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Browsing by Author "Hughes, Kit, committee member"

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    A metaphysical answer to the appropriateness question in aesthetics
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) LaRose, Gabriella, author; Romagni, Domenica, advisor; McShane, Katie, committee member; Hughes, Kit, committee member
    The aim of this project is to give a new, descriptive answer to the appropriateness question in aesthetics. The appropriateness question asks how is it appropriate for ethical value to affect aesthetic value in aesthetic cases? I give a two-step argument for a metaphysical relationship between ethical content and aesthetic experience which is conditional on ethical content being aesthetically relevant and narrative being present. I argue that there is an inherence relationship between ethical content and narrative, where the former inheres in the latter. This relation holds in virtue of the mutual dependence between ethical content and narrative. I then use Noel Carroll's content approach to aesthetic experience to argue aesthetic experience supervenes on narrative content. This supervenient relationship captures the emergence of aesthetic experience while retaining the spirit of Carroll's discussion of aesthetic experience. Ultimately, I argue that because narrative is a feature of aesthetic experience and further because ethical content is a feature of narrative, there is a metaphysical relationship between ethical content and aesthetic experience. Simply, when a narrative exists (even an imagined narrative) and moral content is present, then a metaphysical relationship will exist between ethical content and aesthetic experience.
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    Anxieties and artificial women: disassembling the pop culture gynoid
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Fabian, Carly, author; Gibson, Katie L., advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Quynn, Kristina, committee member
    This thesis analyzes the cultural meanings of the feminine-presenting robot, or gynoid, in three popular sci-fi texts: The Stepford Wives (1975), Ex Machina (2013), and Westworld (2017). Centralizing a critical feminist rhetorical approach, this thesis outlines the symbolic meaning of gynoids as representing cultural anxieties about women and technology historically and in each case study. This thesis draws from rhetorical analyses of media, sci-fi studies, and previously articulated meanings of the gynoid in order to discern how each text interacts with the gendered and technological concerns it presents. The author assesses how the text equips—or fails to equip—the public audience with motives for addressing those concerns. Prior to analysis, each chapter synthesizes popular and scholarly criticisms of the film or series and interacts with their temporal contexts. Each chapter unearths a unique interaction with the meanings of gynoid: The Stepford Wives performs necrophilic fetishism to alleviate anxieties about the Women's Liberation Movement; Ex Machina redirects technological anxieties towards the surveilling practices of tech industries, simultaneously punishing exploitive masculine fantasies; Westworld utilizes fantasies and anxieties cyclically in order to maximize its serial potential and appeal to impulses of its viewership, ultimately prescribing a rhetorical placebo. The conclusion synthesizes each chapter topically and ruminates on real-world implications. Overall, this thesis urges critical attention toward the gynoids' role in oppressive hierarchies onscreen and in reality.
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    Beautiful transgressions: subversion and visibility in YouTube's beauty community
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Marshall-McKelvey, Kira, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee member
    YouTube influencers must navigate the platform's capricious algorithm in order to achieve and maintain visibility online. The attention economy necessitates visibility labor for YouTubers to succeed in digital content creation. In particular, YouTubers must consider advertiser guidelines so that their content gets monetized (and subsequently rendered more visible). Content on YouTube that achieves high visibility tends to reinforce hegemonic logics of self-branding and gender. The beauty community, which produces feminized cultural outputs, is a highly commercial space on YouTube that rewards capitalist-affirming logics of gender and women's empowerment. Working in conversation with scholarship that explores the resistive possibilities of "LeftTube" (leftist YouTube), I highlight subversive tactics that women beauty gurus use without sacrificing their visibility online. Threading in discourse of play and fun, I argue that women beauty gurus can subvert postfeminist, neoliberal norms that discipline and confine gender performance. I first identify the normative genre conventions of the contemporary YouTube beauty community. Then I argue that RawBeautyKristi challenges norms of new momism and the "always on" digital entrepreneur by performing negative affect as a symptom of alienation, decentering western and masculine temporal structures, and complicating aesthetic labor in relation to neoliberal motherhood. Next, I argue that Nappyheadedjojoba performs platform-specific-intimacy to activate an ostensibly apolitical audience. Specifically, on YouTube, her incongruous references to makeup relieve tension, she utilizes beauty-specific terminology to familiarize her politics, she engages respectability politics, and she incorporates self-promotion as relational labor. On Patreon, she positions audience support as promoting creative liberty, she employs self-disclosure in relation to her politics, and she engages ratchetry as resistance. These strategies cultivate a sort of political authenticity. Lastly, Jenna Marbles's playful performance of failure to be part of YouTube's beauty community lluminates the inaccessibility of a seemingly open, democratizing space. By positioning herself as a YouTube viewer who unsuccessfully attempts tutorials, framing excess in contrast to the quest for natural beauty, exaggerating her status as an aging 32-33 year old lady, and flouting YouTube's self-branding conventions, Mourey reveals an attention economy in the beauty community that privileges postfeminist norms of age, beauty, and femininity. Ultimately, my dissertation aims to provide those in precarious positions with tactics to challenge dominant structures in ways that are invisible to those in power.
