rather to become Nietzsche’s “child” and
challenge the impersonal systems of law
and dogmatic religion, opening up new
and creative means to handle social conflict
while encouraging all to go in the direction
of art and rebellion.◆
107
 Bibliography
Avramenko et al. Dostoevsky’s Political
Thought. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
Bowker, Matthew H. Albert Camus and
the Political Philosophy of the Absurd:
Ambivalence, Resistance, and Creativity.
Lexington Books, 2013.
Camus, Albert. The Fall. Translated by
Justin O’Brien, Vintage Internation-
al, 1956.
Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on
Man in Revolt. Translated by Anthony
Brower, Vintage International, 1951.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Kara-
mazov. Translated by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Duvall, William. Camus’ “Fall”—From
108
Nietzsche. Historical Reflections/Ré-
flexions Historiques, Fall 1995, Vol. 21.
No. 3. Fall 1995 p. 537-552
Gordon, Mordechai. “Camus, Nietzsche,
and the Absurd: Rebellion and Scorn
versus Humor and Laughter.” Phi-
losophy and Literature, vol. 39 no. 2,
2015, p. 364-378.
Illing, Sean Derek, “Between nihilism
and transcendence: Albert Camus’
dialogue with Forgiveness, After the Fall.” In La
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky” (2014).
LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1393.
Jones, Malcolm. Dostoevsky and the
Dynamics of Religious Experience.
Anthem Press, 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of
Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals.
Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1956.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: a Book for All and None.
Cambridge University
Press, 2006.
Paris, Bernard J. Dostoevsky’s Greatest
Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Sharpe, Matthew 2018, “Camus and
Case, Marguerite (ed),
Phenomenology and Forgiveness,
Rowman & Littlefield, London, Eng.,
p. 149-163.
 Re-engineering the Planet,
Legally By Lynna Deng
In 2015, 196 parties, including the
U.S., signed the Paris Agreement, mark-
ing a global commitment to limit global
temperatures to 2.0°C above pre-indus-
trial levels. In the seven years since, the
parties’ actions toward this commitment
have proved deficient as global tem-
peratures continue to soar. Based on the
International Panel on Climate Change’s
(IPCC) estimates, in a “business-as-usu-
al” scenario, temperatures are likely to
rise to 2.7°C above pre-industrial lev-
els by the end of this century, and, in
a worst case scenario, they may even
rise 4.4°C. (Hausfather et al., 2020).
The IPCC thus reported that simply
cutting greenhouse gas emissions is no
longer enough – we now must actively
remove carbon dioxide from the atmo-
sphere for any chance of fulfilling the
Paris Agreement (IPCC, 2021).
This burgeoning field of carbon
dioxide removal (CDR), alongside solar
radiation management, where sunlight
is blocked to decrease global tempera-
tures, has been dubbed “geoengineering.”
Increasing scientific interest in geoengi-
neering has created a vast menu of op-
tions, including mechanically capturing
atmospheric carbon dioxide (direct air
capture), using rocks to react with and
trap atmospheric carbon dioxide (min-
eralization), adding certain compounds
into the ocean to increase its absorption
of carbon dioxide (alkalinity enhance-
FEATURE
ment), and even releasing giant mirrors
into space.
The decision of which of these op-
tions to implement and how looms ever
closer, but with geoengineering research
only beginning, it is a politically, legally,
socially, and ethically fraught choice.
Herein lies Environmental Policy and
Culture Visiting Professor Dr. Wil Burns’
current area of research: navigating geo-
engineering under international law.
As Professor Burns tells it, his career
has been a series of “serendipitous” mo-
ments, taking him from studying biology
and political science as an undergraduate,
to forming an international wildlife law
think tank, to working in climate change
litigation. Professor Burns recounts the
particular serendipitous moment that
first introduced him to geoengineering:
“I had been asked to be a visiting scholar
at Williams College, and I was flying
there to start teaching … international
environmental law to undergraduates. I
discovered that instead of 16 weeks, which
is what I thought the semester was, it was
17 weeks. I said, ‘Yikes, I don’t have a topic
for another week.’ I was getting ready to
get off the plane, and the guy next to me left
his ‘USA Today’ on the seat … There was
a small article on climate geoengineering,
and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting topic
combining science and technology and law
and politics and ethics. I bet by Week 17,
I could have a lecture on this for the
students.’ And I did.”
109
 ”
At the time, geoengineering was truly
in its infancy. “There weren’t many people
in geoengineering, full stop, but there was You can play a role in
nobody on the social science side,” Profes- helping to establish
sor Burns says. When he and a colleague at
American University founded their research that foundation, fig-
center, the Washington Geoengineering uring out how we re-
Consortium, in 2013, it was the first working purpose some of these
on the social science of geoengineering.
Now, as the field has flourished under laws to fit, or identify-
the interest of researchers, start-ups, and ing what gaps we have
investors, it has become clear that deploying
any geoengineering technique will have a
that we’re going to
global impact. Yet, with geoengineering only have to fill with more
being seriously considered in the past few law or more regulatory
years, most existing international law doesn’t
directly govern the practice. Thus, Professor provisions in the future.
Burns’ current work seeks to understand
how the international laws and customs cur-
rently in place would affect geoengineering’s the options to select what
deployment, as well as what new legislation to research, his choice is a
“judgment call.” He clarifies,
“You have to … make your
needs to be enacted to fully regulate it. This stands in own decisions about where
stark contrast to many others’ work in international you focus based on your in-
law, including Professor Burns’ former work in in- terest, your expertise, and
ternational wildlife law, where legislation is specifi- whatever criteria you estab-
cally aimed at the issue of interest. On comparing the lish.” For him, those criteria
two, Professor Burns says: are, “Is [the geoengineering
technique] economically vi-
“On one hand, [international law for
able? Is it relatively low risk?
geoengineering is] daunting and frustrating. On
the other hand, that’s kind of an interesting role
… Might [the public] look at
for a lawyer … When it comes to these fields, this and say, ‘Yeah, we could
where they’re relatively new, I think you can live with this’?” Designating
play a role in helping to establish that foundation, these criteria allows some
figuring out how we repurpose some of these options, such as alkalinity
laws to fit, or identifying what gaps we have that enhancement, to rise to the
we’re going to have to fill with more law or more top for Professor Burns.
regulatory provisions in the future. And that’s As geoengineering has
fun to do.” gained prominence, people
With such a lengthy list of geoengineering outside of academia have
options, there is an equally lengthy list of interna- begun seeking out Professor
tional laws and customs that could apply to each. Burns’ 15 years of expertise.
Professor Burns explains that, when he sifts through From briefing congressional

