The Life Cycle of a Woman’s Sexuality: Pieter Bruegel’s Depiction of Women in Netherlandish Proverbs and Contemporary Ideas Annalise Wooster Project Mentor(s): Erika Pazian, PhD Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) depicts a lively town scene full of humans, animals, and objects, each correlating with a proverb or figure of speech. While the work serves as an illustration of humanities foolishness, it also shows an underlying theme of societal conventions related to women and sexuality. Bruegel depicts younger women as being involved in sexual encounters, while the women who age are reduced to tasks with no true purpose. In the contemporary settings, the socio- cultural conventions surrounding have become so blatant that they’ve become satirized. This presentation uses feminist theory to analyze the woman depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs . Bruegel’s depiction of women demonstrates historical precedence for the connection between a woman’s sexuality and age. As the age of the women depicted in the painting progresses, their sexuality diminishes. Drawing on arguments from feminist writers Deborah L. Tolman and Linda R. Gannon, this presentation connects Bruegel’s depictions of women to contemporary ideals of female sexuality displayed in popular media and culture. While present-day media overtly exhibits these ideals, Bruegel’s work demonstrates that this connection has covertly persisted throughout history. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation (May 20, 9:30am–5:00pm) Keywords : Feminism, Sexuality, Art History, Pop-Culture SOURCE Form ID: 206 English Video Games as Multimodal Mentor Texts for First-Year Composition Mushfique Tanzim Ahmed * Project Mentor(s): Dan Martin, PhD This presentation argues that video games constitute rhetorically rich, multimodal texts capable of scaffolding First-Year Composition's three core concepts: rhetorical situation, writing process, and discourse communities. Drawing on Lloyd Bitzer's (1968) theory of rhetorical situation and Ian Bogost's (2008) concept of procedural rhetoric, the presentation demonstrates how video games embed rhetorical situations into their design architecture, requiring players to inhabit, rather than merely observe, constrained communicative acts. Unlike traditional mentor texts, narrative video games position students as active rhetorical agents, making the conditions of persuasion accessible through play. The presentation further argues that gameplay structurally mirrors the writing process where players draft, fail, revise, and iterate feedback within rule-governed systems, enacting the recursive compositional ideals Dwyer (2018) identifies as metacognitive engagement. Games also function as discourse communities, embedding players in shared languages, conventions, and participatory frameworks that parallel academic cultures students are simultaneously asked to enter, a connection developed through Alexander (2009) and Squire (2002). These arguments are grounded in multimodal theory through Selfe (2009) and Vance (2017) and enriched by Latour's (2005) Actor-Network Theory, which positions game mechanics and environments as active agents in meaning-making. Building on Cox (2014) and Sterrantino (2021), the presentation proposes structured emulation as a replicable pedagogical framework for translating gameplay into critical academic writing – one that holds particular promise for multilingual and bilingual writers, for whom games have historically offered informal, low-stakes environments for building linguistic fluency and rhetorical confidence. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation (May 20, 9:30am–5:00pm) Keywords: rhetorical situation, procedural rhetoric, writing process, discourse communities, multimodality SOURCE Form ID: 126
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