Browsing by Subject "sexuality"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Citizenship, Gender, and Intimacy: First Ladies in the Television Age
    (2017-09) Jurisz, Rebecca
    The figure of the first lady of the United States (FLOTUS) initially gained visibility thanks to the media technologies of the industrial age, but in the TV era this visibility exploded, and with it came a stark intensification of the potential for intimate connection between figures at the highest levels of national governance and citizen subjects watching at home. In the same years that broadcast television was at the height of its power, neoliberalism and post-identity politics were on the rise, and worked to refigure definitions of citizenship to be more concerned with the health and prosperity of individuals and families, and less concerned with collective struggle against structures of injustice. For women, this privatized and atomized regime of intimate citizenship fit with the contours of traditional femininity, even as they were being updated to reflect postfeminist imperatives that called women to engage in civic and economic life while still maintaining the primacy of their commitments to home and family. FLOTUS TV became an essential technology of citizenship for women viewer/voters working through these ever-more complex formulations of ideal femininity. This project traces both real and fictional representations of first ladies on television from the inception of the medium in the 1950s, to the declining hegemony of broadcast and cable in the 2010s, to demonstrate how the heightened visibility of first ladies made FLOTUS TV a site of both instruction and debate over definitions of femininity and citizenship that were increasingly narrow, frequently contradictory, and did little to pose substantial challenges to structures of injustice. Ultimately, these apolitical politics of intimate citizenship seem to have worked to (partially) defuse progressive and feminist challenges to power, and disciplined the ambitions of women who wished to rule.
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    Invisible Men: The Risks and Pleasures of Self-Portrayal in the Work of Contemporary American Male Artists
    (2014-05) DeLand, Lauren
    This dissertation examines the rare phenomenon of self-portrayal in the work of contemporary American male artists. The feminist art movement of the 1970s provided the aegis for many women artists to challenge the gendered dichotomy of artist/subject via the strategic deployment of their own bodies as artistic subjects. Yet remarkably little study has been dedicated to the question of why male artists so rarely make their own, allegedly privileged bodies the subjects of their work. I propose that the shifting definitions of masculinity in postwar America have in fact produced a stringently regulated economy of images of the male body. In four case studies of four contemporary American male artists (Kenneth Anger, Ron Athey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Glenn Ligon), I employ visual analysis and comparative readings of juridical rulings and institutional policies that dictate the state of the body in contemporary American art.
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    Popular Culture Images of the Mulatta: Constructing Race, Gender, and Nation in the United States and Brazil
    (2013-08) Mitchell, Jasmine
    Through a hemispheric framework, this dissertation explores how national, transnational, and racial identities have been mobilized through contemporary media representations of the mulatta/mulata (woman of African and European descent) figure in the United States and Brazil. Key to the national imagination, the mulatta figure embodies racialized sexual desires and tensions. Chapters One through Four compare U.S. and Brazilian histories, tropes, star texts, and cultural productions concerning mixed-race women of African descent. Chapter Five uses a transnational approach to consider the mixed-race figure. The dissertation uses both comparative and transnational methodologies to engage with a hemispheric framework. Through a hemispheric approach, this dissertation attempts to elucidate intersections and tensions of national, gender, sexual, class and racial formations and to uncover the very assumptions that construct these formations. As each country's historical and ideological responses towards racial mixing generated different national identities, images of the mulatta reflect these racialized national identities. At this juncture, the paths of Brazil and the United States are intersecting so that understandings of race in the United States and Brazil are becoming more similar. The dissertation shows how mixed-race discourses have upheld as well as resisted dominant racial ideologies. By examining media depictions of mixed-race actresses in both countries, the dissertation also shows how racial self-labeling repudiates national racial topographies. Using case studies from Hollywood films and U.S. and Brazilian television shows and star texts of mixed-race actresses, my dissertation argues that popular culture images of the mulatta demonstrate these shifts and that ideas of utopian mixed-race societies often operate concurrently with desires to manage or contain blackness and nullify racialized differences. The idea of the mixed-race figure of European and African descent then is hemispherically circulated such that similar indicators of sexual availability are signified in both countries. The last chapter explores the transnational dimensions of racial imaginings through an analysis of how Brazil is represented in U.S. cultural productions to mediate contemporary U.S. anxieties and desires around race and national identity. The dissertation ends with the upcoming Rio 2016 Olympic Games to examine how Brazil projects itself to the world. As the idea of race has been produced nationally and transnationally, my research shows that eliminating racism demands understanding race in both national and transnational contexts.
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    Spiritual Matter: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Whiteness, and Material Performance
    (2022-05) Rickard, Hazel
    This dissertation analyzes the “physical manifestations” of nineteenth-century Spiritualism including animated objects, tipping tables, spiritual machines, spirit materializations, ectoplasm, as well as cases of animating human remains. I discuss the American spirit mediums Jonathan Koons, John Murray Spear, J.H. Conant, Elizabeth Denton, Anne Denton Cridge, Mary Schindler, G.A. Redman, Mary Comstock, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Kate and Maggie Fox, Margery Crandon, the English mediums Florence Cook and Elizabeth d’Esperance, and the French medium Eva Carrière. While my analysis is rooted in the American context, I follow where these repertoires traveled, which allows us to see this form of mediumship as a transatlantic phenomenon.I argue that these spirit mediums turned racial Whiteness (particularly feminine Whiteness) into a practical spiritual technology through literalization. Literalization, as a logic of performance that collapses the gap between matter and meaning, uniquely exposed the implicit racial and sexual meanings behind Spiritualist activities. Ultimately, I contend that Spiritualist material performance comprised a set of experimental practices employed to test the power of White identity to transcend matter by absorbing material powers associated with racially othered spirits. The first two chapters look at White mediums channeling Indian and Black spirits, the third looks at how male mediums employed female bodies as spiritual resources, and the fourth looks at how female mediums racialized and sexualized Whiteness through materialization.