Hiding Behind the Closet Door: Representations of the Homosexual Experience in A Streetcar Named Desire

Themes related to homosexuality and the homosexual experience are interwoven in many layers throughout Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. This research paper analyzes contemporary commentary on homosexuality from the 1940s and ‘50s, Blanche’s experiences with light and perception, and moments of homosociality between the male poker players, to interpret how the homosexual experience is represented and exposed on stage through the two main characters in the play, Blanche and Stanley. Williams uses a heteronormative context to portray the homosexual experience, thus mirroring the way gay men had to navigate life in the closet while presenting to the public a façade that mimicked that of the hetero-norm. Ultimately, Williams uses illusions to make a comment on the greater society’s attitudes towards homosexuals. Homosexuals were forced to present themselves in illusory manners to be accepted within society; they had to navigate the world inside and outside “the closet”. Thus, Williams uses this theme of illusion and perception in various instances in the play to showcase this type of mentality. Also explored is the concept of the homosexual v. homosocial. The Poker Night scene exemplifies the concept of the homosocial and serves as another avenue through which the homosexual experience is evoked. We see, through Blanche and Stanley, the way homosexual themes were incorporated from small lighting details to a larger scope present within male relationships in the play. Undoubtedly, there is so much more to do with homosexuality in Streetcar than readers may originally realize, and this paper only dips our toes into a newer lens through which Streetcar can be viewed and analyzed

Knot traces and the slice genus

Knot traces are elementary 4-manifolds built by attaching a single 2-handle to the 4-ball; these are the canonical examples 4-manifolds with non-trivial middle dimensional homology. In this thesis, we give a flexible technique for constructing pairs of distinct knots with diffeomorphic traces. Using this construction, we show that there are knot traces where the minimal genus smooth surface generating homology is not the canonical surface, resolving a question on the 1978 Kirby problem list. We also use knot traces to give a new technique for showing a knot does not bound a smooth disk in the 4-ball, and we show that the Conway knot does not bound a smooth disk in the 4-ball. This resolves a question from the 1960’s, completes the classification of slice knots under 13 crossings, and gives the first example of a non-slice knot which is both topologically slice and a positive mutant of a slice knot.Mathematic

Optimization of a pseudoelastic absorber for vibration mitigation

Damic vibration absorbers (DVAs) have received special attention in recent years due to their capability to reduce structural vibrations of a primary structure. In this work, a DVA of the Tuned Mass Damper type based on a Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) element with pseudoelastic behavior is considered. Owing to their rich thermomechanical response, SMAs can exhibit hysteresis loops with rather different features in terms of overall energy dissipation and of pseudoelastic stiffness. As a first step towards the comprehensive evaluation of the performances of such a device, the optimization of a TMD based on SMA devices with different features is studied. Numerical simulations show that the size and the shape of the pseudoelastic loops can influence in a significant way the performances of the DVA

A Tiltable Single-Shot Miniature Dilution Refrigerator for Astrophysical Applications

We present a 3He / 4He dilution refrigerator designed for cooling astronomical mm-wave telescope receivers to around 100 mK. Used in combination with a Gifford-McMahon closed-cycle refrigerator, 4He and 3He sorption-pumped refrigerators, our cryogen-free system is capable of achieving 2 microW cooling power at 87 mK. A receiver attached directly to the telescope optics is required to rotate with respect to the downward direction. This scenario, of variable tilt, has proved difficult for typical dilution refrigerators, but our design has a geometry chosen to allow tilt to 45 degrees and beyond.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by Cryogenic