Browsing by Author "Bowman, Melanie"

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    An Epistemology of Solidarity: Coalition in the Face of Ignorance
    (2018-11) Bowman, Melanie
    Privileged ignorance about the structures of domination consists not merely in the absence of knowledge, but in the positive production of false information, of encouragement to look away and to actively not-know. I argue that for a person subject to privileged ignorance, attempting to remedy this ignorance by seeking more knowledge brings its own challenges: We have good reason to think that the cognitive distortions that produce privileged ignorance continue to affect a person’s knowledge production even when she becomes aware that they exist. Instead, the epistemically and morally responsible behavior for people privileged with respect to a system of oppression is to interrogate the purpose and provenance of their ignorance and to practice critical trust in the experts (i.e., those who are oppressed under that system). Learning to trust wisely is good for liberatory politics because it demands that we cultivate relationships of trustworthiness. It is also better for knowledge production than pursuing epistemic autonomy, which either vastly constricts what we can know or causes us to overestimate our epistemic abilities in ways that reinforce the cognitive distortions of privilege. Evaluating what we think we know in terms of narrative significance—Whose story does this advance? Which characters are undeveloped? What future narratives does this enable, and which does it foreclose?— in addition to truth-value can offer a solution to paralyzing skepticism and can spur coalitional political action in the face of uncertainty.
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    The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-century Aesthetics of Violence
    (2015-07) Bowman, Melanie
    This dissertation treats the aesthetics and ethics of theatrical violence, focusing on late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France. Tragedy took on the impossible task of presenting, to use Elaine Scarry’s formulation, “world-destroying” pain, using a variety of stage techniques to absorb, amplify, and dissimulate violence. It managed a constant alternation between terror and its foreclosure. Suffering is impossible to represent, and yet it regularly informs the way in which individuals and the theater of state conceive of power, learning, and productive work. Throughout, I consider the ways in which these figure amplify or circumvent an aesthetics of confrontation between tyrant and rebel. Daggers, bloody cloth, and female witnesses to violence absorbed, amplified, and dissimulated the strong affects associated with scenes of suffering bodies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the weapon in plays such as "Didon se sacrifiant"(circa 1605), "Scédase" (circa 1610), and "Le Cid" (1637) absorb the affects and efficacy associated with sacrificial violence. These plays present violence as a compelling theatrical enactment that could spread itself like a contagion. Chapter 2 focuses on bloody cloth, which in "La mort d’Hercule" (1634), and "Cinna" (1639) both stands in for scenes of bodily suffering and facilitates a transformation from gore to glory. In Chapter 3 I study the shifting status of the witness to state violence by focusing on plays featuring female protagonists who survive brothers. In Garnier’s "Antigone" (1580), Rotrou’s 1637 play of the same name, Hardy’s "Mariamne" (circa 1610) and Tristan l’Hermite’s "La Marianne" (1637), sororal mourning increasingly masked suffering and violence.