Browsing by Subject "performance studies"
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Item Living Enfleshment Otherwise:" Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms"(2021-06) Rodine, ZoeThis dissertation traces the language authors employ to describe visceral experience in the literature of the past century and asks: how does the way we articulate embodiment reveal the ways we push against our received notions about the body, and how does our language in turn shape the reality of the human body and even shift our definitions of the human? Through an examination of a variety of interdisciplinary texts—novels, poetry, songs, film, live performance, archival documents—I discover a particular resonance between Afrofuturist and modernist models for embodiment that suggest an alternate genealogy of modernist authorship based on a shared aesthetic and ethical project of revisioning the human. The texts this project examines reveal the degree to which the concept of the human body is in no way essentially or naturally true, and has historically been a racializing, exclusionary construct; this dissertation does the essential work of teasing out just how bodies are constructed, identifying three structures that materialize modernist bodies anew. The first chapter describes the undulatory body, tracing the way that waves structure embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sun Ra’s music and poetry. The second chapter, which links Mina Loy’s poetry, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and Douglas Kearney’s verse and nonfiction, focuses on the possibilities and limitations of our increasing enmeshment with machines. The final chapter theorizes the horrified body through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, positing that horror has the potential to productively erode boundaries between bodies. Re-centering the body as a foundational critical concern for modernism and literary studies more broadly reveals the sinews that animate texts by Black and white authors alike, illuminates the long history of resistance to the hegemonic constructions of the body, and provides building blocks for negotiating a twenty-first century subjectivity that goes beyond the previously established boundaries of the human.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.Item Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies(2021-11) Gentleman, RyeThere are many instances in scholarly writing and pop culture in which transgender identity is invoked as a metaphor for the fragmenting, decentering, and virtualizing effects of digital media and technologies, contributing to cultural tropes that imagine transgender people as unreal, futuristic, and unknowable. In response, this dissertation argues for an understanding of the link between digital technologies and the post-1990s iteration of transgender as a material, historical assemblage composed (at least partially) of media elements, bodies, and systems such as surveillance culture and big data that participate in processes of gendering and racialization. In attempting to rethink the trans/digital technology assemblage in a way that accounts for the material reality of trans bodies, practices, and lived realities and the material stuff of digital culture, each chapter engages with a specific material aspect of new media. Engaging with each of these different types of media necessitated using slightly different methods in each chapter including social research (primarily interviews), cultural analysis, and autoethnography. Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, which proposes a posthuman model of performativity that takes into account nonhuman entities, is employed throughout the project. This makes possible a nuanced theorization of the trans body, one that does not stop at the enactment of gender at the body’s surface but also takes into account the way that trans bodies materialize in concert with a host of other matter, beings, and forces, including digital media and technologies. At times my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters produce a productive trans friction that creates new possibilities for trans modes of being. At other times, my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters result in transnormative efforts to eliminate friction. The variability of these findings exposes the incongruousness of the trans/digital technology metaphor which attempts to fix transness as a stable entity that can stand in for specific qualities of digital technologies and media. Instead, this project shows that transness is situational and that the relationship between transness and digital technologies is multivalent.