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This dissertation explores literary-theoretical constructions arising from the consideration of certain non-narrative linguistic strategies and applies them to dance analysis. My intent is not only to provide new, functional tools for dance scholars and writers, but also to alter the theoretical terms themselves: by employing literary critical language beyond its original purpose, I hope to locate the limits of that language as it applies to dance. Moreover, I strive to identify the ways moving bodies complicate concepts normally applied to static and disembodied text. In this way my research moves in two directions: adding a specific theoretical lens to the dance-writing toolbox, and, in turn, using dance to sharpen and focus that lens. I have chosen two theoretical constructs--Julia Kristeva's explication of the semiotic aspect of language and her characterization of the abject--because of the ways they address the unsayable through body, repetition, and rhythm. Kristeva's texts, Desire in Language (1981) and Powers of Horror (1982), provide the dissertation's primary theoretical frameworks. The first text puts forth key concepts about heterogeneous meaning within her conceptualization of the semiotic; the second addresses meaning that exceeds language, and the self, and arises out of the abject (a crisis of the subject when confronted with a breakdown of boundaries between self and other). Both concepts are relevant to dance, emerging from the materiality/substance of language rather than from language as a phantom structure that ideas are placed into. This dissertation grapples with how dance strives to express that which exceeds "paraphrasable" meaning from three vantage points: 1) the assessment of the critical reception of historic choreography (Paul Taylor's Big Bertha) that plays simple narrative against the horror of the unknown; 2) an examination of participants' communications during the choreographic process of innovative choreographer, Gabrielle Lamb, and how research material was transformed during that process; 3) the documentation of my own struggle to express the unsayable during the creation of a hybrid dance/textual piece. These perspectives require different analytic strategies: 1) the casting of an artwork's meaning in historical and cultural contexts, 2) the parsing of the language used to communicate meaning between participants during the creative process, 3) the self-chronicling and reflective analysis of meaning-making during the conception and execution of a hybrid work. My objective is to show how Kristeva's theoretical constructs play out in different types of dance analysis and how the lack of a certain strain of theoretical language in dance discourse has left a hole where discussion might profitably ensue. I seek to use Kristeva's texts and post/modern techniques of the body to offer a multi-layered and technically invested understanding of dance rather than an aphoristic and imagistic one: one that substitutes multiple, specific bodies and their actions for a single idealized institution of the beautiful. / Dance

L’art abject est entré comme terme et comme concept dans le dictionnaire du monde de l’art dans les années 1990. Son utilisation a été consacrée par l’exposition Abject Art : Repulsion and Desire in American Art du Whitney Museum en 1993 qui a, de surcroît, influencé les critères établis pour déterminer si une œuvre est considérée, dans l’imaginaire collectif, comme étant abjecte. Cette exposition a ainsi véhiculé une compréhension de l’art abject comme étant, d’un point de vue matériel, à la fois dégoûtant et fascinant. Lors de la recherche menée pour ce mémoire, il a notamment été question d’élargir le concept d’art abject pour qu’il recouvre dorénavant des œuvres représentant des identités appartenant à des communautés marginalisées par un pouvoir ou une identité dominante. Plus précisément, nous nous sommes penchés.es sur des œuvres exposant des identités abjectes par rapport à une identité dominante allégoriquement hétéro-homo-normative masculine et occidentale s’exprimant par l’entremise du tableau de 1814 peint par Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, La grande odalisque. Ce tableau est devenu le dénominateur commun d’analyse pour nos trois études de cas, soit les œuvres Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? des Guerrilla Girls, Tapestry de J J Levine et La Grande Intendante de 2Fik. Ces œuvres – toutes trois ayant été exposées au Canada depuis l’an 2000 – ont permis de questionner la définition dominante de l’art abject. Elles font conjointement parties d’un grand dialogue, à la fois contemporain et transhistorique, visant à explorer le potentiel didactique de l’abjection, afin de comprendre le pouvoir subversif et transformateur contenu dans ce type de création. En effet, en utilisant les techniques d’autoreprésentation et de réappropriation de motif, les artistes issus.es de communautés abjectées neutralisent ultimement leur abjection, leur déshumanisation et leur aliénation politique contemporaine et produisent une culture dont les représentations sont plus inclusives. / Abject art is a term and concept introduced in the art dictionary in the 1990s. Its use was enshrined in the Whitney Museum's 1993 exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which further established the criteria for work to be considered in the collective imagination as abject. This exhibition thus conveyed an understanding of abject art as being, from a material perspective, both disgusting and fascinating. Part of the research for this study is focussed on expanding the concept of abject art to include works that represent identities that have been marginalized by a dominant identity. Specifically, we examine works that expose abject identities in relation to an allegorical dominant hetero-homo-normative Western male identity expressed in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres' 1814 painting La grande odalisque. This painting became the common denominator of analysis for our three case studies: the Guerrilla Girls' Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, J J Levine's Tapestry and 2Fik's La Grande Intendante. These works - all of which have been exhibited in Canada since the year 2000 - have allowed us to question the dominant definition of abject art. Their analysis also sparks a larger contemporary and transhistorical dialogue that explores the didactic potential of abjection in which these types of creation contain a subversive and transformative power. By using techniques of self-representation and motif reappropriation, artists from abjected communities ultimately neutralize their abjection, dehumanization and contemporary political alienation to produce a culture that is more inclusive in its representations.

