Browsing by Subject "Queer theory"

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

I argue that experimental poets, beginning with Gertrude Stein but proliferating later in the century with such poets as Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Joe Brainard, and Barbara Guest, were drawn to comics for the way they perform, while undoing, the most conventional appeals to authorship, authenticity, personhood, and the unified text. Examining twentieth-century poetry in juxtaposition with comics as an often-overlooked interlocutor, I show how comics—from their inception—have always held an influential place in an US, poetic avant-garde. Drawing on critical work in visual cultural studies and popular culture as well as queer theory and literary studies, this project revises the term “avant-garde” and its loaded connotations of privilege, elitism, and obscurity, to include a myriad of popular frameworks that expand literary histories of the US American avant-garde and its recognized artists.

In comparing US poetry and the comics field in the twentieth century, I attend to the places, socialities, and shared materials of the avant-garde in order to move beyond an inversion of long-standing concerns for the “great divide” between “high” and “low” art. Rather than attempt to reverse hierarchical classifications, I chronicle production continuities (e.g. publication models, modes of distribution, editorial influences, and common audiences) between avant-garde culture and mass media in order to emphasize overlapping contexts between these seemingly disparate fields. Attending more closely to the sites of formation, dissemination, and the literal and symbolic boundaries of these contexts, I use the comparison to open up a more nuanced dialogue about American culture with respect to experimental poetry and its interactions with popular, pictorial media. My consideration of long-publishing comics in poetry—from the Nancy comics to Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy—not only highlights the ways these poetic works challenged conventions in their use of comics media, but also how multi-authored texts provide agitating, lyrical depictions in response to reductive classifications of race, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth century. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory of disidentification, I analyze poetic texts alongside close readings of the comics they use to reveal how these literary forms mirror and respond to one another in, turn, to challenge how we perceive popular images and texts as fixed, irrelevant, or boring.

How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies.

Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity.

As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity turns to early queer and third-wave feminist scholarship to identify a unique strategy and style of literary criticism, which I name as/if criticism. As/if criticism is both born of and resistant to two conflicting imperatives in the US academy, which first come to a fore during the 1990s. The first is the demand to write “as”: that is, the institutional demand that critics use their gender, race, sexuality, etc. as credentials of authentic knowledge. The second is the demand to write “as if”: that is, the post-structuralist demand that critique suspend the idea of knowable or stable identity. Challenging both of these demands, as/if criticism employs four different strategies—recognition, qualification, intimacy, and interruption—in order to disrupt identity as it is produced and valued as a knowable category within literary criticism. Taking five authors as case studies, I examine Eve Sedgwick’s compendium of queer critical essays, Tendencies (1993); Deborah McDowell’s debut work of black feminist criticism, The Changing Same (1995); Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive take on race and gender, The Feminist Difference (1995); and Robert Reid-Pharr’s innovative critical essay collection, Black Gay Man (2001). Over the course of its chapters, As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity makes the case that as/if criticism is well-suited to describe fraught social bonds, experimental allegiances, and unintuitive cross-identifications because its style mirrors the substance of its argument.

Lee Edelman notes that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” This statement reinforces a particular view of queerness: one that suggests that it is, first and foremost, an action, and secondly, that it is an action that is meant to challenge already existing structures. And while the act of disruption itself is not always queer, queering-as-action emphasizes the destabilization of entrenched ideas, norms, and binaries.

My dissertation examines the music, productions, and subsequent reception of four operas by Britten at the time of their premieres — Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Owen Wingrave (1971) — focusing on how these operas each present various ways of queering and forms of queer disruption. On a musical level, these works subvert a largely nineteenth-century heteronormative model of opera that dictated voice types within certain roles, the power and relationship dynamic between male and female characters, and portrayals and performances of gender. On a social level, these four operas tell stories that engage with and disrupt ideas of wartime-era constructions of nation and empire at a time when the desire to depict British strength and relevance competed with the rise of new global superpowers.

Britten’s operas fit within a timeline that runs alongside the postwar era in Britain. In a period shaped by World War II and its aftermath, postwar Britain encapsulated significant political and cultural shifts that includes the dissolution of the British Empire, student and youth protest movements, and the decriminalization of homosexuality. How these works were reviewed and discussed by critics as well as citizens will show how these operas (and their disruptions) relate to, reinforce, and reject these social shifts. Through the perusal of press reviews and archival materials, I explain how these disturbances are realized by those experiencing these operas at the moment of their premieres. These primary sources also reveal how Britten’s postwar operas run counter to and engage with large cultural and societal changes in postwar Britain.

“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.