The works I examine in this thesis for Egyptian women’s narrative liberation strategies span from the nationalist-feminist works of the 1920s in Egypt throughout the twentieth century. I include works by Huda Shaarawi, Zainab al-Ghazali, Nawal El Saadawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, the post-1970s generation such as Ibtihal Salem, Alifa Rifaat and Salwa Bakr and finally, Ahdaf Soueif. The works for examination are organised chronologically and surround anti-colonial independence struggles in Egypt. I argue that writing corporeality for contemporary Egyptian women complicates the modern national space and histories. Qasim Amin (1863-1908) is deemed Egypt’s feminist founding father. His modernist reformist discourse is one of the attempts to create the interstitial space for Egyptian women’s liberation in Homi Bhabha’s concept. Amin’s ‘imitative’ Western gender equality discourse renders the heterosexual relationship complex within Egyptian nationalist heteronormative discourses. It kindles numerous debates about Islamic definitions of womanhood. Not only does this cause the tension between Islam and Egyptian feminism but it also makes Islamic culture open to changes and a plethora of discourses. This thesis aims at assessing narrative strategies through female bodies, which form an interstitial space in Egypt’s histories. Romantic love narratives in contemporary Egyptian women’s writing re-signify national space. Re-writing heterosexual relationships in El Saadawi’s (1931-) secular gender politics unsettles heterosexual constitution in Egyptian modern fiction, which disrupts a sense of a linear time in inventing national identities. Writing against Freudian masculine discursive power, El Saadawi distinguishes her feminist stance from Western feminist colonialist discursive hegemony. Her strategy renders an instantaneous frame of time, to use Bhabha’s concept. It targets the assumption of tradition as a nationalist discourse. Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996), through the creation of Layla in The Open Door, suggests that female sexuality can articulate historical perspectives of Egyptian modernity which has been dominated by male-centred views. The central space conferred on female sexuality in The Open Door reveals the symbolic representation of female sexuality in the male-led nationalist and nationalist-feminist debates. In Return of the Pharaoh, al-Ghazali (1917-2005) demonstrates her body to be able to endure tortures better than men; it involves a complication of the nationalist invention revolving around feminine ‘spirituality’, dependent on women’s roles of respectability. Her autobiographical writing is fluid between the personal and political and it becomes a vehicle for negotiating the national and female selves. Therefore, writing corporeality constitutes strategies for creating narrative time and space in Egypt as a nation. Also, Egyptian women’s writing techniques bring forth narratives of the lower class in Egyptian women’s movement. In the writing of the post-1970s generation, Ibtihal Salem’s (1949-) daily description of women’s lives disrupts the masculine national linear time. For Salem, sexual life expresses disillusionment toward Jamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist nationalism, lament for neo-colonialism and the fundamentalist revival. Alifa Rifaat’s (1930-1996) representation of female genital mutilation integrates suturing, i.e. healing, and infibulations. Rifaat’s writing renders nationalist discourse split by demonstrating this practice as a sense of belonging and a wound, and thus, she creates an alternative space for nationalist discourses. The short story genre is a strategy of conveying Egyptian women’s culturally mixed daily life. Salwa Bakr (1949-) devises female madness as a strategy to create new space within the domestic sphere. Her approach is based on revisiting Islam. She describes female psychological problems and carves out a representational possibility for Third World urban female subalterns. The zar ritual and psychoanalytic institutions introduce feminine circular time in Bakr’s works. Ahdaf Soueif (1950-) adopts the feminine romance genre to seek narrative possibility for female sexuality and for formulating space for historical subalterns. I suggest that women’s corporeality in Egyptian modern fiction articulates a series of performative ever-changing national identities.

This thesis focuses on three plays written by Samuel Beckett: Play, Not I and Footfalls. Corporeality is the central theme of these works, which also connects them to an important and celebrated source of study and inspiration for the dramatist, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The influence played by Dante's descriptions of the body, particularly in the cantica of Inferno, is visible in Beckett's works for the ways in which the organs of perception and expression are treated at both textual and theatrical level. In the three plays the activities of mouth, eyes, ears (and less relevantly, nose) constitute the narrative focus of the text, while the sensorial aspects derived by their presence on stage determine the kind of exchange at play between actors and spectators. Staging immobilized, constricted and barely visible characters who, narrating obscure, uncertain stories, obsessively try to make a sense of their existential and physical conditions, the author gives life to a metatheatrical language rooted on instability and doubt. After the introductory opening chapter, the second chapter looks at the language of Dante's Inferno and at its thematization of corporeality, introducing the continuities between the poem and Beckett's drama. The third chapter juxtaposes the characters and the uncertain...

