This dissertation arises from an interdisciplinary attention to the categories of embodiment, otherness, and the "abnormal." In deconstructing a "normal" versus "abnormal" binary, I focus specifically on establishing intersections between disabled and/or queer bodies, those commonly categorized as monstrous. By way of feminist science studies and cultural studies theoretical frameworks, I postulate that the connections between disabled and/or queer bodies can be read through the practices of biological, cultural, and queer reproduction(s). Chapter One is concerned with examining how disabled and/or queer physical reproduction highlights and troubles a heteronormative and able-bodied normative time line. I consider Michael Berube's memoir Life As We Know It and Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible in order to hypothesize a notion I term "queer-progress," a time line that works in opposition to a linear progressive movement of bodies in time. In Chapter Two, I investigate the process of cultural and social reproduction. What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and storylines are perpetually recreated and reproduced around disabled and/or queer bodies? How is the disabled and/or queer body positioned against a "normal" body? I study Alice Munro's short story "Child's Play" and Lois Lowry's young adult novel The Giver with the aim to expose how socio-cultural reproductive policing technologies seek to maintain able-bodied and heteronormative privilege by way of the normalization and reproduction of negative affect towards monstrous bodies. Chapter Three analyzes texts that envision queer reproductive stories, both biological and cultural, for disabled and/or queer subjects. I examine the question of what happens when disabled and/or queer bodies bear reproductive fruit, both physically and in the form of cultural change. I explore Larissa Lai's novel Salt Fish Girl and Allyson Mitchell's art installation Ladies Sasquatch and posit that these texts offer alternative manifestations of reproduction, community, and kinship formations. This project places different dialogues in conversation with one another feminist thought about reproduction, disability and reproduction, queerness and reproduction, disability and queerness and how the "normal" body is created and maintained. In sum, I build on existing work in feminism, disability studies and queer theory to develop the notion of "reproduction" in an interdisciplinary fashion. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines how transnational gay and queer discourses conceal ongoing forms of violence against multiple subaltern populations, through the seemingly natural teleology and progressive nature assigned to gay rights and queerness. I use the theoretical framework of necropolitics, developed by Achille Mbembe who analyzes how power is exercised through killing and death, to examine two sites of violence that are typically presented as progressive: transnational gay rights and queer tourism. First, I demonstrate that the problem of ‘anti-gay’ violence in non-western subaltern contexts is not due to a lack of legal rights, as most western activists have framed the issue, but is rather an issue of non-controlled forms of lateral violence carried out by non-state actors against multiple groups. Second, I reveal that the representation of queer tourism as progressive masks subjection of subaltern labourers to violence and death. These findings suggest that relations of power constituted through necropolitics should be the lens through which violence in subaltern contexts is read. This perspective is in opposition to most western based transnational discourses that misread and disregard forms of violence in subaltern contexts and consequently facilitate the recurrence of violence in these contexts. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-21 12:17:17.871

This dissertation examines the interplay of queer sexuality, theology, and transatlantic modernism in the oeuvres and critical receptions of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Hart Crane (1899-1932), and W.H. Auden (1907-1973). As an interdisciplinary study in literary criticism and of each author’s reception history, this thesis reads the poetry, critical prose, and correspondence of Eliot, Crane, and Auden with focused reference to queer theory and continental philosophies of religion extending from Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the post-Kantian legacy. Gauging the “post-secular turn” in cultural criticism, the dissertation develops a critique of “epistemic secularism,” which constitutes a normative framework for scholarship in many branches of the humanities. To examine “the secular limits of discipline” at the junction of queer theory and modernist studies, it examines how literary critics and queer theorists define modernity and conceptualize subjectivity at the secular limits (or limitations) of their fields. Imbrications of theology and queerness in the works of Eliot, Crane, and Auden occasion this study’s response to epistemic secularism and prompt its recalibration of secularism in the ethical terms of “mere reason,” rather than as an episteme rife with antireligious politics. Research undertaken for this thesis is guided by two foundational questions: 1) Do extant models for the study of queer sexualities presuppose secularism or enforce secularization as a benchmark for the “achievement of modernity”? 2) Are religious foundations conceivable for queer subjects to whom secularism remains a key factor in the emancipatory history of sexual cultures? The dissertation argues that, for better and for worse, secularism has become a blueprint in the metropolitan West for thinking sexual modernity as progressive and achievable. Notwithstanding such provisos, this study finds that the “proper” subject in queer-modernist studies is in essence neither nonreligious nor antireligious. Rather, reading with and against the grain of secularism’s episteme, it uncovers in the corpuses of Eliot, Crane, and Auden a radical conception of theology as a positively queer endeavour in an era of “liberated” secularist polities. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2014-02-28 10:37:43.026

No description available.

As a poet, I am continually on the lookout for the strange in the real, and the real in the strange: scientific, linguistic, poetic, human. These poems are my offerings of strange realness and real strangeness. Often where the poems want to go is toward questions that live in connection / disconnection, identity, disability and illness, art, religion and ritual, desire and love and wanting, and one of my dearest loves, music. And, of course, science and language, and the language of science.