Este trabalho investiga a associação entre a violência e o feminino no cinema contemporâneo. Em virtude das mudanças nas formas de apresentação da violência feminina no cinema dos últimos anos, a primeira parte deste trabalho dedica-se, a partir das análises de Sedução e Vingança e Valente, a percorrer os caminhos que permitem considerar a especificidade do imaginário cinematográfico relativo à violência feminina e emergência de um novo tipo de personagem feminino, a guerreira, expressão do embate discursivo em torno da feminilidade da violência. Na segunda parte deste trabalho, composta pela análise dos filmes em que três personagens-ícone do período aparecem Nikita, Lara Croft e Beatrix Kiddo , dedica-se a chamar a atenção para as transformações e contradições que permeiam as diferentes caracterizações da guerreira. / This research investigates the connection between femininity and violence in contemporary cinema. While considering the changes in which female violence has been portrayed in recent years, the first part of the work explores, through the analysis of Ms. 45 and The Brave One, the particularity of female violence cinematographic imagery and the emergence of a new kind of character, the warrior. The second part analyses the movies that featured three distinct icons of this period Nikita, Lara Croft and Beatrix Kiddo exploring the transformations and contradictions relative to the stereotypical female violence aspects presented in these different warriors.

Este trabalho investiga a associação entre a violência e o feminino no cinema contemporâneo. Em virtude das mudanças nas formas de apresentação da violência feminina no cinema dos últimos anos, a primeira parte deste trabalho dedica-se, a partir das análises de Sedução e Vingança e Valente, a percorrer os caminhos que permitem considerar a especificidade do imaginário cinematográfico relativo à violência feminina e emergência de um novo tipo de personagem feminino, a guerreira, expressão do embate discursivo em torno da feminilidade da violência. Na segunda parte deste trabalho, composta pela análise dos filmes em que três personagens-ícone do período aparecem Nikita, Lara Croft e Beatrix Kiddo , dedica-se a chamar a atenção para as transformações e contradições que permeiam as diferentes caracterizações da guerreira. / This research investigates the connection between femininity and violence in contemporary cinema. While considering the changes in which female violence has been portrayed in recent years, the first part of the work explores, through the analysis of Ms. 45 and The Brave One, the particularity of female violence cinematographic imagery and the emergence of a new kind of character, the warrior. The second part analyses the movies that featured three distinct icons of this period Nikita, Lara Croft and Beatrix Kiddo exploring the transformations and contradictions relative to the stereotypical female violence aspects presented in these different warriors.

Esta pesquisa analisa os efeitos subjetivos resultantes das transformações sociais contemporâneas, tais como o impacto da tecnologia e o crescente poder da imagem, que resultam na problematização sobre o lugar do corpo na sociedade. Esta análise é proposta a partir da leitura de obras específicas de artistas contemporâneos identificados à arte abjeta, modalidade da arte vinculada à constituição do ser humano e à apresentação do real. / This research analyzes the subjective effects resulting from the contemporary social changes, such as the impact of technology and the increasing power of image, that lead to the problematization on the place of the body in society. This analysis is proposed anchored in the reading of specific works from contemporary artists of the abject, art style linked to the human being’s constitution and to the presentation of the real.