This thesis contends that Nina Katchadourian's oeuvre can be read as subtly breaking down problematic assumptions about nature in Western thought. The second chapter draws on biosemiotics, which redefines life as semiosis, and trans-corporeality, which reconceptualizes the human body as inseparable from the environment, to show how Katchadourian's art routinely calls attention to non-human animal and material agencies. The third chapter demonstrates how Katchadourian's work implicitly reinforces Donna Haraway's idea of naturecultures, which contends that nature and culture are mutually implicated and inextricably intertwined, through a close reading of two of Katchadourian's pieces, Natural Crossdressing and Mended Spiderwebs #19 (Laundry Line). The final chapter compares the use of irony in two pieces that comment on Western animal classification--Chloe, by Katchadourian, and Scala Naturae, by Mark Dion--contending that Katchadourian's piece demonstrates what Bronislaw Szerszynski terms an "ironic ecology."

Fundamentado em modelos de análise produzidos pela semiótica greimasiana, este estudo da gestualidade sob o domínio teatral observa diferentes usos da expressão corporal, apresentados de maneira independente da manifestação verbal ou em simultaneidade. Nosso ponto de partida metodológico vem a ser a classificação das dimensões da comunicação gestual proposta por Algirdas Julien Greimas em \"Condições para uma semiótica do mundo natural (1970). Considerando as dimensões gestuais atributiva, dêitica, modal e mimética, contemplamos o plano do conteúdo organizado em níveis e patamares que descrevem e explicam os processos de significação, a partir do percurso gerativo do sentido. A fim de destacar a aplicabilidade das categorias, por meio das quais a gestualidade se define enquanto objeto semiótico, procedemos às análises de trechos selecionados de espetáculos teatrais, de acordo com os níveis discursivo, sêmio-narrativo e profundo ou, de maneira correlata, com o patamar missivo que, por sua vez, nos insere na tensividade, mote para os desenvolvimentos atuais da teoria. Nesse sentido, as espacialidades tensivas merecem ser evidenciadas, conforme a circulação das aberturas e dos fechamentos corporais é associada aos paradigmas da coerência e da consistência, necessários ao desvelamento da pessoa em seu espaço da significação. Nosso objeto de estudo se constitui em três espetáculos: Cravo, Lírio e Rosa (1996), Café com Queijo (1999) e Kelbilim, o cão da divindade (1998). Com essas montagens, o grupo Lume de Campinas desenvolve respectivamente três eixos no trabalho do ator: o corpo cômico, a mimese corpórea e a dança pessoal. / Based on the analytical model produced by Greimasian semiotics, this study of gestures in the theatrical domain looks at different uses of body language, presented independently of verbal manifestation or simultaneously. Our methodological starting point is the classification of the gestural communication dimensions proposed by Algirdas Julien Greimas in \"Condições para uma semiótica do mundo natural (1970). Taking into account the attributive, the deictic, the modal and the mimetic gestural dimensions, we contemplate the plan of content organized into levels and scales, which describe and explain the processes of meaning effects, from the generative path of meaning. In order to highlight the applicability of the categories, through which the gesture is defined as semiotic object, we proceed to the analysis of selected excerpts from theatrical performances, according to the discursive, semio-narrative and fundamental levels or, in a correlative way, to the missive level which, in its turn, inserts us in the tensivity, motto to the current developments of the theory. In this sense, the tensive spatialities deserve to be highlighted according to the circulation of body openings and closings, which is associated with the paradigms of coherence and consistency, necessary for the persons unveiling in its place of meaning production. Our study object is constituted by three plays: Cravo, Lírio e Rosa (1996), Café com Queijo (1999) and Kelbilim, o cão da divindade (1998). With them, Lume group from Campinas develops three axes in the actors work, respectively: the comic body, the bodily mimesis and the personal dance.

