Surveillance plays a central role in the film Ex Machina (2015). Though surveillance is usually conceived as a unilateral force exerted by one agent onto another, the film imagines a more fluid system where characters perform roles of surveillant and subject of surveillance simultaneously. to provide commentary on surveillance culture, the film connects the A.I. film genre to the office film and fraternity film, which privilege male kinship. In bringing these three genres together, the film highlights gender hierarchies and constructions of masculinity where surveillance is a tool for exacting hetero-patriarchal power. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I draw a connection between notions of gender and surveillance in the film. Surveillance becomes the system through which the characters understand, construct, and perform their gender, thus highlighting the performativity of gender. But surveillance, too, is revealed as performative, as it is it becomes an unstable method for knowledge aggregation and presumes the tools of its undoing. Understanding lateral surveillance as performative opens up possibilities for resistance in the post-9/11 surveillance state.

Sally Mann (1951- ) has spent forty years photographing scenes in the American South, including domestic scenes, landscapes, and portraits. Although scholars generally interpret her work as a reflection of the region’s history of violence and oppression, my research will consider her work through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism. In her art and writing, Mann portrays the land as an indifferent witness to history, a force intertwined with humanity, lending matter for human lives and reclaiming it after death. However, she also describes the way the environment interferes with her the antiquated technology she uses, creating dramatic flaws that imbue the landscapes with emotion absent from the scenes themselves. My research offers new perspectives on Mann’s body of work, especially the way she grants agency to the environment, thereby giving a voice to silent ecologies or silenced histories.

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Sweets—cake, candy, cookies, ice cream, and any other sugary treat—are a favored component of the American diet. They are also a familiar motif in the American cultural landscape. From the Good Ship Lollipop to Candy Crush Saga, imagined and imagined confections suffuse media and amusements, where they serve as both site and subject for negotiating economic and social tensions in the collective imagination. The visual and material depiction of sweets in the cultural landscape composes what I call the “confectionery vernacular,” a hybrid graphic language that provides an interdisciplinary framework within which to consider the American experience. Whether illustrated, photographed, filmed, or fabricated, these inedible reproductions do not impart sugar’s neurochemical or gustatory pleasures, yet their prevalence affirms sweets’ power to satisfy more than hunger. In the mass culture of the American 1930s, imagined scenarios of confectionery abundance probed anxieties related to widespread economic and social instability. This dissertation explores the confectionery vernacular constructed in four specific sites. The Wheatsworth Gingerbread Castle, a Hamburg, New Jersey roadside attraction, was a three-story monument that used imaginary edibility to promote nutritious whole wheat snacks. A selection of short cartoons set in confectionery Cockaignes borrowed tropes from Medieval folklore to imagine worlds of redemptive abundance and leisure. A second set of narrative cartoons lampooned confectionery mass-production and probed the indignities of industrial alienation. Finally, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Continental Baking Company’s Wonder Bakery used a beloved fairy tale, an urban wheat field, and a sexy scarecrow to mitigate consumer apprehension about mass-produced baked goods. From the Great Depression to the present, the confectionery vernacular has coalesced imagination, aesthetics, and social mores into a visual network, mapping how people construct meaning in hardship and in comfort.

The following essay and digital projects each engage both with a unique aspect of contemporary queer Appalachian art and culture as well as the ways in which oral history and digital humanities methodologies can be used to generate collaborative research possibilities. The first essay is an exploration of two LGBTQ+ Appalachian artists, Dustin Hall and Charles Williams, and the ways in which their work uses Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Jose Muñoz’ understanding of queer futurity to rethink human relationships with non-human nature. The first digital project is an online exhibition of queer Appalachian artists and their work, bolstered by oral history interviews, that provides a platform for these artists to connect with one another and reach a wider audience. The second digital project is a digital archive of the Queer Appalachia Project’s Instagram account, serving as a means to hold the Project accountable for their numerous scandals and provide a resource for Appalachian Studies researchers to access the account in a way which is more easily navigable than the social media site. Together, these three projects embody an interdisciplinary intervention into the fields of Appalachian Studies, rural queer studies, oral history, and the digital humanities.

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This dissertation is about modernism in Washington, D.C., specifically about a series of encounters between the visual program that helped realize the city’s modernization and works of art that put this way of seeing to the test. The modernization of Washington took hold of the city in the twentieth century in large part because of the advent of a new way of representing Washington. In short, Washington’s modernization would rely on a grammar of representation that constructed an easily legible image of the city as well as spectators capable of reading it as such. Numerous artists working in Washington exposed the workings of this rhetoric of modernity by creating art that, due to its inherent and sometimes-deliberate wordlessness, ceased to convey the modern city’s ideological messages and allegorical narratives. Instead, these artworks, by resisting or negating language, offered material expressions of knowledge and embodied structures of feeling—that is, they conveyed modern experiences that fell beyond the pale of language. This project employs six episodes from Washington’s modernization in order to assess the tension between legible imagery and lived experience. The first chapter examines the creation of Washington’s modern urban structure through the figure of andrew Mellon whose corporate bodies launched a massive urban renewal campaign that culminated in the establishment of the National Gallery. The second chapter is concerned with three artists who leveraged their own silence to create their work: the photographer Robert Scurlock, whose silent observation of the famous Marian anderson concert at the Lincoln Memorial evoked the singer’s own silence in the face of a progressivist narrative of civil rights; the poet Sterling Brown, whose redacted history of black Washington, originally written under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project, conjures parts of the city that were being systematically erased; and the painter Jacob Kainen, whose dissolution of the city’s visible forms in his abstract works went hand in hand with a theory of negation that called up the wonder and mystery often unavailable though literal representations. The next chapter examines how written efforts to contextualize Alma Thomas’s paintings have inadvertently removed her work from her own embodied artistic practice—a practice, I argue, that maps out the city as it underwent a series of urban renewal projects. The conclusion examines the failure of the rhetoric of modernity on its own terms during the public display of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery. as the painting appeared in various commercial and media outlets, people claimed to hear it “speak,” yet the incident reveals how modern experience took shape precisely when an artwork refused to say anything whatsoever.

This dissertation posits that a new form of material literacy emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1925, in tandem with the modern advertising profession. A nation recalibrating the way it valued economic and cultural mass consumption demanded, among other things, new signage – new ways to announce, and through those announcements, to produce its commitment to consumer society. What I call material literacy emerged as a set of interpretive skills wielded by both the creators and audiences of advertising material, whose paths crossed via representations of goods. These historically situated ways of reading and writing not only invited Americans to interpret a world full of representations of products, but also to understand – to read – themselves within that context. Commercial texts became sites for posing questions about reading behavior more generally, and they connected members of various professions who stood to benefit from that knowledge. In this dissertation, I explore how reading and consumption converged for advertising experts, printers, typographers, and experimental psychologists. Despite their different occupational vantage points, their work intersected around efforts to understand how modern Americans decoded printed texts, and how this behavior might be known and guided. To establish their professional reputations, the authors I study positioned themselves as being uniquely capable of observing and interpreting the behavior of readers. The body served as a key site, and metaphor, for their inquiries – a means of making both literacy and legibility material.

This dissertation brings the field of critical disability studies to bear on organizational paradigms of nineteenth-century American literature. “Reading Bodies” intervenes in these fields with the claim that the book in a variety of formats, publications, and circulations acts as a disciplinary tool that seeks to arrange physical and mental characteristics and capacities into the category of disability. This project moves beyond examining representations of disability to demonstrate that the same social, cultural, and political forces that generated literary movements and outpourings – such as nationalism, displacement of Native peoples, slavery, and state-sanctioned violence – also generated material conditions of impairment that formal literary conventions sought to consolidate as “disability.” Individuals and communities reading, writing, and responding to the genres of seduction, historical fiction, slave narrative, Civil War poetry, and children’s literature both deployed and challenged formal literary conventions to model or defy normative and deviant behaviors. The formal characteristics and aesthetic concerns of the field of American literature, I find, are products of larger social processes that both cause impairment and that communicate and mark constructions of disability into and onto reading and non-reading publics. as social and literary forces coalesced the category “disability,” often those populations most vulnerable to impairment responded by challenging, resisting, or completely renovating the conventions and categories of textual and bodily behavior. In a variety of interactions with the book, nineteenth-century women, Native Americans, African Americans, wounded soldiers, and children offer alternative intersectional perspectives and possibilities for what it means to produce literature and for what it means to inhabit a body. Those works considered literary outliers both in their day and in contemporary critical assessments, such as Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808), the Life of Black Hawk (1833), and midcentury children’s books printed for sight-impaired readers, reveal the normative underpinnings of literary and bodily taxonomies.

John Fahey’s music holds a distinct place in the mid-century folk revival--distinct because he is difficult to fit in with traditional narratives of the revival. John Fahey created a unique musical style through incorporation of traditional American music with classical music forms. His musical “quotations” and renditions of American blues, folk, ragtime, Protestant hymns, and parlor songs did not merely revive traditional music, but gave it new form and newfound respect in order to further artistic exploration. Fahey was a musical modernist, infusing tradition with the new. Fahey’s work can be situated in the context of modernist/folk connections that began earlier in the century.