Failure Theatre: An Artist’s Statement, is an invitation to a rumination on failure. The project is divided into four discreet offers that combine together to form a portrait of failure. A full play text, a manifesto and a choreographed response to research as well as an Artist Statement merge into a pastiche that sheds light on failure’s possible position(s) within the Canadian theatrical milieu. Basing the overall approach on work by Judith Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Ann Bogart plus several other Feminist, Queer and Performance authors, this thesis examines failure as a force for resistance and change. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-01-28 15:45:13.857

The celebration of a White heteronormative masculinity is still vivid in Heavy Metal. This has embodied and discursive consequences that are visible in the domination of Metal spaces or the marginalisation of female, trans* or non-binary musicians, but also in an aesthetics of (hetero- and cis-) sexism and racism that is often apparent. Nevertheless, Metal is still empowering and joyful for those who experience exclusion and marginalisation. They have found ways to react and organise an alternative participation in Heavy Metal. Using a queered approach to Cultural Studies, this study aims at intervening in the continuous reproduction of a normative White and straight Metal masculinity. Collecting data from five ethnographic interviews with queer Metalheads and additional autoethnographic data, it shows how queer Metalheads organise their participation in Heavy Metal and create an alternative Metal cosmology. This study is not only a theoretical intervention. As a result of the interview project, a new community of queer Metalheads was created.

A presente pesquisa busca empreender um mapeamento de produções cinematográficas, nacionais e internacionais, que abordam a transgeneridade. A partir desse procedimento, observamos as regularidades que emergiram desse conjunto de produções. Objetivamos traçar um percurso que inscreve esse esforço num plano micropolítico, uma vez que interroga criticamente as práticas comunicacionais e discursivas do cinema hegemônico. Para tanto, exploramos aproximações e tensionamentos provocados pelos estudos queer considerando, aqui, que é esse conjunto de noções que melhor dá conta de pensar a condição trans enquanto um deslocamento que se impõe ao sistema binário masculino/feminino e, como consequência, ao sistema sexo/gênero. Esse percurso conduzido, ainda, sob um viés discursivo/foucaultiano, traz como implicação um profundo questionamento daquilo que configura o humano ao interrogar os biopoderes, os limites do corpo e os regimes de verdade que o produzem. Desse modo, essa pesquisa guia-se pela seguinte questão: como se configuram os discursos que produzem e expressam os corpos trans no cinema? Partimos das análises dos filmes Meninos Não Choram (1999), Tomboy (2011), Num Ano de 13 Luas (1978), Tirésia (2003), Lado Selvagem (2004), Vera (1987), Tangerine (2015), Paris is Burning (1991) para examinar as regularidades observadas, supondo ser possível interrogar as condições de possibilidade de novas formas de expressar a transgeneridade, no sentido de configurar linhas de fuga significativas para as audiovisualidades. / The present research seeks to undertake a mapping of cinematographic productions, national and international, that deal with transgender characters. From this procedure, we observe the regularities that emerged from this set of productions. We aim to trace a path that inscribes this effort in a micropolitical plan, since it critically questions the communicational and discursive practices of hegemonic cinema. To do so, we explore approximations and tensions provoked by queer studies, considering here it is this set of notions that best account for thinking the trans condition as a displacement that imposes itself on the male / female binary system and, as a consequence, on the sex / gender system . This course, conducted even under a discursive / Foucaultian bias, entails a deep questioning of what constitutes the human being when interrogating biopowers, the limits of the body and the regimes of truth that produce it. Thus, this research is guided by the following question: how are the discourses that produce and express trans bodies in cinema? We start from the analysis of the films Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Tomboy (2011), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), Tiresia (2003), Wild Side (2004), Vera (1987), Tangerine (2015) and Paris is Burning (1991) to examine observed regularities, assuming that it is possible to interrogate the conditions of possibility of new ways of expressing transgender experiences, in order to configure significant escape lines for audiovisuals.

Catholics is an artist's book, a limited-edition memoir that makes use of text, image, and tactility. It relates the author's Catholic upbringing as it interweaves several themes: Church history, pre-Christian mythology, and the places where such spiritualities resonate with twentieth-century pop culture.