Fundamentado em modelos de análise produzidos pela semiótica greimasiana, este estudo da gestualidade sob o domínio teatral observa diferentes usos da expressão corporal, apresentados de maneira independente da manifestação verbal ou em simultaneidade. Nosso ponto de partida metodológico vem a ser a classificação das dimensões da comunicação gestual proposta por Algirdas Julien Greimas em \"Condições para uma semiótica do mundo natural (1970). Considerando as dimensões gestuais atributiva, dêitica, modal e mimética, contemplamos o plano do conteúdo organizado em níveis e patamares que descrevem e explicam os processos de significação, a partir do percurso gerativo do sentido. A fim de destacar a aplicabilidade das categorias, por meio das quais a gestualidade se define enquanto objeto semiótico, procedemos às análises de trechos selecionados de espetáculos teatrais, de acordo com os níveis discursivo, sêmio-narrativo e profundo ou, de maneira correlata, com o patamar missivo que, por sua vez, nos insere na tensividade, mote para os desenvolvimentos atuais da teoria. Nesse sentido, as espacialidades tensivas merecem ser evidenciadas, conforme a circulação das aberturas e dos fechamentos corporais é associada aos paradigmas da coerência e da consistência, necessários ao desvelamento da pessoa em seu espaço da significação. Nosso objeto de estudo se constitui em três espetáculos: Cravo, Lírio e Rosa (1996), Café com Queijo (1999) e Kelbilim, o cão da divindade (1998). Com essas montagens, o grupo Lume de Campinas desenvolve respectivamente três eixos no trabalho do ator: o corpo cômico, a mimese corpórea e a dança pessoal. / Based on the analytical model produced by Greimasian semiotics, this study of gestures in the theatrical domain looks at different uses of body language, presented independently of verbal manifestation or simultaneously. Our methodological starting point is the classification of the gestural communication dimensions proposed by Algirdas Julien Greimas in \"Condições para uma semiótica do mundo natural (1970). Taking into account the attributive, the deictic, the modal and the mimetic gestural dimensions, we contemplate the plan of content organized into levels and scales, which describe and explain the processes of meaning effects, from the generative path of meaning. In order to highlight the applicability of the categories, through which the gesture is defined as semiotic object, we proceed to the analysis of selected excerpts from theatrical performances, according to the discursive, semio-narrative and fundamental levels or, in a correlative way, to the missive level which, in its turn, inserts us in the tensivity, motto to the current developments of the theory. In this sense, the tensive spatialities deserve to be highlighted according to the circulation of body openings and closings, which is associated with the paradigms of coherence and consistency, necessary for the persons unveiling in its place of meaning production. Our study object is constituted by three plays: Cravo, Lírio e Rosa (1996), Café com Queijo (1999) and Kelbilim, o cão da divindade (1998). With them, Lume group from Campinas develops three axes in the actors work, respectively: the comic body, the bodily mimesis and the personal dance.

