Reception to follow.

Kiri Alvarado
Listening to Medieval Voices: Women, Religion, and Healing in the Paston and Lisle Letters

The voices of medieval women are difficult to recover because of the lack of sources written by them. The few letter collections that survive offer one glimpse of the experiences of elite women. In this thesis, I argue that these letter collections show us that women connected healthcare with their religious beliefs, and women were responsible for using both to protect and maintain their families. By using the Paston family letters of the fifteenth century and the Lisle family letters of the sixteenth, I examine how female letter writers discussed health, responded to sickness and death, provided advice, and created community around health and religion. I show that medieval women were responsible for caring for their families medically and women’s medical care was as much a familial affair as it was a community one. Childbirth particularly drew women together as they supported each other during labor, and afterwards. Lastly, this thesis examines how religion was indispensable to medieval understanding of health, and medieval women interacted with religion to further fulfill their roles as caretakers. Thesis advisor: Katherine French.

E Karin Cadoux
Animating Injury: Trauma Rite as Personal Exhibition and Public Exposition
Weaving genres of social theory, art critique, poetry, and performance,

This thesis explores E Karin Cadoux’s 2016 public performance work Trauma Rite in order to investigate lived survivorship and challenge the architecture of public affect. Trauma Rite was an eight hour endurance piece in which Cadoux discloses their identity as a survivor of rape, attempts to clean their body, and scrubs their skin raw, repeatedly performing a trauma cycle of recognition, redemption, and relapse. Audience culture was recorded through documentation of the intersection of North University and State St, in Ann Arbor, MI, between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, and an online forum that passersby could anonymously interact with, logging their responses to Trauma Rite. Cadoux writes on internal and external impacts of giving voice to the survivor body in the public, through their own performance and impactful performed works on gendered violence and psychic injury by other artists. In sections surrounding their address to the audience, audience complicity, and onlooker space-making, Cadoux posits that performance surrounding sexual violence has the capacity to undermine frameworks of public immobility and survivor isolation, unveiling compassionate counterpublics and commons. Thesis advisor: Candace Moore.

Katrina Hamann
Catholic on the Margins: Faith, Ambivalence, and LGBQ Community in a West Michigan Lambda Catholics Group

Despite the Catholic Church’s condemnation of “homosexual acts” as “gravely immoral,” a definite presence of advocacy groups focuses specifically on the affirmation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Catholics. One such group is the Lambda Catholics chapter located in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Lambda has been instrumental in creating a positive and affirming environment for LGBTQ Catholics since the early 1990s. Inspired by my own coming out experience and my relationship with the Catholicism in which I was raised, this thesis considers the role faith has played in the lives of non-heterosexual Catholic women. Four women, all of whom have a connection to Kalamazoo Lambda Catholics or the parish in which it is located, were interviewed about their experiences growing up in the Catholic faith, its influence (or lack thereof) on their understandings of their sexualities, and their current relationships with the faith. For further perspective I also interviewed a Catholic priest who supports Lambda’s mission. The women and the priest all articulated concerns with the Church’s discriminatory attitude towards sexuality and women. In addition, a common theme emerged within each woman’s story that indicated a refusal to adhere to the institutional expectations espoused by the Church. Although the women identified themselves as definitively Catholic, they interpreted the faith in a way that allowed them to both embrace and question Catholicism. Thesis advisor: Dean Hubbs.

Anouk Versavel
Empowerment in Revolutionary Contexts: Women’s Experiences in Poland and Nicaragua

How do women who become lifelong political activists understand their empowerment in the context of revolution? Through qualitative analyses of interviews from the Global Feminisms Project sites in Poland and Nicaragua, I identified various paths to empowerment in the context of revolutionary social change. I used the lenses of intergroup conflict, violence, and feminism to critically examine two movements aimed at social change, while highlighting the connections between empowerment theory and practice, as well as between feminism and social movement theory. Using grounded theory coding of the life narratives of women who participated in Poland’s non-violent Solidarity movement and in Nicaragua’s violent Sandinista movement, I found that common themes (education, belief in a cause, law, leadership, literature, political networks, disempowering experiences, and role models) emerged in women’s accounts of their empowerment and in turn shape their perspective on and commitment to social change. Some of these structures and experiences were described as sources of empowerment and some as results of empowerment. Most importantly, for each woman there were dynamic connections between them that defined pathways they followed as they changed the power relations in their own lives, and worked for broader changes in their communities and countries. Thesis advisor: Abby Stewart.