Browsing by Subject "Queer theory"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Beyond the closet: LGBT and queer archiving in the United States
    (2014-12) Colleary, Eric Joseph
    This dissertation explores the ways sexual identity and culture are produced, imagined, performed, shaped, re-shaped, and deconstructed in LGBT archives in the United States. While a great deal of research has been conducted within the past two decades on LGBT historiography, there has been a dearth of studies examining the archival sites from which histories of LGBT identity are being written. This dissertation reveals that the construction of non-heterosexual sexual identities has been a conscious, careful process - borrowing from established historiographic, feminist, and colonial and postcolonial theories to establish archives of LGBT history and culture counter and in relation to dominant heteronormative narratives. There are times, however, when every archive fails to capture the complexity and diversity of LGBT experience. Rather than see these moments as failures, I "read" them as queer opportunities to rethink and reposition identities which may have become politically and socially stagnant. In each chapter, I focus on a particular archive and a specific individual (an archivist or a collector) who helped make it. The first chapter explores W. Dorr Legg's efforts in the 1950s to establish the discipline of homophile studies through the ONE Institute in Los Angeles as a way of creating a historical and archivable past for a collective homosexual minority that was just beginning to take shape. Chapter Two focuses on the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Joan Nestle's radical reimagining of what an archive could be through the lens of 1970s lesbian separatist feminism. Chapter Three looks at the acquisition and organization methods of Jean Tretter of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota as a way of describing the queer possibilities of encountering the unexpected in an archive. The fourth and final chapter theorizes what a queer archive might look like, grounding this theorization in the collection of 1960s performance artist Jack Smith, which has recently been acquired by the Gladstone Gallery in New York.
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    A desire called America: biopolitics and utopian forms of Life in American literature
    (2012-12) Haines, Christian P.
    "A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature" analyzes two periods of American literature - the American Renaissance and American literature following the 1960s - in terms of how specific literary texts return to and revise the founding of the U.S. as a political experiment. Historically speaking, these two periods stand at opposite ends of the arc of U.S. global hegemony: the American Renaissance as the U.S. rises to the status of global hegemon, and American literature after the 1960s in the midst of that hegemony's unraveling. I argue that the precarious position of the U.S. in these two periods enables American literature to reactivate the utopian promise of the American Revolution. The texts I analyze treat the revolution as an archive of futures past, that is, they imagine futures that might have taken place but never did because of the betrayal of the revolutionary experiment. Put differently, my dissertation focuses on the tensions and contradictions between the U.S. - understood as a geographical and political entity - and America - understood as a utopian political desire. I show that one of the most important ways in which the reactivation of utopian political potential occurs is through figurations of the human body.
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    High theory, the teaching of writing, and the crisis of the University.
    (2012-07) Pawlowski, Lucia
    Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has "writing" at its center. Yet the post-structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to textual critique on the other. In this polarization, too often post-structuralism is posited as mere ludic play, while serious political critique is considered the domain of other bodies of research, such as social-epistemic rhetoric. Political critique is especially important at this historical juncture for academia, where the neoliberalization of the university means a less just university. While social-epistemic rhetoric is necessary to a political critique, social-epistemic rhetoric is insufficient because it lacks a micropolitical critique--one that works at the level of specific institutions (in this case, the university). The exemplary case of social-epistemic work that is necessarily political but insufficiently micropoiltical is David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University." In this essay, he argues that composition teachers must teach first-year writing students the conventions of academic discourse as one would teach the social conventions of any culture in order to acculturate the newcomers. This project posits queer theory as a micropolitical post-structuralism: a theory that can co-articulate post-structuralism and social-epistemic rhetoric, while paying attention to the kind of institution into which students are expected to be acculturated (academia). Queer theory, with its critique of heternormativity, has obvious political implications. At the same time, with its post-humanist notion of the subject and of semiotics, queer theory is post-structuralist. This dissertation proposes that composition teachers use the concept of "drag" in queer theory to "teach academic discourse in drag," which means to teach academic discourse as a kind of identity--like gender--that students "perform" without identifying with or subscribing to the institution--neoliberalized academia--from which its emanates. I propose a "rhetoric of drag" for post-structuralist composition teachers who are critical of the neoliberal university. This professional rhetoric consolidates the diverse attempts in social-epistemic rhetoric to teach academic discourse while critiquing academia for its neoliberalization. But the metaphor of drag does more than consolidate existing statements in Composition Studies: the metaphor of "drag" politicizes the process of acculturation in a way that "inventing" does not. The metaphor of "drag" draws attention to how the discourse of any oppressive institution--be it heteronormativity or academia--is exclusionary, oppressive, and compels a creative, parodic response. By teaching academic discourse in drag, college writing teachers give students the opportunity to reconcile the need to learn the discursive conventions of academia even while resisting the institution of academia. The act of disidentification that "drag" offers has special purchase for marginalized students--first-generation students, students of color, and working-class students--who already have a resistant or oppositional relationship to academia. Teaching academic discourse in drag acknowledges this oppositional stance, a stance that we can expect to become more prevalent the "non-traditional" student becomes the norm in our writing classrooms.