This thesis explores the roles of gender, sexuality, and the body in the works of six Mozambican authors: poets José Craveirinha (1922-2003) and Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002), and prose fiction writers Lília Momplé (1935-), Paulina Chiziane (1955-), Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (1955-), and Suleiman Cassamo (1962-). Building primarily on the critical precedents set by Hilary Owen, Phillip Rothwell, and Ana Margarida Martins, the study aims to make an original contribution to the field of Mozambican cultural studies by proposing that the gendered body has a unique capacity for reappropriation as a means of resistance to oppressive power mechanisms, thanks to its consistently central position in Portuguese imperial and Mozambican postindependence discourses of nationhood. In addition, the thesis seeks to illustrate the value of intergenerational, inter-gendered, and inter-aesthetic author comparison, and an eclectic ‘toolbox’ approach to critical theory, for the production of innovative new perspectives on Mozambican literary output. Following the contextual scene-setting laid out in the Introduction, Chapter 1 explores constructs of masculinity in a selection of poems from José Craveirinha’s first published collection, Xigubo (1964), and compares them with Paulina Chiziane’s third novel O Sétimo Juramento (2000), using Judith Butler’s theories of compulsory heterosexuality and gender subversion (1990 and 1993). While Craveirinha’s work is posited as a counternarrative to Portuguese imperial emasculation of the black male subject that ultimately reproduces colonial gender structures, Chiziane’s novel is shown to engage with strategies of parody and realism in order to challenge such reproductions. Chapter 2 makes use of the concept of ‘disidentification,’ developed in the late twentieth century by U.S. feminists and queer theorists of colour, to compare selected poems from Noémia de Sousa’s Sangue Negro (1948-51) with prose fiction by Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (1987 and 1990). Despite the authors’ aesthetic dissimilarities, their work is shown to share a successful commitment to the rejection of imposed femininities. Whereas de Sousa articulates this refusal via a ludic use of language, Khosa roots his narratives of disidentification in grotesque gendered corporealities. Chapter 3 compares novellas and short stories by Lília Momplé (1988, 1995, and 1997) and Suleiman Cassamo (1989 and 2000), examining the authors’ uses of the (dis)embodied states of suicidality, hunger, and ghostliness. Making use of Achille Mbembe’s (2001 and 2003) postcolonial reworkings of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics (1976), this final chapter seeks to understand the ways in which the authors exploit imperial and postindependence instrumentalisations of the Mozambican body as a means of reasserting subjectivity and selfhood in the face of massification. Throughout the study, emphasis is placed on the often concealed and latent nature of gendered resistance, which remains a persistent feature of Mozambican literary output despite the relative intransigence of sexual politics in the country. By centring the body in their aesthetically diverse works, writers from Mozambique demonstrate the value of gendered resistance not only as an end in itself, but also as a means of accessing wider subversive discourses and gestures.

According to the material feminist corpus, namely Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, material flows and interconnectivity between humans and their environment insists that the human body has never been atomistic, but rather a porous figure that continually interacts/intra-acts with its environment. The recent biotechnological boom allowing for the production of human-animal hybrids (chimeras) provides the kind of visualization of these interconnectivities that can help instigate a reconception of the human—as not human at all, but rather posthuman. This study looks at the presence of these human-animal hybrids in popular art media, specifically: the horror film, Splice (Dir. Natali 2009); the YA novel, Inhuman (Falls 2013); and the comic, Sweet Tooth (Lemire 2009-2013). This thesis argues that the human-animal hybrid figure exhibits utopian horror, or the use of horror to produce new, better, ways of conceptualizing human-animal relationships, ones that acknowledge our already posthuman plurality of self.

