Semester of Graduation
Spring 2025
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
Ocean Bluffs: A Novel tells the story of a beautiful and grotesque community built on a foundation of control, artifice, and absurd expectations of physical ability. In particular, the novel focuses on one resident, Clem, who is angry, frustrated, and obsessed with finding her mother—or her mother’s body. What exactly, she must know, did the town do with her mother after she failed one of its many tests? The novel follows Clem as she investigates her mother’s disappearance, participates in the town’s grueling rituals, reckons with her body’s strange and unbelievable abilities, and discovers a burgeoning romantic relationship with a rebellious local woman. The ending collapses these threads into one earth-shattering event while also revealing secrets about the town and its future as a coastal community that is sinking into the ocean.
This book explores many personal obsessions—beach towns, sisters, mothers, the bottom of the ocean, the inner workings of cults, femme women in love—while blending genres, from literary fiction to speculative fiction to dystopia to horror and beyond. Further, the book seeks to engage thoughtfully with the realities of the forthcoming climate crisis, the role of queer relationships and bodies in reckoning with these challenges, and more.
Perhaps the most essential questions at the book’s core relate to the absurdities and cruelties of ableism under capitalism. The tasks individuals must complete to be “able-bodied” in Ocean Bluffs may seem ridiculous and arbitrary, but are they any more ridiculous than, for example, office jobs requiring that applicants be able to lift and move fifty pounds to be hired? How do these requirements, in a sense, produce disabilities where they may not have existed in more reasonable, humane, or compassionate worlds? And, in the face of disabling events like pandemics and genocides, as the able-bodied among us are only temporarily so, how do our definitions of ability and disability warp and shift to suit the needs of those in power?
Date
3-22-2025
Recommended Citation
Rosen, Sunni R., "Ocean Bluffs: A Novel" (2025). LSU Master's Theses. 6098.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/6098
Committee Chair
Francisco, Ariel