110
representatives and law firms, to speak-
ing with reporters, to consulting for
start-up companies, to running a pod-
cast and webinar series, he finds that
being a social scientist makes him well
equipped to give such explanations and
recommendations. “In some ways, [it’s]
easier … than having a scientist com-
municate because scientists sometimes
just can’t break it down. [Scientists]
don’t know what [others] don’t know,”
he says.
The aforementioned decision of
which geoengineering technologies to
use and how relies heavily on this com-
munication. Professor Burns says that,
based on a new study from the Univer-
sity of Oxford, the number of people in
a given country who report they know
about carbon removal “ranges from
four or five percent, maybe up to 18%
... But I even question [what people
mean] when they say they know about
carbon removal; there’s no reason for
most people to know about this, right?”
(Smith et al., 2023).
Indeed, perhaps most people feel
they have no reason to stay informed
about geoengineering, but as our un-
willingness to make drastic emission
cuts catapults us toward a terrifying
future, we all certainly need to. Pro-
fessor Burns’ work in geoengineering
research and education thus only grows
in urgency and importance.

References

Hausfather, Z., Drake, H. F., Abbott, T., Schmidt, G. A. (2020). Evaluating the performance of past climate model projec-
tions. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(1). https://doi.org/10.1029/2019gl085378

IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors,
C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews,
T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United
Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 2391 pp. doi:10.1017/9781009157896.

