"Uncanny Affects" argues, broadly, that the gothic novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries models a critical ethics of reading. By examining recurrent scenes of reading and interpretation in key gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816), and Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), I surmise that this critical ethics posits affect, or the experience of generalized emotion, as central to the act of interpretation. I contend that this gothic critical ethics influences the concurrent development of the discipline of literary criticism. By reading these key gothic novels and then tracking their broader influence on Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, I make a case for the significance of a gothic epistemology to the development of literary criticism in British and American universities from the nineteenth century onward. A focus on the gothic novel's critically inclined characters, including antiquarians and detectives, enables me to read gothic novels and other gothically-inflected writing for what they can tell us about the practice of interpretation, particularly as that practice becomes institutionalized and professionalized. Thus I track the gothic mode's tendency toward affective reading in relation to ideas of professionalization, which values critical detachment or disinterestedness in interpretation. As a result, interpretation in the gothic mode can seem too emotional or "creative" for a typically professional practice. Reading the gothic as such links it to modern discussions about interpretive practices such as close reading, paranoid and reparative reading, and surface reading. Perhaps more importantly, reading the gothic alongside these new discussions on critical ethics allows us to think through the place of affect and pleasure in an ethical critical practice. Ultimately, examining how gothic texts formulate a gothic mode or philosophy of reading demonstrates the real ubiquity this mode has achieved in the critical setting, a ubiquity that continues to shape and influence our conceptions of scholarly and critical reading even today. / text

My dissertation project explores the ways in which the banana exposes Americans’ interconnected imaginings of exotic food, gender, and race. Since the late nineteenth century, The United Fruit Company’s continuous supply of bananas to US retail markets has veiled the fruit’s production history, and the company’s marketing strategies and campaigns have turned the banana into an American staple food. By the time Josephine Baker and Carmen Miranda were using the banana as part of their stage and screen costumes between the 1920s and the 1940s, this imported fruit had come to represent foreignness, tropicality, and exoticism. Building upon foodways studies and affect studies, which trace how foodstuffs travel and embody memory and affect, I show how romantic imaginings of bananas have drawn attention away from the exploitative nature of a fruit trade that benefits from and reinforces the imbalanced power relationship between the US and Central America. In this project, I analyze the meaning interwoven into three forms of cultural production: banana cookbooks published by the United Fruit Company for middle-class American housewives; McKay’s dissent poetry; and the costumes and exotic transnational stage performances of Baker, Miranda, and also the United Fruit mascot, Miss Chiquita. / 2021-01-11

abstract: At the heart of this dissertation is a push for critical genealogy that intervenes into two major theoretical bodies of work in rhetoric and composition -- affect studies and queer latina rhetorics. Chapter one intervenes into emerging discourses on publics and affect studies from seamlessly recovering "the body" as an always-already Western body of rhetoric in the advent of this renewed interest in emotion, embodiment, and structures of affect as rhetorical concepts showing the long history of theorizing by queer mestizas. Chapter two focuses on one register of affect: anger, which articulated from the works of writers such as Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa offers a complex theory of agency for the subaltern subject. Chapter three links emotions like anger and melancholia to the corporeal rhetorics of skin and face, metaphors that are abundant in the queer mestiza and chicana writers under discussion, revealing the dramatic inner-workings of a the queer mestiza subject and the inter-subjective dynamics between the racialized and gendered performance of that body. By re-rooting affect in the queer colonized, yet resistant body, the link between the writing subject and colonial violence is made clear. Chapter four looks at the autoethnographic process of creating an affective archive in the form of queer racial melancholia, while Chapter five concludes by taking writing programs to task for their view of the writing archive, offering a radical new historiography by means of a queer chicana methodology. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's EDM-pop productions for "Chandelier." Treated as case studies, these songs and artists exemplify body-subject impressionability, political disaffection from historically dominant forms of whitened, hetero-patriarchal, liberalized ideology, and the performative possibilities of crossing and crowding subject-hood through persona crafting. Following these case studies, the project concludes by offering conceptual im/possibilities and pedagogical materials for rhetorically teaching composition as a sonic art. The fifth and final chapter conceptually intervenes in rhetoric and composition's pedagogical tendencies toward elevating and espousing notions of the minimally affected, individual, authorial, agentive rhetor/writer by developing a series of activities designed to give instructional supports for scaffolding student learning and composing specific to vocalic sound and the sorts of affects engendered in listening.

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This thesis focuses specifically on yoga clothing to explore the wardrobes of individuals who practice yoga within Northern Europe. This study explores yoga as an embodied practice connected to dress, uncovering the relationship between clothing and the body based on online ethnographic research. Wardrobe studies were carried out remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic producing a new approach to the field through remote wardrobe studies. The theoretical perspective of Erving Goffman analyses the participants and their wardrobes through the lens of dramaturgy. This perspective allows for the investigation into the behaviour of individuals practising online and in- person yoga classes compared to yoga at home. Viewing social life as a theatre performance to explore individual’s wardrobes and yoga clothing is a vital component of the study. The research demonstrates how individuals in a society constantly perform and how a wardrobe is an object that also performs. The findings suggest that yoga clothing, the body, and the wardrobe are intrinsically connected, providing rich information contributing to fashion studies.

Queer people of color in the United States are perpetually under siege politically, psychically, economically, physically, and affectively in the twenty-first century under capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Radical Self-Care, connects radical artivist performance in Austin, Texas with the theoretical genealogies of queer of color critique, women of color feminism, queer studies, and performance studies in order to propose a program for queer of color survival, sustainment and political revolt. Radical self-care is the holistic praxis that names the confluence of two distinct but inextricable processes developed in the first two chapters of this thesis. In chapter one, I take up the Generic Ensemble Company’s workshop production of What’s Goin’ On? as a case study in order to theorize the ‘performative of sustenance,’ a mechanism of queer worldmaking and queer world sustainment defined by its erotic and utopian affects. Chapter two, through a discussion of reproductive rights activism at the Texas state capitol, reformulates the concept of ‘parrhesia,’ the Socratic practice of ‘free speech’ taken up by Foucault in discussions of the care of the self, into a performance praxis of speaking truth to power with the potential to interrupt hegemonic systems of oppression. The final chapter explicates the ways in which these two mechanisms converge and operate as a dyad in the holistic process of radical self-care through an analysis of Fat: The Play, a devised work that premiered in Austin by and about fat queer femmes. Ultimately, Radical Self- Care aspires to offer queers of color a methodology of queer world sustainment that is also a program of political intervention, grounded in solidarity politics, into those systems of oppression that too often characterize queer of color existence as a project of survival rather than a project of flourishing. / text