This research involves a discourse analysis of several alternative video works produced by Paul Wong, an alternative video artist based in Vancouver, BC. Utilizing Judith Butler's "Subjects of sex/gender/desire," (1999) to comment and expand on Michel Foucault's four 'rules' for conducting discourse analysis, as laid out in The history of sexuality volume I: An introduction, Part Four, Chapter 2, "Method," (1978, 1990) I analyse Wong's 60 unit: Bruise (1976), Confused: Sexual views (1984) and So are you (1994). By focusing on discourses addressing the intersections of gender, race and sexuality in Wong's work, this analysis focuses on how alternative video art can be examined as activist work from a sociological perspective. Wong's video works reflect his engagements with intersecting queer and racialised identities and, through discourse analysis, can be shown to reflect, question and challenge mainstream queer and Chinese histories in Canada. Exploring Wong's contribution to discourses on gender, race and sexuality acts to underscore the contributions of alternative media artists to changing understandings of historical relations and to mainstream historical constructions of identity. Postmodern perspectives inform much alternative video practice and have worked to break down the distinctions between disciplines, recognize previously ignored mediums as legitimate and important forms and also to recognize a multiplicity of narratives and engage with marginalized perspectives. Utilizing postmodern perspectives, then, this research challenges notions of historical 'truths,' in mainstream narratives and histories. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-226).

Thesis advisor: Joni L. Kinsey. Thesis advisor: Joni Kinsey. Includes bibliographic references (p. 287-299).

South African photographer Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko and South African painter Tracy Payne explore different ways of communicating African realities. The visual imagery of these two artists focuses a lot on movement, challenging the rigidity of boundaries set by Western social constructs. In their work, Veleko and Payne critique the limitations of terms such as “authenticity.” It is extremely difficult to portray shifting notions of contemporary African identity in light of the stain of colonial philosophies which have, in times past, exoticised and appropriated the African body and ascribed conventions of “authenticity” to African representations. Undermining the burden of Western boundaries1, Veleko and Payne redefine what it means to operate in Africa today. Veleko seeks additional cultural realities to complicate her identity as a woman living in Africa while Payne uses concepts of movement to question the validity of structures which advocate an either/ or binary such as “East” and “West” and “masculinity” and “femininity”. By subtly merging aspects of these binaries in their representations, Veleko and Payne bring transnational possibilities to light by undermining the restrictions inscribed in the social and political history of (South) Africa with regard to collective and individual identities. Constructs of gender have contributed to a heightened sense of “African” “masculinity,” forming a stereotype of the African body which is difficult to break free from. Considering the notion of transnationalism and the issue of moving beyond boundaries, borrowing aspects of different cultures in attempt to better define a sense of self, Veleko and Payne engage in the sampling of different lifestyles and perspectives to better define their individualities. This thesis seeks to provide an analysis of the visual language used by Veleko and Payne to promote fluid “African” identities.

This study takes up the phrase ‘the skin of all’ as a means to explore the tension between the singular and the collective, and between union and estrangement. I examine aesthetic, symbolic, and theoretical attempts at unification amidst various forms of difference and the political imperatives and implications attached to this aim. The goal is to analyze how such attempts were related to the development of artistic institutions and discourses as well as to broader sociopolitical conditions within and beyond Brazil’s dictatorship era (1964-1985). This dissertation reflects on the reemergence of the discourse of antropofagia throughout the sixties and seventies in Brazil, a concept first developed in the 1920s as an explicit rejection of the privileged position of European culture and the assertion of a unified Brazilian national identity forged from its colonial histories and the co-presence of indigenous, African, and European identities. I emphasize that antropofagia has functioned as a counterhegemonic proposition reliant on the appropriation of marginal racial positions and their integration into a larger national framework, while still acknowledging the productive potentials that antropofagia’s collapsing of boundaries facilitates. My project challenges simplified narratives of harmonic exchange, embracing contradiction and the tensions of privilege, access, and power. Examining primary sources, contemporaneous writings and present-day scholarship, this project interrogates the mythos, life, and after-life of Pape and Oiticica’s performance and participatory works and analyzes these alongside both artist’s media-based practices. Analyzing the broader aims and implications of Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica’s engagement with Black and indigenous cultures, I unpack the ways their works irresolutely engage with race in the Brazilian context and how a primitivistic essentialism has been central to these works and their reception.