Smith, S. M., Geden, O., Nemet, G., Gidden, M., Lamb, W. F., Powis, C., Bellamy, R., Callaghan, M., Cowie, A., Cox, E.,
Fuss, S., Gasser, T., Grassi, G., Greene, J., Lück, S., Mohan, A., Müller-Hansen, F., Peters, G., Pratama, Y., Repke,
T., Riahi, K., Schenuit, F., Steinhauser, J., Strefler, J., Valenzuela, J. M., and Minx, J. C. (2023). The State of Carbon
Dioxide Removal - 1st Edition. The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/W3B4Z

111
 ABOUT
ABOUT
THE
THE

CONTRIBUTORS
CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Ann Brooks

Violet Decker
Juliet Jacques
Karina Karbo-Wright
Olive Liu
Kiana Staples
Nina M. Wetoska

112
 Emily Brooks
Going On Seventeen:
“Type,” the Ingenue,
and Teenage
Girlhood Onstage

In a nutshell, what is your research topic? fullness of themselves onstage and unlim-
The trope or “type” of the ingenue, the ited by reductive, untruthful, exclusive
expectations it creates for teenage girl- notions of what it is to be a young wom-
hood/young womanhood onstage, and the an. My combined process of traditional
impact of those expectations on theatre academic reading, ensemble discussion,
artists and audiences. and performance as research could be in-
credibly generative if applied to different,
How did you come to your research topic? similar, or even the same topic with a dif-
As a young female theatre artist often ferent core ensemble of individuals. While
considered for “ingenue” roles, I had I focused on the demographic of teenage
found the type limiting and untruthful, girlhood and the “type” of the ingenue,
and was interested in investigating how to there is much exciting research and cre-
interface with this “type” while telling the ative work to be done around expectations
kind of stories I wanted to tell. Research, for other ages, genders, and “types”/cate-
particularly community conversations, gories of role onstage, and what processes
soon showed me that my frustrations rep- and texts can tell each of our stories with
resented only a small, shallow portion of the most truth and positive impact.
the ramifications of ingenue expectations.
Where are you heading to after graduation?
Where do you see the future direction I’ll be staying in Chicago to work profes-
of this work leading? How might future sionally as a theatre artist, particularly
researchers build on your work, or what focused on performance, choreography,
is left to discover in this field? and direction. I can’t wait to continue to
I would hope that this work would further pursue my passions of healthy artist ex-
push a shift in mindset in the theatre periences and meaningful, collaborative,
industry toward greater respect and rec- positively impactful storytelling!
ognition of each artist as a full, agentive,
creative individual, allowed to express the
113
 Violet Decker
God, Absurdism, and
Law: Suffering and
Meaning in the Works of
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and Camus

In a nutshell, what is your research topic? to better personal and societal fulfillment
My research seeks to find textual support and meaning.
and connections in specific works of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Where do you see the future direction
Fyodor Dostoevsky regarding the purpose of this work leading? How might future
and nature of the legal system and religionresearchers build on your work, or what is
in society. The thesis seeks to explore, left to discover in this field?
through literary works and the lives of I see much more to dissect regarding the
the respective authors, the drives toward legal system’s portrayal in world literatures
strict religious and/or legal beliefs and and how that, in time, could translate to a
the larger result of this on both personal greater understanding of some of its pit-
development and society at large. falls and challenges. Because literary works
focus so richly on human nature in a way
How did you come to your research topic? the legal system alone cannot, it
In my reading of French and Russian lit- brings a new dimension to our under-
erature through my major of Comparative standing of judgment and law. Any por-
Literary Studies, I noticed a repetitive trayal of character involvement with (or
theme of the legal system and the common against) the legal system in fictional works
threads of its portrayal in numerous nov- in world literature can help enhance these
els. I became interested in exploring this understandings.
further to seek practical understandings
of how these portrayals might guide us Where are you heading to after graduation?
in revising relevant legal frameworks, or I am preparing for an M.F.A. in Creative
creating new frameworks that might lead Nonfiction writing.

