Browsing by Subject "Queer studies"
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Item Open Access Collective Care: Community-Based Practices in Reproductive Justice(2024-04-27) Francisco-Zelkine, CoraliThe mainstream reproductive rights movement tends to focus on abortion and contraceptive freedom. The movement has historically 1) been led by cisgender, White women, and 2) only addressed autonomy in reference to the “choice” to not have children. Reproductive justice (RJ), which has emerged in recent years, is both a framework for understanding inequality in reproductive rights, and a movement that fights to make visible the particular needs of women of color and queer folks. RJ operates largely through community-led work, which separates it from national campaigns and organizations that take a more top-down approach to their work. This thesis asks: how do community-based initiatives promote the fight for RJ? The ethnographic project draws from Black feminist and intersectionality theory, participant observation and interviews with various RJ organizations and activists, and digital content analysis of different organizations’ social media platforms to explore the relationship between community and the RJ movement. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which community-based organizations that ground their operational strategies in the RJ framework offer a space for folks from marginalized racial and gender identities to advocate for themselves. Furthermore, the thesis sheds light on the way that the inclusivity of the RJ framework makes it valuable in potentially expanding beyond sexual and reproductive rights to other social justice issues.Item Open Access Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial(2013) Bradley, Rizvana"Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial," examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. My dissertation is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided by Hortense Spillers in her monumental essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Drawing on Spillers, I argue that it is not the black female body but the material persistence and force of that body, expressed through the flesh, that needs to be theorized and resituated directly with respect to current discourses that take up black ontology, black subjectivity and black aesthetics. I expand Spillers' conclusions to an analysis of how the materiality of this flesh continues to structure, organize and inflect contemporary aesthetic interventions and performances of blackness in the present. The five chapters that comprise the dissertation map a specific set of problems that emerge from a tangled web of gender, race and performance. I argue that black female flesh, forged through desire and violence, objection and subjectivity, becomes the ground for and the space through which black masculinity is fashioned and articulated as open, variable, and contested within artistic practices.
Examining the work of these artists, I identify a set of practices that channel this neglected black flesh as a site of aesthetic reclamation and recovery. Focusing on the art of collage and assemblage and its techniques of cutting, pasting, quoting and tearing I demonstrate how black identity is always assembled identity. Moreover, I demonstrate how artistic assemblage makes visible the dense and immeasurable compressions of race, gender and sexuality that have accumulated over time. I argue that these practices offer us unique opportunities to inhabit this flesh. The dissertation expands upon connections between visibility, solidarity, materiality and femininity, bringing them to light for a critical discussion of the unique expressions and co-productions of blackness and sexuality in the fields of visual art and performance. I draw upon thinkers who help me think about the material status of black female flesh and its reproductive value. The project aligns itself with current black scholarly work that treats not simply black subjectivity but blackness itself as central to an understanding of a history of devaluation that subtends the historical construction of modern subjectivity. I theorize how the degraded materiality of blackness, linked to the violent rupturing of black flesh, indexes a deeper history of devaluation that becomes the very condition for and means of qualifying and substantiating our definitions of subjectivity and personhood. I conclude by tracing an aesthetic community or aesthetic sociality grounded in the recovered, lost materiality of Spillers' ungendered black female flesh, a community that I argue, may be glimpsed through particular instantiations of the flesh in art and performance.
Item Open Access Discipline décadente et stylistique de l'existence dans la littérature française, 1884-1922(2023-04-24) Atkinson, StephenDecadence, a loosely defined literary movement in France and England at the fin de siècle, has proved popular for its paradoxes and transvaluations that, according to some critics, destabilize modern binarisms. In this thesis, I survey four works of French Decadent literature and its 20th-century afterlives: J.K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901), André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902), and Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922). As a guiding analytic, “decadent discipline” points to several governing paradoxes in Decadent literature: the stylistic discipline involved in producing Decadent literature; the ascetic discipline of decadent styles of existence; and the recursivity of decadence-attribution, whereby rejections of decadence, in favor of discipline, are themselves deemed decadent. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick guide my analysis, which narrows its scope to the intersection of male homosexuality and religious devotion, while highlighting the centrality of racialized, gendered, and colonial violence to the subject formations depicted in this body of literature. In my conclusion, I engage with recent trends in queer theory and culture. I propose that the recursive attribution typified by decadence applies not only to all the foundational binarisms of modernity, but also to queer identity politics: linguistic rejections of binarisms tend to reify and reproduce the binarisms they purport to oppose. Alternatively, an attention to styles—in our own existences and in art—reveals the singularity of individual experience that eludes binarizing language.Item Open Access In Between the Closet and the Wild: Queer Animality in Contemporary China(2023) Wang, YidanThis thesis investigates the intersections between queer and posthuman studies, exploring how animality can serve as a force for queer movements. Drawing on the theories of Eve Sedgwick and Jack Halberstam, this project proposes the existence of an intermediate space between the domestic and the wild, which is linked by queer movements. Particularly, by examining three queer works from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this project demonstrates how animality provides resources and imaginative space for queering to transgress fixed features and identities. The works examined in this project queer taxonomies, language, species, bodies, and sexualities, opening up infinite possibilities for becoming. In this way, it intends to inspire new ways of thinking about identity, community, and the natural world.