Political instability and radical ideas flourished in the 1850s, the first decade of Californian statehood. As California sought to establish its institutions, the new state tested its limits amidst the nationwide sectional crisis. This project explores and contextualizes calls within the state for California to challenge the federal government by claiming direct ownership of the state’s vast public lands, an idea which chiefly flourished between 1849 and 1855. The federal government’s perceived mishandling of California’s administration, land claims, and land policy fueled local discontent, increasing support for state-level action. Supporters' diverse arguments and goals reflected many of the ideas held about California as a social and an administrative project. The state ownership movement reflects early attempts by Californian politicians to establish regional preeminence and autonomy during national debates over the power of the federal government. Ultimately, the movement failed to achieve any legislative victories. As both state politics and the nation fractured in the second half of the 1850s, the movement quietly faded. Although many Californians lamented federal inaction on Pacific interests, most saw greater benefits to be found in avoiding conflict with the federal government, reaping the benefits of union while avoiding heavy-handed federal reaction.
The moral dissonance of accepting the violation of moral standards in pursuit of religious ends must be accepted as a premise of Israeli geopolitical affairs. However, the devices by which Israel continues to both physically and ideologically expand reveals a logic of domination that extends far beyond the mere realization of religious ideals. Zionism can be read as an attempt to overcome the chronic impotence and diasporic condition Friedrich Nietzsche associates with priestly ressentiment by transforming a historically persecuted people into a sovereign political power. However, the persistence of moral narratives grounded in existential victimhood suggests that state power does not automatically dissolve reactive value-structures. The case of Israel complicates Nietzsche’s master/slave morality dichotomy by demonstrating how modern nationalism can fuse sovereign force with priestly moral legitimation. Using Nietzsche’s Genealogy and some aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil as a guide, this paper examines how the Zionist State is ultimately the culmination of a priestly will to power and considers how moral systems counterintuitively sustain Israel’s immoral conduct in Palestine and other regions.
This paper evaluates the masculinist segment of the homosexual emancipation movement in early 20th-century Germany in relation to Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, broader German society, and the emerging National Socialist Party. In particular, this paper focuses on how certain masculinists, with varying relationships to the NSDAP, aimed to center homoerotic desire and homosocial bonding within their visions of Hellenistic revival – visions which were otherwise also taken up by the National Socialists. This research primarily examines the images and essays of the early gay publication Der Eigene ("The Self-Owner," or "The Unique One") in this context. Current scholarship on Der Eigene and the masculinists – though limited in comparison to the body of work on the portion of the gay movement associated with Hirschfeld – focuses on the rhetorical dimensions of the attempted reconciliations between masculinist visions of same-sex desire and often-fascist nationalisms. Instead, this paper re-examines these reconciliations and rejections with an additional lens of aesthetic analysis, applying methods of visual analysis broadly utilized elsewhere in the field of National Socialist studies to the adjacent circles of the masculinist gay emancipation movement. This research also addresses the nuances within Der Eigene, which, while broadly conceived as espousing a vein of antisemitism not unlike that of the NSDAP, maintained a certain distance from that particular form of discrimination – though not others.
This thesis examines how New Media, especially social media, has influenced contemporary cinematic aesthetics and narrative form in film and television. Through close analysis of three primary case studies—Bo Burnham: Inside, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the ScreenLife film Searching, alongside a discussion of Beast Games and War of the Worlds as negative comparative examples—the project demonstrates the increasing ubiquity of New Media aesthetics in film and television. It first shows how social media’s visual language of authenticity and intimacy has reshaped performance-based media, particularly in comedy specials and reality television. It then analyzes how rapid-cut, highly stylized “retention editing” can be transformed into narratively meaningful hypermediacy. Finally, it considers ScreenLife films and their utilization of a digital mise-en-scène, examining how it can deepen intimacy and characterization, whilst also revealing the limits of the format when authenticity or narrative motivation breaks down. Taken together, these examples show that not only is film actively absorbing, adapting, and sometimes subverting the aesthetics of popular New Media platforms, but that recognition of this fact opens the door to further conversation about the value and use cases of these new aesthetic tools.
This thesis examines how the reception practice or aesthetic sensibility known as camp is exercised in the 21st century. It explores the contemporary avenues in which the sensibility appears and evolves, namely, social media platforms. Through sites such as X and Instagram, it investigates the range of content that emerged from the Wicked franchise and its seemingly never-ending press tour. From users making press tour parodies to adding Wicked images to arbitrary posts, this thesis identifies where the essence of camp develops. It begins with one of the most recognized and remixed moments from the press tour, the Out Magazine interview by Tracy E. Gilchrist with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and examines its varied responses to assess where a sense of esoterism differentiates parody makers from camp creators. Users’ inability to perceive or play into the humor highlights how camp receptors communicate through the content’s visual and linguistic language. Furthermore, this thesis highlights the queerness found in the Wicked franchise, underlining the gay sensibility that inspires the qualities that are most integral to camp, preparing the text to be circulated in an online camp culture. In addition, it emphasizes how an online camp culture differs from a traditional one, as social media profiles more visibly exhibit the roles of women, as well as anonymous users, as arbiters and receptors, which expands the expectation of a camp audience. Finally, this thesis discovers how the incongruities and referentiality that transform Wicked content are applied to other texts as users revisit camp canon with a unique sense of humor, defining the practice of online camp.
