This project examines how dreams, nightmares, and visions function as catalysts for female transformation in psychological literature. While dreams are often interpreted as tools of foreshadowing or psychological characterization, in narratives centered on women I argue that they serve a more active role: they instigate transformations that challenge patriarchal expectations and conventional gender roles. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and cognitive theories of dreams, repression, motherhood, and interpersonal relationships, this study asks: how do dreams, nightmares, and visions inform representations of the female condition in psychological narratives? Using Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s The Goddess and Han Kang's The Vegetarian as case studies within a larger corpus of psychological horror, thriller and fiction literature, I analyze how visionary experiences propel female protagonists toward bodily, psychological, and social transformation. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye's dreams catalyze her rejection of domestic and gendered expectations, while The Goddess similarly presents visions as forces that destabilize traditional constructions of womanhood. Across both texts, dreams function not merely as predictions of future events but as narrative mechanisms that enable resistance and self-reinvention. However, the gendering of these visions play a significant role in their transformative nature for women. Whereas the male visions of The Goddess often reinforce existing social structures, the female visions within The Vegetarian frequently generate rupture, rebellion, and change. By positioning dreams and visions as transformative agents rather than passive symbols, this research offers a new approach to understanding how psychological horror imagines female autonomy, resistance, and liberation.

This study contends that Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters offer crucial insights into mental health and into advancing liberatory healing practices within the Black community. Through Black feminist theory and textual analysis, this research examines how these narratives represent mental health as a central factor in individual and collective well-being. By highlighting healing strategies that safeguard against racial and gender-based oppression, this study illustrates concrete care models within these novels. Expected findings include attention to the role of community as necessary to healing, and to self-discovery within the major characters as an instructive model for navigating the political present. Considering the historic deprioritization of mental health among African Americans, each text underscores both the realities of mental health experiences and the urgent need for healing.

Interpersonal boundaries are crucial relational tools that encompass physical, emotional, and mental limits individuals set to protect their wellbeing. However, in Latine culture, the word “boundary” itself does not exist beyond physical territory, and having boundaries is discouraged because of cultural values that promote interdependence, obligation, and self-sacrifice, especially from women. Using family systems theory as a framework, the current study had two aims: (1) to examine how Latina eldest daughters conceptualize boundaries and (2) to explore the implications of setting boundaries. Sixteen Latina eldest daughters (Mage = 22.25, SD = 1.82) from immigrant families participated in qualitative focus groups. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze focus group data. Preliminary findings from aim one revealed two themes: (1) lack of previous boundary knowledge and (2) boundaries and autonomy are interconnected. Aim two revealed two themes: (1) negative response regarding boundary setting and (2) complexity around reinforcing boundaries. The findings of this project aim to inform preventive efforts and enhance support for eldest daughters. Given the various challenges Latina eldest daughters face, these findings can help facilitate conversations about establishing and communicating boundaries within families.

Resident Evil 7 is a best selling horror-action game released in 2017. The narrative focuses on Ethan Winters saving his wife, Mia, from a fungally possessed plantation in Louisiana. This paper examines the intersection of gender, horror, and embodiment in Resident Evil 7, focusing on the unsettling transformation of its protagonist, Ethan Winters. In a pivotal scene, Ethan’s hand is severed by Mia: an act that destabilizes normative gender roles and bodily integrity by evoking Barbara Creed’s “hellmouth” as a site of both physical trauma and symbolic gender inversion. Drawing on Creed’s theories of the monstrous feminine, particularly the figure of the female castrator, this paper argues that Mia’s violence symbolically enacts a form of castration that repositions Ethan within a feminized framework of vulnerability. Theorized through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Ethan’s forced transition across gendered boundaries from the active, penetrative masculine subject to what can be read as a half passive, wounded, and penetrable body becomes a site for gender ambiguity, freakishness, and horror.