Browsing by Subject "feminist theory"
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Item Post-Gay Television: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Marriage, and Bullying On and Off Screen(2015-06) Elias, LioraThe 2000-era has been a momentous time for LGBT policy shifts. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project on these policy changes in the areas of military service, marriage rights, and bullying in schools within the context of post-gay television. I take as a starting point that post-gay politics assumes that civil rights for gays and lesbians have been achieved and continued activism is no longer needed. Since the 1990s post-gay politics has gained currency within important modalities of discourse (news media, television, print media). I investigate a cluster of television shows in which post-gay themes suggest that equality for gay and lesbian individuals has been achieved. Drawing from media studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, this dissertation examines the television shows Army Wives (Lifetime), Modern Family (ABC), and Glee (Fox) as case studies for theorizing the ways in which media facilitates the emergence of post-gay discourse. It does so by situating these shows within the context of, on the one hand, government hearings and documents and Supreme Court decisions, and, on the other hand, the industrial and popular discourse surrounding these TV programs. Post-gay television is often comprised of conservative and assimilationist political values such as the desire for gays and lesbians to openly serve in the U.S. military, same-sex marriage, and "equality"� based initiatives to eradicate bullying in schools. These initiatives often mask structural issues such as the continued prevalence of homophobia in the U.S. Military, the assimilationist qualities of same-sex marriage, as well as the enforcement of heteronormativity and gender policing common in U.S. high schools. These series do not simply represent LGBT lives on screen; they also participate in fundraising and public relations efforts for issues like marriage equality. Following the call to move beyond the politics of representation, my dissertation provides a critical historical and contextual perspective on the way in which the implementation and repeal of policy legislation is productive of what I am calling the politics of norms. It also considers how these policy changes and their treatment on television are informed by post-gay discourse.Item Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Feminized Labor in Postwar American Art(2015-05) Joseph, LauraThis dissertation examines the ways in which postwar art historical discourses routinely trivialize feminine creative, emotional, and physical labor, as well as the artists whose work is associated with this labor. It takes form of five case studies, each of which coheres around a different type of feminized laborer, including the domestic, the cook, the entertainer, the hostess, and the widow. It asserts that the labor that characterizes these roles gets written over by art historical practices that cannot conceive of time as doing anything but moving forward, of radicality as involving anything other than rejection of the past and of artistic and social conventions, and of the art object as anything other than autonomously authored and produced. These case studies do not correspond with an examination of four independent artists. Rather, they emulate the gendered work of American kin-work, a set of sustaining practices identified and studied by social scientists since the eighties. Each chapter traces a network of relations between artists whose affiliations are not legible within traditional art historical narratives. The artists who populate this study include a selection of those whose work has been trivialized on the basis of its affiliation with feminized labor, such as Janet Sobel, Lee Krasner, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Charlotte Moorman, and J Morgan Puett. These artist's careers span the transition from modernist to postmodernist art practices and several generations of feminist thought. These figures do not just serve to represent exclusion, however. Nor is it this project's goal to rescue them from obscurity. When we hold back, in order to survey what art historical narratives have left behind, we find that these remains offer alternative methods of meaning making, methods that abide by, rather than seek to dispel, obscurity. This project looks to other contemporary artists whose work addresses itself to the erasure of feminized creative, emotional, and physical labor--including Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Dario Robleto--to develop these historical methods.