In this dissertation, "An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture," I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an "archive" of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire's Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides?s Middlesex, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn?s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process?theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships.

Recent changes in the politics of gay rights have led to a gay rights demand for liberal governments: i) decriminalization of sodomy and ii) full governmental recognition of civil, same-sex marriages. Challengers to liberalism argue that a neutral liberalism cannot satisfy the gay rights demand. I argue that the liberal political framework put forth by Ronald Dworkin can adequately fulfill the gay rights demand. Dworkinian liberalism, which is neutral with respect to the ethical life, need not be neutral with respect to moral and non-ethical values. I argue for the more modest claim that Dworkinian liberalism has the conceptual tools and principles for satisfying the gay rights demand. In arguing for my claim, I discuss the internal criticisms of Carlos Ball and Michael Sandel and the external criticism of John Finnis. I argue that these concerns are surmountable. Dworkinian liberalism is capable of offering a robust defense of same-sex relations.

This report is an analysis of Salvador Plascencia’s first novel, The People of Paper, with relationships to current understandings of lesbian genres from queer theory, the body from disability theory, and race in relation to the characters’ migrations/transgressions across physical and figurative boundaries from Mexico to the United States. Key thinkers who have influenced my reading of the novel include Gloria Anzaldúa whose text, Borderlands/La Frontera, portrays the intersections of a multiplicity of identities across gender, sexuality, ability, nationhood, race, and ethnicity. The thinking of Chicana lesbian scholar, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel; queer scholar, Alexander Doty; and disability scholars, Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Tobin Siebers, are also integral to the report as I explore the intersections of sexuality, disability, and diaspora of key figures like the “retarded” prophet, Baby Nostradamus, and the women of paper, Merced de Papel and Liz. These figures are explored in relation to each other as well as to the readers, critic, and author as the novel is a metafictional one that lends itself to the blurring of genre boundaries. Further, as I analyze these corporeal intersections, I focus on the lesbian trope of forked tongues as a trope of queer disability as it relates to the markedly “Other” body of Merced de Papel and the lesbian triangle she forms with Little Merced and Merced as well as to the formation of a queer disability community. / text

In this report, I examine the reception of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) from contemporary reviews in periodicals to twenty-first century online reviews. I am interested in how the novel has been situated in both historical and personal canons. I focus on how Nightwood has been read through the lenses of experimental modernism, lesbian feminism and postmodern queer theory, and how my own readings of it have changed over the years. / text

In this project, I am interrogating discourse surrounding the 2008 WHO/UNAIDS controversy, which both preceded and followed the publication of an article in the U.K. newspaper The Independent. The article reported that the head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS initiative admitted that the threat of an AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals was “officially” over. These texts are particularly important for such an endeavor because, as I will argue below, the controversy enables both “AIDS” and “heterosexuality” to operate as floating signifiers whose meanings are contested in public discourse in ways that ultimately reinforce heterosexual privilege and under-attention to the AIDS crisis. In the end, the destabilization of the meaning of HIV/AIDS does not serve emancipatory ends. Although the destabilization of meaning is the emancipatory gesture ‘par excellence’ for the poststructuralist tradition, my investigation shows that the destabilization of meaning in the WHO controversy actually results in the reification of master narratives. / text

This project looks at the mutually imbricated relationship between space, sex, and technology in cultural output from the last fifteen years. Through an examination of sexual cruising cultures in Samuel R. Delany’s essays Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, I unpack the ways in which technology is represented as a facilitator and barrier to the formation of spaces that foster queer sexual interactions. This thesis is interested in the ability of different technologies and spaces to promote the formation of heterogeneous relationships that cross categories of social difference—including race, class, and sexuality—following the HIV/AIDS crisis. Alongside an investigation of the potential of technologies of affiliation to support these kinds of interpersonal contacts, I argue that representations of technologically mediated intimacy are often limited to a hesitant ambivalence due to a cultural unease about the new types of non-normative relation offered by technology.