Essays
Projects
Divorce Italian Style by Pietro Germi, a hallmark of Commedia All'Italiana, transforms femicide into a comedic performance of ultimate masculinity, in which patriarchal authority is epitomized through the ownership of women’s lives, sexuality, and emotional devotion, expressed through the calculated grooming of young Angela as both romantic fantasy and justification for murder.
Through the close reading of the premonitions, conjuring sequences, and memories, Eve’s Bayou modifies “The Woman Who Knows Too Much” to conceptualize young Eve’s initiation into soothsaying as a disruption of patriarchal occultism, a system of social illusion preserved through concealment, emotional performance, and respectability politics. Black feminine mysticism is revealed as an alternative epistemology, in which second sight equips young Eve with the knowledge and foresight to destabilize narratives that maintain Louis Batiste’s patriarchal authority and to enable potential freedom and sovereignty from masculine control.
Through the frameworks of misogynoir and digital infrastructure, this paper strives to elucidate how Iris West’s (The Flash) hypervisibility and structurally controlled narratives, and Nicole’s (The Summer I Turned Pretty) position as romantically disposable from the outset, both exhibit the foregrounded limitations of black female sexuality, desirability, and subjectivity through erasure disguised as inclusion.
Through the analysis of Weems’ From Here I Saw What Happened, and I cried 1995-96, this essay strives to deconstruct voyeuristic sadism within white supremacy, its role in the suppression of black pain, and how it has been used to bar the oppressed group from reclaiming agency from said trauma.