Browse Exhibits (131 total)

In light of the popularity of social media platforms for sharing images and videos, it is still being determined how these sites should be researched. Since the start of COVID-19, specifically, accounts on social media, such as Instagram accounts aimed to inspire optimism, have increased. Toxic positivity Instagram accounts are primarily there to remind individuals trying to overcome times of uncertainty. These accounts provide guidance and cryptic statements such as, "Be pleased to aid particular people who have mental health issues." It's important to understand that these posts often lack any support for the idea that people dealing with mental health difficulties shouldn't only be urged to be joyful to cheer themselves up. Toxic positivity is the name for this particular. According to medical news today, toxic positivity is described as a preoccupation with positive thinking. It is the idea that all events, even the most terrible ones, should be seen positively.

My Omeka project is an exploration into the history of witches, their origins and how the concept has developed, and the ways this understanding has been challenged. Monsters depicted in culture tend to reflect a shared fear among a population. Our understanding of witches stem from early efforts by the European church to assert power over local leaders. Traditional pagan knowledge was considered evil by the church, and thus those educated in it inherently became evil as well. This kind of wisdom was especially associated with women, as the church being a patriarchal institution needed to control potential threats to their power. By the 19th century, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge wrote “The Witch.” This archive specifically focuses on her poem and the ways it subverts expectations of what witches are or what they may represent.

My exhibition titled Rotten Apples? An Analysis of Hysteria and Gender Roles in Du Maurier’s “The Apple Tree” examines the unusual behavior of the husband in relation to hysteria. In the story, a widowed husband develops an abnormal obsession with the apple tree outside his home who he claims to encapsulate Midge, his late wife. It appears the husband is being haunted after strange events occur, but no other characters share these experiences. This suggests the husband has become delusional and hysterical. Before the publication, hysteria afflicted women for centuries and after the publication in 1952, hysteria remained a diagnosable disorder until 1980. Du Maurier’s purpose in this story is to depict a man being affected by hysteria, a gendered disorder, to reveal the power of the patriarchy so it can be dismantled in the diagnosis of women. Additionally, Du Maurier’s story is to portray the negative effects of being women constrained to their gender roles through Midge and how this makes women miserable, not hysterical. This exhibit assembles information and studies on hysteria and reviews of “The Apple Tree” to prove Du Maurier’s purpose of dismantling the patriarchy.  

“Political Agencies of the Oppressed, Silent Protest and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch, and Other Tales” is an exhibition that focuses on the shorter fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell. This collection includes the strange novella “Lois the Witch,” a story set in Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials as well as a ghost story called “The Crooked Branch,” which tells the story of a mother and father who die from grief when called to testify against their wayward son at his criminal trial. Women and the working poor are the main characters of stories that chronicle what the narrator relays as grave injustices suffered by them because they do not have the kind of social, political or legal power that other (white men) do. Women are executed for the imaginary crime of witchcraft and the working poor are put in an impossible ethical position when the law demands they incriminate the child they had committed to protect and love unconditionally. These stories are, as the exhibition suggests, central to the collection (the first and last in it) and also to Gaskell’s more radical ideas about the political agency of oppressed peoples. Rather than insist that the only way oppressed peoples can resist their oppressors is by actively fighting back, Gaskell fills these stories with scenes of silent protest: refusals to confess or testify that provide these characters with a way to temporarily assert some agency in a system that refuses to acknowledge their basic human rights. Weaving together close readings of these fictional texts and modern works of moral and political philosophy, my exhibition makes a case for Gaskell’s substantive contribution to the history and theory of passive resistance (including silent protest) and democratic dissent.