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    Colorblind love and Black love on purpose: Black feminist thought, casting, and the invisibility/visibility of Black womanhood on television
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) Goepfert, Ava, author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Black, Raymond, committee member
    This thesis interrogates the representations of Black womanhood on television by investigating the production context and text of two contemporary television shows. Both case studies reveal the importance of quality on screen representations and the relationship between production practices and understandings of intersectionality, stereotypes, and cultural specificity. I argue Being Mary Jane's industrial discourse and text intentionally offer a complex image of a Black woman's life while the industrial context surrounding Rachel's journey on The Bachelorette undermines Black female visibility through a colorblind discourse that dismisses Rachel's position and experience as a Black woman. These case studies demonstrate how off screen discourses contribute to representation on screen and create narratives that can exclude or include cultural specificity and racial complexity. Such narratives resonate throughout popular and political discourses with the potential to empower marginalized voices or expose the mechanisms that strive to silence them and reify white supremacy.
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    Continue playing: examining language change in discourse about binge-watching on Twitter
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Peterman, Katharyn Alison Marjorie, author; Humphrey, Michael, advisor; Champ, Joseph, committee member; Hughes, Kit, committee member
    Utilizing data from Twitter, this study characterized the change in the use of the term binge and its variants from 2009-2019. While there is a significant amount of literature looking at either language change or digital media, this research considered the two as inextricable forces on each other. To examine this and the proposed research questions, a textual analysis was conducted of tweets containing the word binge. Overall, the findings suggest that the December 2013 press release published by Netflix deeming binge-watching as the "new normal" in media consumption, may have pushed binge-watching into the mainstream lexicon. Language use about binge-watching was typically positively connotated in contrast to the negative connotations associated with binge-eating and binge-drinking. The connotative change appears to align with a widening of the definition of "watch" to account for the normality of binge-watching. As the use of binge-watching spread throughout the United States, the pattern of the geographic diffusion of binge-watching did not follow traditional theories of the diffusion of language change. The difference in spread may derive from the corporate origins of the term. Lastly, Twitter enabled and reinforced the spread of binge-watching through the facilitation of the social aspect of binge-watching. The findings of this study provide rich ground for future study.
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    Death becomes us: constituting death and imagining wellbeing through global youth environmental activist discourses
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Amedée, Emily, author; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
    In this study, I analyzed death as a rhetorical strategy and emphasized the speaking power of youth environmental activists and their unique contributions to public discourses. I argued that the stories we tell about death constitute particular identities, ways of living/life chances, and ways of imagining the world. I explored the persuasive power of death in and of itself—death as rhetoric—and how rhetoric constitutes death, even as death functions to elide and enable the very discourses that call it into being. I narrowed my focus by consciously "placing" death on the edges of environmental issues and highlighting the ways discourse about the natural world constructs ecological realities and gives shape to environmental ideologies and human/environmental interaction. To enlarge the existing rhetorical criticisms of youth voice, I featured the discourses of three individuals: Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Isra Hirsi. Each orator's intercultural and international contexts ensure that the relationships and experiences each girl has with their environmental context are diverse and span a variety of ecological and intersecting social issues. My study suggests that when youths employ the persuasive power of death, they do one or more of the following: (1) Constitute a space of inbetweenness and a process of becoming; (2) Harness the rhetorical significance of the material, spatial, and temporal aspects of everyday life; (3) Highlight the consequences of placelessness, disconnection, and detachment; (4) Call forth a politics of relation centered in an ethic of responsibility, intersectionality, and shared accountability; and (5) Imagine more just, sustainable, and flourishing futures for all our relations. Considering the rhetoric of this diverse set of young women rhetors, I synthesized the significant findings and key implications of my analyses to suggest a rhetorical theory of eudaimortia, which reveals the persuasive power of death to challenge and reconstitute how to live, how to become, and how to make, move, and imagine bodies, worlds, and time.
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    Overworked and underpaid: Hollywood gatekeeping in assistant labor and discourse
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Bennett, Kiah E., author; Marx, Nick, advisor; Black, Ray, committee member; Faw, Meara, committee member; Hughes, Kit, committee member
    Ubiquitous, yet unseen, exploited assistants' unseen labor hems the fabric of Hollywood and entertainment industries. In this dissertation, I interrogate the unseen cultural discourses of Hollywood that obfuscate the exploitation of the overworked, underpaid underclass of future creatives and executives: assistants. I argue that the position of an "assistant" – as an entry-level position for Hollywood executive and creative professions – materially, discursively, and socially acts as a gatekeeping mechanism against workers based on class, ability, race, and gender. Meanwhile, Hollywood production and hiring practices must adapt to contemporary demands for accurate representation of diverse positions on-screen and behind-the-scenes diversity. However, Hollywood is inherently white, masculine, middle-to-upper class, and able-bodyminded in its expectations and values. Therefore, I demonstrate how Hollywood uses the position of assistantship to appear diverse, meanwhile the material and cultural conditions of this position gatekeep difference out of Hollywood's creative and executive decision-making roles.