Magister Artium - MA / There is a theoretical gap in scholarship pertaining to masculinity and disability in dance. Existing scholarship on masculinity, disability and dance respectively, seldom bring these three themes into conversation with each other, missing opportunities to examine the nuances of masculinity. Through an ethnographic study, I endeavoured to capture the narratives of three professional disabled male dancers from different contexts and backgrounds. The phenomenological approach was selected in order to enhance understanding of my participants’ experiences in an attempt to illuminate how these dancers negotiate and embody their masculinity in dance spaces. The nuances of masculinity, disability and dance are therefore interpreted through a phenomenological framework and seek to foreground the intricacies of negotiation and subjectivity. Through face-to-face in-depth interviews, watching performances and rehearsals as well as less formal conversations, this project aims to illuminate the lives of Marc Brew (Scotland), David Toole (England) and Zama Sonjica (South Africa) as disabled male dancers. I am particularly interested in disability’s ability to challenge normative ideas around dance, identity and masculinity. I argue the need to change limiting perceptions of hegemonic masculinity and the male dancer’s body to advance the artistic medium of dance and allow for constructive dialogue around issues of access and inclusivity. Furthermore, like Roebuck (2001), I am interested in the ways in which contemporary dance works "contributes to the development of a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which dance articulates masculine identity" (Roebuck, 2001: 1).

Speaking through the voice of another is a practice-based PhD that employs art practice to interrogate translation (as a textual and verbal practice). It uses linguistic translation as both the subject and the method to make multimedia artworks (text, sound, performance and events) that examine and analyse the translation process itself. The research has been conducted from my own subjective position, as an artist and monolingual speaker (a translation user rather than translation professional), investigating translation as a dialogic, subjective, embodied and performative phenomena. It adopts a self-reflexive methodology that places equal value in theoretical and experiential knowledge and proposes that an artist-led inquiry challenges assumptions, translation protocols, conventions and normative behaviour. The artists and artworks discussed in the thesis examine the translators /translation s agency and its linguistic performativity; exploiting it s creative potential as an artistic process/medium and amplifying its pivotal role within the expanding global art world. This transdisciplinary approach has resulted in the creation of translation zones - works and events devised to engage monolingual and multilingual individuals, professional translators, practitioners and public(s) in the process of translation - that offer an alternative perspective on translation (to research carried out within Translation Studies). Consequently, generating new knowledge that contributes to our understanding of translation and art and beyond both disciplines, creating a new transdisciplinary genre of art-and-translation. The artworks are an integral part of the thesis submission; samples and documentation of these are accessible within the full interactive PDF ersion. The layout of the thesis has been specifically designed to ease communication of the research, it uses various visual cues to distinguish between different types of information and to demonstrate my research praxis; the continual movement between theory and practice.

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis I investigate the radical reframing of maternal representation in the photographic series by Cape Town-based artist Svea Josephy (b. 1969), entitled Confinement 2005-ongoing. Using Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the maternal body’s relation to abjection, as well as its imperative to the remodelling of the relationship between the corporeal and the cultural, I explore how Josephy’s images explicitly engage with the Kristevan abject in order to disrupt cultural inscriptions of maternity and ‘motherhood’. I contend that Confinement situates Josephy’s experience of ‘becoming-mother’ against the dominant discourses of maternity and birth, and thereby uses the maternal subject as a means to interrogate broader issues of gender and identity. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis ondersoek ek die radikale herberaming van die moederfiguur in Confinement (2005 tot op hede) – ‘n fotoreeks van die Kaapse kunstenaar Svea Josephy (geb. 1969). Julia Kristeva se teorieë oor die moederlike liggaam, en in besonder die moederliggaam se verhouding tot abjeksie, word aangewend om die verband tussen die liggaamlike en die kulturele te herbedink. Ek ondersoek hoe hierdie fotoreeks Kristeva se konsep van die abjekte benut, ten einde kulturele voorskriftelikheid oor moederskap en 'ma-wees' te ontwrig. Ek argumenteer dat Confinement Josephy se ondervinding van 'wordend-moederskap’ die dominante diskoerse van moederskap en geboorte uitdaag, en sodoende die moederlike subjek gebruik om breër aspekte rondom geslag en identiteit te bevraagteken.

<p>To say that Gypsy and/or Traveller and/or Romany life stories have existed on the periphery of literary studies can be considered an understatement. In this study of the relational self, <i>Narrating Gypsies, Telling Travellers</i>, examines the discursive and structural complexities involved in the practices of writing and speaking in the production process and narrative trajectories of the life stories of Gordon Sylvester Boswell (1970), Nan Joyce (1985), Jimmy Stockins (2000), and Jess Smith (2002 and 2003).</p><p>The study emphasizes relational aspects of self-construction, which includes links to the national (hi)stories of Scotland, Ireland and England. Beginning with an eighteenth-century scaffold confession and moving through colonial, post-colonial, national and internal colonial narratives, the study follows a discursive path that re-emerges and reverberates in the spoken and/or written words of the story narrators. The study problemetizes the effectiveness of resistance as the historical depth and relationally produced dual-nature of domination is analysed. Above all the study positions modes of domination and self-domination within processes of forgetting forged through consensual, subtle and coercive practices related to points of view and the taken-for-granted.</p>

To say that Gypsy and/or Traveller and/or Romany life stories have existed on the periphery of literary studies can be considered an understatement. In this study of the relational self, Narrating Gypsies, Telling Travellers, examines the discursive and structural complexities involved in the practices of writing and speaking in the production process and narrative trajectories of the life stories of Gordon Sylvester Boswell (1970), Nan Joyce (1985), Jimmy Stockins (2000), and Jess Smith (2002 and 2003). The study emphasizes relational aspects of self-construction, which includes links to the national (hi)stories of Scotland, Ireland and England. Beginning with an eighteenth-century scaffold confession and moving through colonial, post-colonial, national and internal colonial narratives, the study follows a discursive path that re-emerges and reverberates in the spoken and/or written words of the story narrators. The study problemetizes the effectiveness of resistance as the historical depth and relationally produced dual-nature of domination is analysed. Above all the study positions modes of domination and self-domination within processes of forgetting forged through consensual, subtle and coercive practices related to points of view and the taken-for-granted.

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