Comply to resist: agency in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist dystopian texts | IUP Islandora

Comply to resist: agency in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist dystopian texts. (2019). Comply to resist: agency in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist dystopian texts.

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Title	Comply to resist: agency in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist dystopian texts
Abstract	This dissertation investigates the representation of agency in twentieth and twenty-first- century feminist dystopian novels, television, and video games. Through drawing on media theory, feminism, agency theory, and feminist dystopian theory and criticism, I examine Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Octavia Butler's Dawn, HBO's Westworld, Double Fine Production's Broken Age, and Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil. Specifically, I consider how the representation of agency changes depending on the medium because novels, television, and video games have disparate affordances and limitations, which shape how the reader, viewer, or player understands agency. These particular feminist dystopian texts demonstrate how female characters often comply with gender-based oppression in order to resist it, which novels, television, and video games convey in disparate ways that are unique to the medium. I term this pattern in twentieth and twenty-first-century feminist dystopian texts a Subversive Narrative Structure, which is defined by a female protagonist who complies with gender-based oppression in order to resist it in ways that depend on the medium and the situation that the protagonist finds herself in. This project seeks to expand scholarship's understanding of agency through exploring how women resist gender-based oppression in feminist dystopian novels, television, and video games in exceedingly complex and nuanced ways, which is supposed to empower real-world women to resist patriarchal corruption in individualized ways as well.
Date	2019

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Title: Comply to resist: agency in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist dystopian texts
Personal Name(s): Hurley, Meghan Marie
Heflin, Tanya
Corporate Name(s): Indiana University of Pennsylvania
English.
Note: Advisors: Heflin, Tanya Committee members: Mike Sell; Heather Powers.
Topical Subject(s): American literature
Gender studies
Womens studies