ABSTRACT Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts seems necessary to explore how Faulkner’s characters interpret the sensory stimuli in their fictional landscape and how their actions in this regard reveal the larger social constructs functioning in the novels. In particular, this dissertation seeks to borrow the theoretical approach known in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology as sensory studies to examine nine Faulkner novels: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms), Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, The Town, and The Unvanquished. Such an approach requires moving away from examining sensory stimuli as symbols that are read the same way by everyone; instead, the way Faulkner’s characters use the senses is examined as a biased act, an act that is committed and interpreted differently depending on who is doing the sensing. Using this type of sensory studies framework can transform close readings of Faulkner’s texts, particularly since such an approach helps us understand the way the senses are constantly interwoven with characters’ attempts to define (and sometimes confine) the other characters. In fact, exploring the way characters actively use their senses to categorize others can reveal a hidden discourse, one where the language of the senses illuminates belief-systems in ways that are not otherwise obvious.

No description available.

Geschlechtliche Queerness in zeitgenössischer medialer Repräsentation ist hingegen das Anliegen von Diana von Pich Lipinskis (M. A.) Untersuchung, Queere Gegenwartsliteratur im Kanonisierungsprozess? Wertungskriterien ausgewählter deutschsprachiger Zeitungsrezensionen. Gemäß der modifizierten These, „(Rezensions)Macht macht Kanon“, analysiert die Verfasserin, mit Hilfe linguistischer und hermeneutischer Verfahren, ein umfangreiches Korpus von Literaturrezensionen, die 2015 in vier bundesdeutschen Leitmedien erschienen sind, auf Erfolge, Erfolglosigkeit und Erfolgsaussichten queerer Kanonkritik und -revisionen hin. Verbindet diese genderwissenschaftliche Studie so in innovativer Weise die disziplinäre ‚Kontaktzone‘ zwischen Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft, ‚überquert‘ auch ihr Anliegen (in durchaus feministischer Tradition!) die Grenze von wissenschaftlicher Analyse und politischem Engagement: Begegnet sie doch dem analysierten Befund von Unterrepräsentanz und der schlechten Kanonisierungs-Prognose von queerer Gegenwartsliteratur mit dem Plädoyer, das bislang auf Homosexualität begrenzte Verständnis von Queerness für die Vielfalt geschlechtlicher Identitäten und Begehrensformen jenseits der Heteronormativität zu öffnen und so Leben, Literatur und Literaturkritik in ein neues, liberales und zeitgemäßes Verhältnis zu bringen.

Den Queer Studies verpflichtet ist der kunstwissenschaftliche Beitrag „Zeitgenössische queere Kunst in Südafrika am Beispiel von Zanele Muholi“ von Anna Zorn (M. A.). Am Beispiel der Künstlerin Zanele Muholi (*1972), die sich selbst als ‚visual activist‘ bezeichnet, wird ein Einblick in die zeitgenössische queere Kunst in Südafrika gegeben. Muholi thematisiert in ihren Fotografien, Fotobüchern, Filmen, Installationen und Performances die gegenwärtige Situation der physischen und emotionalen Bedrängnis der queeren Community. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Serie Faces & Phases (seit 2006). Sie macht Muholis Ästhetik und Technik, die Verhandlung zwischen (Un-)Sichtbarkeit und Hypervisibilität minorisierter Gruppen, besonders deutlich. Die Fotografien machen, so die Argumentation, queere Personen im gesellschaftlich-politischen und künstlerischen Kontext auf eine spezifische Weise sichtbar, sodass über positive Einzel-Bilder hinaus ein Bild-Archiv queeren Lebens geschaffen und eine ‚radical black queer visual history‘ geschrieben werden. Dabei ist Muholis ‚visual activism‘ nicht unpolitisch und wirkungslos, sondern nutzt, im Sinne einer Gender-Agency, das Potenzial queerer Kunst erfolgreich, um festgefahrene Situationen und Formationen zu dynamisieren.

The writings and life of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942-2004) have had an immense impact in a variety of disciplines. Her oft-cited text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is included in many university courses’ reading lists for its contributions to discourses of hybridity, linguistics, intersectionality and women of color feminism, among others. Unfortunately, most scholars content themselves with the intricacies of Borderlands to the neglect of her corpus of work, which includes essays, books, edited volumes, children’s literature and fiction/autohistorias. This analysis presented here wishes to expand our understandings of Anzaldúa’s work by engaging with her pre- and post-Borderlands writings in an attempt to highlight the unrecognized contributions Anzaldúa offers to feminist theory, spirituality, spiritual activism, queer theory, expansive ideas of queerness and an articulation of alternative, non-Western epistemology. This project offers close readings of published and archival Anzaldúan text and draws parallels between her life and her writing.