114

In a nutshell, what is your research topic?
My thesis is centered around studying
representations of masculinity for adoles-
cent characters in the Twilight Saga. This
global book series and movie franchise has
had an incalculable effect on the genre of
Young Adult fiction as a whole. I argue
that despite its seeming banality as a
romance novel, it is actually doing some-
thing new and important in the way that it
portrays teenage boys’ fraught relationship
to patriarchal standards of masculinity.
After discussion with my advisor, I
submitted the introduction of my thesis to
the NURJ. In this, I summarize the field of
Twilight scholarship, trace the way that it
has evolved over the past decade, and ar-
gue that there is a gap in the study of mas-
culine characters. I argue that this is also
representative of a larger trend in literary
and gender studies, which tend to focus on
feminist studies without a parallel under-
standing of the way that men, especially
during adolescent, are also necessarily a
part of and affected by patriarchal systems.
I then go on to outline my arguments for
the three chapters of my thesis and con-
clude with the importance of this research.
Juliet Jacques
Monstrous
Masculinities, Male
Angst, and Adolescent
Development in the
Twilight Saga
How did you come to your research topic?
I’ve been a Twilight fan since middle
school, but only recently have begun to
not be embarrassed about it! I feel strongly
about defending seemingly silly romance
novels, which because of the way they are
marketed towards women, get a hugely dis-
proportional amount of hate and criticism.
Where do you see the future direction
of this work leading? How might future
researchers build on your work, or what is
left to discover in this field?
I feel that my work on masculine
characters in Twilight is only the
beginning. I focus on two main primary
characters, but I argue that all characters
within the series are interacting with
masculinity in different and interesting
ways, and all would be fruitful objects of
analysis. I also think that the frameworks
I have developed for thinking about these
characters can definitely be applied to
other novels in the genre.
Where are you heading to after graduation?
University of Wisconsin-Madison Law
School with a full scholarship
115
 Karina
Karbo-Wright
“When did the
depictions become
worse than the reality?”:
Black Trauma Porn and
The Black Horror Genre
in Television and Film
In a nutshell, what is your research topic? avenues within Black horror and within
I am looking at what is meant by “Black other Black genres that I could explore.
Trauma Porn” and if the best phrase to I also proposed the idea of engaing with
describe the phenomenon is being used how colorism and interracial relationships
specifically in relation to television and film.
play a role in these films as well. I would
love to explore Black horror more. I
How did you come to your research topic? think that besides the authors mentioned
Professor Hesse and I were chatting about throughout the thesis, there is not a ton
research topics and he brought up Black work on Black film genres, especially
Trauma Porn and asked my opinion on it. horror, with it’s impact on current con-
When I gave it, which was pretty much a ceptualizations compared to other fields
regurgitation of what is online, he asked in Black studies. I’d love to see how people
me if I’d be willing to interrogate it. As a could expand on these ideas in analysis
film lover, I thought it was a great idea! of other Black genres, Black performance
fields, and Black creations.
Where do you see the future direction
of this work leading? How might future Where are you heading to after graduation?
researchers build on your work, or what I currently work at Vivacity Tech PBC
is left to discover in this field? as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Spe-
I would LOVE to continue this work in a cialist, however, I would very much like
graduate study program. In the conclusion to continue my study in a Black studies
of my full thesis, I say that there are other PhD program.