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2016-07-14T13:03:29Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Thaissa Machado Vasconcelos_Dissertação.pdf: 2097655 bytes, checksum: 2fb32f1f65c5f51e5e648e520c9f782c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-14T13:03:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Thaissa Machado Vasconcelos_Dissertação.pdf: 2097655 bytes, checksum: 2fb32f1f65c5f51e5e648e520c9f782c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-23 / CAPEs / Os investimentos científicos e políticos que lançam olhares sobre as mulheres trans apareceram no Brasil, de forma mais expressiva, a partir da década de 1990. Este interesse foi impulsionado por transformações culturais e políticas (nos movimentos sociais, na academia e no campo da gestão pública), que possibilitaram o reconhecimento de travestis e transexuais como sujeitos políticos, propondo novos desafios e a visibilidade/produção de demandas. Questões relacionadas ao corpo aparecem como relevantes nos estudos e pesquisas produzidas, apontando interfaces entre as transformações corporais e o bem estar, saúde, felicidade, direitos civis. Problematizamos nesta dissertação como mulheres trans produzem corporalidades femininas, compreendendo o corpo, por um lado, como construção histórica, que inclui (mas não se limita a) sua dimensão biológica e material e, por outro, como dispositivo que se (con)figura em/por jogos de poder. Tais jogos produzem corpos valorizados socialmente e, em contraponto, outros que, ao não se enquadrarem em padrões de sexo-corpo-gênero são relegados à zonas de abjeção. Utilizamos a ideia de “campo-tema” para pensar a metodologia deste trabalho. A pesquisa incluiu para a sua construção trânsitos entre eventos, encontros e a realização de entrevistas narrativas individuais com sete mulheres trans residentes da Região Metropolitana de Recife. As análises focalizam três eixos principais: 1) "corpos em trânsitos", no qual são exploradas questões sobre os percursos e transformações empreendidas por essas pessoas com (e em seus) corpos 2) "corpos em transes", no qual organizamos narrativas de afirmação e resistência frente aos binarismos e 3) "corpos em tranças", no qual exploramos questões que articulam (ou não) inteligibilidades aos corpos, lançando olhares sobre o binômio “corpo-nome” e a "estética de classe". Finalizamos (sem concluir) abordando as potencialidades, dificuldades e alcances deste trabalho, especialmente no que concerne à crítica à objetividade científica, apontando questões sobre interlocuções entre corporalidades com educação e religião. / The scientific and political investments that cast looks on the trans women appeared in Brazil, more significantly, from the nineties. This interest was driven by cultural and political transformations (in social movements, in academy and in the field of public administration) that enabled knowledge of transvestites and transsexuals as political subjects, proposing new challenges and visibility/production on demands. Questions regarding the body appear as relevant in studies and research produced, pointing interfaces between the body changes and the welfare, health, happiness, civil rights. We question in this dissertation how trans women produce female corporealities, the body comprising on the one side, as historical construction, including (but not limited to) its dimension biological and material, and other, like device that sets in/by power games. These games produce socially valued bodies and, in contrast, others who do not meet the standards of sex-body-gender are relegated to abjection zones. We use the idea of "theme-field" to think the methodology of this study. The research included for its construction transits between events, meetings and realization of interviews-narratives individual with seven residents trans women in the Metropolitan Region of Recife. The analyzes performed from interviews focuses on three main axis: 1) transit bodies: to thinking questions about the pathways and transformations undertaken in bodies; 2) bodies in trances: organizing narratives about the binary body against mind; and 3) bodies in braids, to reflect issues that add up to assign (or not) intelligibility to the bodies, launched here looks to the "body-name" to refer to issues of social and name "esthetic of class". The way of conclusions, we reflect about the difficulties and reaches of this work, thinking about scientific objectivity, and point questions about the potential dialogues between corporeality with education and religion.

(in English): This interdisciplinary thesis deals with the relation of oral tradition and somatic terms - words describing specific parts of the human body. The analysis is based on the ethnolinguistics, the theory of term's profile in particular, that deals with the question of which somatic terms serve as the inputs to semantic contexts and what is their dominant meaning. The thesis focuses on general interpretation of folk poetry, while aiming to those poetic methods and characteristics that are coherent to the main subject of the thesis. Next chapter describes ethno-linguistics and explains its methods and theory - the relation of language and culture, language stereotypes and mainly the theory of term's profile. The core of the thesis is the chapter dedicated to somatic terms: hands, eyes, blood, cheeks, mouth and face. Based on the collections Prostonárodní české písně a říkadla (National Czech songs and riddles) by K. J. Erben and Moravské národní písně (Moravian national songs) by F. Sušil, it determines the meaning profiles. In these it describes more closely in what meanings the terms mentioned above appear in folk songs.

Cinemas of Endurance begins by questioning the way in which critics and scholars have addressed art cinema over the last decade, specifically the films referred to as “slow cinema.” These films have garnered widespread attention since the start of the 21st century for how they deploy what many believe to be anachronistic and redundant formal techniques, often discussed in terms of nostalgia and pastiche. This dissertation argues that these films have been unfairly couched within this discourse that largely judges their validity based on their stylistic similarities to the art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Breaking from this direction, this project proposes we take these films and their aesthetic seriously, not for stubbornly refuting the prevailing formal trends in filmmaking, but for how it creates a critical optic that grants us a greater capacity to recognize some of the most prevailing social, political, and economic issues of the last decade. Further, by using stylistic techniques that can often register as out of place, or protracted, these films can help us to understand the way our physical, mental, and affective coordinates have shifted in this historical moment. Each chapter of this dissertation takes an exemplary film from this subset of art cinema and addresses how the aesthetic works against established modes of viewing to render visible modalities of life that often escape critical ire because they are expected. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of film and media studies, aesthetic theory, realism, materialism, accelerationism, cultural studies, continental philosophy, and political philosophy. The films and filmmakers analyzed include: The Limits of Control (2009), dir. Jim Jarmusch; Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), dir. Pedro Costa; Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier; and, 2046 (2004), dir. Wong Kar-wai.