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Graduation Term
Summer 2026
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Department of English
Committee Chair
Ray Levy
Committee Member
Mary Jeanette Moran
Committee Member
Ela Przybyło
Abstract
This creative dissertation is a short story collection of retellings, primarily from queer(ed) and crip(ped) perspectives in literary, speculative, and historical fiction genres. The source material includes a range of folk archives (fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology), as well as classic novels and short stories. The project is guided by Creative Writing Studies, primarily as it intersects with the fields of Queer Studies/poetics, Disability Studies/poetics, and Crip Theory. Major critical theories for this project come from Amanda Leduc’s Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory, and Susan S. Lanser’s “Queering Narrative Voice.” The general ethos of these stories is not a simple project of inclusion of queer and/or disabled characters (ex: Cinderella, just add a gay princess). Rather, the presence of queerness and disability is inherently meant to question the stories’ original themes and meanings, and to more broadly question the status quo of the cultures that produced them. The two major creative methods of the stories are 1) the shift toward queer and disabled perspectives, and 2) a series of narrative experiments, including metanarrative elements that draw attention to story-as-story; point of view experiments (such as first-person plural or second person); and queering/cripping form through poetic techniques (such as line breaks) and found forms (such newspaper articles and social media posts incorporated as narrative).
Access Type
Dissertation-ISU Access Only
Recommended Citation
Heffers, Audrey T., "Even in Another Time: A Creative Dissertation" (2026). Theses and Dissertations. 2407.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/2407