116
 Olive Liu
Defeating the Dragon:
Epistemic Injustice
Towards Asian/
American Women

In a nutshell, what is your research topic? berg. Throughout this class, I realized
Epistemic injustice, and testimonial injus- that testimonial injustice was something
tice specifically, is a type of discrimination I had experienced for most of my life as
that occurs when a person suffers a cred- an Asian/American femme. There was a
ibility deficit because of an identity-based huge sense of relief in being to describe
prejudice. This presentation seeks to this kind of discrimination, and have the
understand testimonial injustice and its tools to combat it in my own life. Because
relevance to Asian/American women. of this, I became interested in how the
Through the course of this project, I influencing factors of testimonial injustice
explain what prejudices influence acts of towards Asian/American women have
testimonial injustice against Asian/Ameri- been shaped and influenced throughout
can women, tracing both their historical and histories of racially gendered and colonial-
theoretical roots. I will also discuss the po- ist violence.
tential effects of testimonial injustice, which
consists of two main types of harm: sexualWhere do you see the future direction
and psychological. Finally, I present the idea
of this work leading? How might future
of epistemic justice as a counter to epistemic
researchers build on your work, or what is
injustice and how it can be practiced. left to discover in this field?
As it stands, epistemic injustice is a
How did you come to your research topic? relatively new concept within Philosophy.
In the winter quarter of my junior year, Yet, for most of the people I spoke with
I took a course on the topic of epistemic throughout this project, it was something
injustice with my advisor, Sanford Gold- they had experienced frequently. Thus, I

117
 think that one of the goals of this project
was to provide the language and tools for
people to identify and combat this kind
of injustice in their own communities. In
terms of the future direction of this work,
I think that the development of a more
specific account of testimonial injustice
for different groups would be valuable,
especially in thinking about how specific
communities can work against and heal
from epistemic injustice. Even further,
I’m curious to see how epistemic injustice
118
changes depending on the intersections
of certain identities, shifting cultural
contexts, and modes of communication,
like digitally.
Where are you heading to after graduation?
Currently, I am working at Chicago Pub-
lic Schools as a NU Public Interest Pro-
gram Fellow. After the program ends, I
hope to continue my research by applying
to Ph.D. programs in either Philosophy
or Ethnic Studies.

In a nutshell, what is your research topic?
The role of women in South Korea’s tattoo
history and culture, as well as the experi-
ences of South Korean female tattoo artists.
How did you come to your research topic?
As a female tattoo collector myself, I
wanted to investigate the experiences of
women in South Korea’s tattoo scene. I
noticed many female tattoo artists in South
Korea who were popular, but not a lot of
research on them apart from writings on
beauty tattooing (such as tattooing semi
permanent makeup).
Kiana Staples
Unashamed:
Exploring A South
Korean Female Tattoo
Artist’s Negotiation
Of Identity
Where do you see the future direction
of this work leading? How might future
researchers build on your work, or what
is left to discover in this field?
I am hoping to interview more artists
as my Korean proficiency continues
to improve. I’m hoping that other
researchers in my field will consider the
usefulness of ethnographic methods
such as oral history to supplement exist-
ing research that focuses on literature or
other sources.
Where are you heading to after graduation?
I’m currently taking a gap year at home,
spending time with my mom, little broth-
er, and cats. I hope to earn a master’s and
PhD in my field and eventually become a
college professor.
119
 Nina M.
Wetoska
The Effects of Power
Dynamics in University-
Community Partnerships
In a nutshell, what is your research topic?
This study looks into the power dynamics
between undergraduate students and
adult community members and their
effects on mediating these relationships
within the realm of university-communi-
ty partnerships.
How did you come to your research topic?
I participated in the Young People’s Race,
Power, and Technology Project (YPRPT)
as an Undergraduate Coordinator for the
2020-2021 academic year. I also completed
a credit-bearing Research Apprenticeship
working with Dr. Sepehr Vakil and the
YPRPT Research Team. My experiences
led me to choose university-community
partnerships as my topic and YPRPT as
my case study.
120
Where do you see the future direction
of this work leading? How might future
researchers build on your work, or what is
left to discover in this field?
I see the findings of this work and
emphasis on the adult community
member and undergraduate relationship
contributing to future improvements
in university-community partnerships.
There is so much left to discover in this
field, particularly because the town and
gown dichotomy continues to hold true,
at least to some degree, in many towns
where universities reside.
Where are you heading to after graduation?
I’m currently working at the Buehler Center
for Health Policy and Economics at the
Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
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