MacDonald, Ian

Making Wonder Women: Recursive Tendencies in Feminist Utopias argues that reduplications of patriarchal hegemonies exist in William Marston’s Wonder Women. Using several close readings of Marston’s original comics as well as three modern (2011, 2017, 2020) reimaginings by Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison, and Daniel Warren Johnson, this thesis highlights how the design of Paradise Island, the Amazons, and Wonder Woman serve to reproduce Rockwellian demands of femininity through the guise of sexual radicalism and the religious rhetoric of liberation through servitude. This culminates in the position that Marston’s feminist ideals calcified into pop-culture a confusing and muddled icon of white colonial feminism.

The aim of this thesis is to examine Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred as a work of post-apocalyptic literature that uses American slavery as its apocalyptic event. I will argue that Kindred critiques the use of linear time and the narratives of progress that are commonplace within the science fiction genre by focusing on an apocalypse from America’s historical past, instead of creating an apocalypse in an imagined future. To do this, I will examine how the novel challenges the reader’s understanding of time and history alongside another work of post-apocalyptic literature, Walter M. Miller Jr’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. I will also utilize apocalyptic theory to argue that Kindred should be considered a post-apocalyptic novel, and by comparing it to Butler’s other works of apocalyptic fiction. Ultimately, Kindred expands the possibilities of postapocalyptic fiction by demonstrating that we are already living in a post-apocalyptic reality.

Popular fantasy is often populated by members of different species, such as dwarves, elves, and orcs. Much of the narrative structure of the genre comes from the interactions and conflicts between these species, with many of them serving as stand ins for real world culture. This has become the underlying fabric of fantasy fiction and has deep resonance in our contemporary pop culture. However, many of these depictions are founded on colonialist constructions of race and otherness, turning the genre into a medium for reproducing racist ideologies, often unconsciously. This thesis examines the origins and trajectory of this trend by looking at one of the most well- known examples of contemporary fantasy: Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft.