Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation contends with the diverse corpus of Gothic ivory grooming implements carved in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Employing feminist, queer, posthumanist, and ecocritical methodologies, it explores these objects as tools in gender and identity formation. Attending to the complexity of medieval attitudes to grooming and women and to the polysemy of these objects’ iconographies, this dissertation argues for the inherent ambiguity of the bodies that constitute and were constituted by these tools. It participates in a broader project of revealing the inherent ambiguity of medieval gender and its deep enmeshment with the nonhuman animal world by presenting ivory beauty implements as nexuses of excess and resistance to feminine ideals. Calling attention to the body of the elephant as the source of the grooming tools’ materiality, its analysis demonstrates how the subjugation of the nonhuman animal reverberates through objects created to give order to human animal bodies, in particular the bestial female body. The material, iconographical, functional, and textual strands wound together in ivory grooming tools reveal the women of flesh and ivory to be far more multilayered and subversive, resourceful and complex, than scholarship has hitherto recognized. At once tools of subjugation and instruments to assert agency, in the hands of their users, ivory grooming tools become sites of identity expression and self-transformation.

The following study traces modern Quebecois art from the beginning of the twentieth century with specific reference to the question of the redefinition of identity. The study mainly consists of an analysis of different strategies used by certain progressive artists like Paul-Emile Borduas, Francoise Sullivan and Jean-Paul Riopelle to impose a new reality which was simultaneously contemporary, rooted and distinct in the context of a Quebec that was emerging in modernization. By using popular or marginalized artistic forms and by seizing certain ancient models belonging to the distant past---in the non-western world or precolonial America---and by using different strategies of deconstruction and transgression of normative codes defined by the dominant ideology, these artists were able to avoid current hegemonic models in order to assert new spaces for expression and representation. Taking on modern Quebecois art from an approach belonging to diverse social sciences and humanities, this study aims to renew the analytical parameters of the traditional art history. The main challenge lies in zeroing in on the ways in which the development of modern identity (meaning the affirmation of the right to be different and to self-determination, and the development of subjectivism and expressivism) influenced avant-garde artistic productions, and which strategies artists used to replace the values imposed by traditional institutions and the dominant ideology, which in turn sparked a renewal of identity. Modern identity is based upon a principle that is modeled on two foundations: on the image that the subject will have of himself, and the impression that the Other (a bordering neighbour, cultural cousin, colonial authority or political oppressor) will have of him. In fact, this "stranger" will essentially assume the role of guaranteeing the recognition of the proposed identity. The phenomena of mythical constructions of symbolical imagination and of primitivism, in this study,

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Revision of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 1969. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-330) and index.

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