At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before delving into their various points of theoretical and art-historical intersection within these categories. This analysis ultimately forms the argument that color can be a powerful tool in reclaiming the female nude figure, stimulating emotive bodies that inspire empathetic viewers and intersubjective rather than objectifying, or abjectifying, dialogues.

“Resisting the Vortex” examines the tenuous role of the abject in Melville’s early writings. While much psychoanalytic criticism on Melville and his works is driven by Freudian and Lacanian analyses, my study explores the role(s) of women, particularly that of the mother, through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection. I suggest that Melville’s depiction of the abject evolves and becomes more apparent as his writing career progresses. I include Typee, Mardi, Moby-Dick and Pierre in my analysis since these texts demonstrate the evolution of Melville’s relationship to the abject mother. I argue that throughout each of these works, the female (and some of the male native characters as well) are depicted in terms that are similar to Kristeva’s concept of the idealized chora and the abject mother. While the male protagonists of Melville’s early works are drawn to women who seem to embody the chora (the energies and drives that are regulated by the mother’s body), they recoil from women who are abject and seem to threaten their sense of identity. Although man must reject/abject the mother in order to maintain a sense of autonomous identity, he still longs to recreate the symbiotic relationship he once had with the mother as an infant. He seeks the language of the mother’s body – that of the semiotic, which issues from the chora, – in an effort to return to the safe haven of the womb. This tension between maintaining a sense of identity that is separate from the mother while simultaneously longing to return to the mother, is evident in each of Melville’s aforementioned works to varying degrees. However, it is in Pierre, a work that chronicles a young man’s attempt to escape the suffocating influence of his mother, that the threat of the abject becomes the central theme of one of Melville’s novels. Ultimately, man should strive to balance his need for an autonomous identity with the realization that he may never fully “escape” the mother’s presence in his life. Unfortunately, Melville’s leading men fail to recognize this paradox and the consequences are dire.

In this thesis, I explore the construction of female erotic desire in Ovid’s work as it is represented in the form of mythical heroines. Phaedra-like figures appear in Ovid’s poetry as dangerous spectres of wildly inappropriate and therefore destructive, bestial, or incestuous sexuality. I consider in particular the catalogue of Phaedra-like figures in Ars Amatoria 1.283-340, Phaedra in Heroides 4, Byblis in Metamorphoses 9.439-665, and Iphis in Metamorphoses 9.666-797. Their tales act as a threat of punishment for any inappropriate desire. They represent for the normative sexual subject a sexual desire which has been excluded, and what could happen, what the normative subject could become, were he or she to transgress taboos and laws governing sexual relations. I apply the idea of the abject, as it has been formulated by Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, in order to elucidate Ovid’s process of constructing such a subject in his poetry. I also consider Butler’s theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles in relation to the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions his poetry creates. The intersection of “performance” and performativity is crucial to the representation of the heroines as paradigms of female desire. Ovid’s engagement with his literary predecessors in the genre of tragedy, in particular Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragedies featuring Phaedra, highlights the idea of dramatically “performing” a role, e.g., the role of incestuous step-mother. Such a spotlight on “performance” in all of these literary representations reveals the performativity of culturally defined gender and kinship roles. Ovid’s ludic representations, or “citations,” of Phaedra, I argue, both reinvest cultural stereotypes of women’s sexuality with authority through their repetition and introduce new possibilities of feminine subjectivity and sexuality through the variations in each iteration.

This thesis examines the phenomenon of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the representation of female victims in U.S. and Mexican mainstream media and performance activism. Specifically analyzing representations of maquiladora workers and feminicide victims in film, fashion and photography, this thesis explores the simultaneous fetishization and devaluation of border women in patriarchal society. By broadening the base of pressure for justice, via performance and internet activism, misogynist governments and policies can and will change.