That Awful Knowledge: A Poetry Collection Responding to the Romanticization of Violence Against Women

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dc.contributor.advisorMayr, Suzette
dc.contributor.authorNavickas, Erica Nicole
dc.contributor.committeememberVeprinska, Anna
dc.contributor.committeememberJenney, Angelique
dc.date2025-06
dc.date.accessioned2025-01-06T21:03:57Z
dc.date.available2025-01-06T21:03:57Z
dc.date.issued2024-12-23
dc.description.abstractMy research-creation master’s thesis – a poetry manuscript titled That Awful Knowledge – is informed by the writing, spoken word poetry, and lyrics composed by women, including queer and BIPOC women, whose literary responses to institutional sexism and cultural misogyny have cultivated historical threads in the archive of canonical and often forgotten works. My poetry attempts to address the “patriarchal socialization” that reduces women’s voices to extreme stereotypes, drastically reducing their “subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity” (Gilbert and Gubar 48). The women inspiring my collection, both real and imagined, are invoked to reimagine their transgressive voices in contemporary dialogues of intersectional feminist praxis. That Awful Knowledge begins with my rage: inconvenient, undeniable, unwanted rage. I began drawing a vision in my mind that my rage could be productive, that I could not only produce trauma-informed work within the institutional archive, but that my performative activism – contained in what Diana Taylor calls “unreproducible knowledge” or, rather, “the repertoire” – holds validity and causes disruption in academic spaces. Women’s performative rage has been historically stifled, ignored, and silenced by patriarchal societies, and my collection searches for such historical seeds of resistance, often located in feminized representations of the uncanny, the spectacular, and the monstrous. That Awful Knowledge engages with this uncanny, “unusual archive” (Cvetkovich) of trauma through the portrayal of men’s sexual violence against young women and girls. The collection attempts to address the long-established consumption and perpetration of rape culture that disproportionately affects our world’s youngest, most vulnerable human beings.
dc.identifier.citationNavickas, E. N. (2024). Title (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1880/120349
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisher.facultyGraduate Studies
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgary
dc.rightsUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subjectviolence against women
dc.subjectfeminist literary criticism
dc.subjectpoetry
dc.subject.classificationEducation--Language and Literature
dc.subject.classificationLiterature--Comparative
dc.subject.classificationGender Studies
dc.subject.classificationWomen's Studies
dc.titleThat Awful Knowledge: A Poetry Collection Responding to the Romanticization of Violence Against Women
dc.typemaster thesis
thesis.degree.disciplineEnglish
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Calgary
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Arts (MA)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudentI require a thesis withhold – I need to delay the release of my thesis due to a patent application, and other reasons outlined in the link above. I have/will need to submit a thesis withhold application.
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