My dissertation brings together prose texts and poetry by four writers and poets, who published in German language at the beginning of the twentieth century: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All four of these writers are concerned with the inadequacy of language and cognition, the so called Sprachkrise at the turn-of-the-century. In their texts, they challenge the ability of language to function as a means of communication, and as a way to express emotions or relate more deeply to the world. While it is widely recognized that this “crisis of identity” in modernist literature has been a crisis of language all along, I argue in my dissertation that the question of language is ultimately also a question of “the animal.” Other scholars have argued for animals’ poetic agency (e.g. Aaron M. Moe; Susan McHugh), or for the conceptual link between the “crisis of language” and the threat to human exceptionalism in the intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century (Kári Driscoll). My dissertation is the first study that explores the interconnection between Sprachkrise, animality, and the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology, I illustrate how Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke and Trakl invoke the body as intertwined with animals in complex ways, and employ these animal figures to reconceptualize notions of language and specifically the metaphor. The authors, I argue, engage in a zoopoetic writing, as other forms of life participate as both symbolic and material bodies in the signifying processes. Moreover, I illustrate how their zoopoetic approach involve forms of intimacy and envision figures that fall outside heteronormative sexualities and ontologies, making the case for a queer zoopoetics in Modernist German literature.

This thesis analyzes the “home area” learning center in open-ended preschool classrooms to address the various forms of gendered learning and pedagogy elicited by its presence in geographies of early learning. I argue that the home and block areas spatially and symbolically mimic the traditional division of public and private spheres of sociality characteristic of the patriarchal social order. I suggest that the gendered enactments of space and place in open-ended classrooms function to socialize children into heteronormative forms of sex-role consciousness through what I identify as a spatial pedagogy of domestication. I suggest that this pedagogy is enforced by ideologically haunted landscapes like the domestic landscape of the home area. By outlining critical, feminist, and queer interventions in early learning I suggest that taking a spatial approach provides a more capacious explanatory frame for analyzing how, in a neo-Marxist sense, the ideo-culturally bound relations of production are reproduced through the socializing apparatus of the preschool.

This thesis analyzes the “home area” learning center in open-ended preschool classrooms to address the various forms of gendered learning and pedagogy elicited by its presence in geographies of early learning. I argue that the home and block areas spatially and symbolically mimic the traditional division of public and private spheres of sociality characteristic of the patriarchal social order. I suggest that the gendered enactments of space and place in open-ended classrooms function to socialize children into heteronormative forms of sex-role consciousness through what I identify as a spatial pedagogy of domestication. I suggest that this pedagogy is enforced by ideologically haunted landscapes like the domestic landscape of the home area. By outlining critical, feminist, and queer interventions in early learning I suggest that taking a spatial approach provides a more capacious explanatory frame for analyzing how, in a neo-Marxist sense, the ideo-culturally bound relations of production are reproduced through the socializing apparatus of the preschool.

Being is Becoming: selves are constantly changing, always in process, and never able to arrive at a coherent identity. Contemporary discussions of sexual and gendered identity have replaced the view that heterosexuality is an innate or natural category with views that sexuality is fluid and multiple. Consequently, desire is a creative force in the engendering of sexual subjectivities and new social communities, rather than a negative force that limits gendered development to a heteronormative model. With this in mind, this thesis has three interrelated, yet distinct aims. The first is to explore the concept of sexual subjectivity, asking questions such as do human beings have a knowable sexual identity? And how have Freudian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian poststructuralism contributed to our contemporary understandings of sexuality? My second aim is to clarify Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of becoming, using the metaphor of the rhizome to link feminist philosophy, queer theory, and subsequent deconstructions of sexual identity. My third project is to identify what is meant by becoming queer, including how it challenges the authority of heteronormative institutions. In order to demonstrate the potentialities of becoming queer, I conduct a case study of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millans performance project Lesbian National Parks and Services. Through their performance art practice, Dempsey and Millan challenge dominant narratives of heterosexuality and fixed gender identity, offering a starting point for discussions of the reciprocity between artistic practice, social movements, and academic discourse. In addition, they demonstrate how queer becomings participate in an ethics of accountability, that is, as materially-situated, localized subjectivities they are able to alter and transform their environments.

Being is Becoming: selves are constantly changing, always in process, and never able to arrive at a coherent identity. Contemporary discussions of sexual and gendered identity have replaced the view that heterosexuality is an innate or natural category with views that sexuality is fluid and multiple. Consequently, desire is a creative force in the engendering of sexual subjectivities and new social communities, rather than a negative force that limits gendered development to a heteronormative model. With this in mind, this thesis has three interrelated, yet distinct aims. The first is to explore the concept of sexual subjectivity, asking questions such as do human beings have a knowable sexual identity? And how have Freudian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian poststructuralism contributed to our contemporary understandings of sexuality? My second aim is to clarify Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of becoming, using the metaphor of the rhizome to link feminist philosophy, queer theory, and subsequent deconstructions of sexual identity. My third project is to identify what is meant by becoming queer, including how it challenges the authority of heteronormative institutions. In order to demonstrate the potentialities of becoming queer, I conduct a case study of Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millans performance project Lesbian National Parks and Services. Through their performance art practice, Dempsey and Millan challenge dominant narratives of heterosexuality and fixed gender identity, offering a starting point for discussions of the reciprocity between artistic practice, social movements, and academic discourse. In addition, they demonstrate how queer becomings participate in an ethics of accountability, that is, as materially-situated, localized subjectivities they are able to alter and transform their environments.

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Thesis of (Ph.D)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on October 7th, 2009). "Fall, 2009." At head of title: University of Alberta. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduates Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2009. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-179). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR51556

This project focuses on Horus Gilgamesh’s Awkward Moments of the Children’s Bible, Vol. 1 (2013), an adult picture book that parodies the Bible by illustrating biblical scriptures with child unfriendly images of gore, sex, and God’s sexy ass. Using semiotic, religious, and queer theory, I read this text as not only a satirical one, but one that is life affirming to “childish adults”—those individuals who don’t quite fit into the heteropatriachichal standards normalized by religious right ideologies.

Through my PhD thesis, ‘Porno-graphing: ‘dirty’ subjectivities & self-objectification in contemporary lens-based art’, I use the term ‘porno-graphing’ to group together and examine lens-based artworks where artists use as art-material sexual situations or sets of sexual dynamics present in their life independently of their art practice. I consider how artists act upon these sexual situations in order to make art out of them, the art-results they produce and their means of sharing them with audiences. I argue that the artists whose work I examine, use sexual situations that can potentially be perceived as ‘taboo’; for example Leigh Ledare involves incest-related dynamics in Pretend You Are Actually Alive and Kathy Acker with Alan Sondheim implicate child-sexual subjectivities in the Blue Tape. I argue that they choose and use these situations to self-submit into the ‘dirtiness’ of their sexual and artistic subjectivities and in doing so to negotiate how subjectivity is produced. To do so, they use visual vocabularies of autobiography to self-objectify into roles as both artists, e.g. assuming positions such as the white male pornographer-exploiter (the work of Ledare) and as sexual subjects, e.g. ‘perverted’ or hyper-sexual objects of desire (the work of Lo Liddell). In embracing these roles they create ‘intensified encounters’ (Edelman & Berlant, 2014) between the artist, the art-object and the viewer, to interrogate ‘normative’ and ‘antinormative’ patterns of meaning-making and value-attribution regarding subjectivity and art.