This thesis seeks to explore, problematize and critique the violence of norms—normative violence, especially gender norms and heteronormativity-- in contemporary political life. It focuses on the interaction and engagement between norms and the body, and demonstrates that normative violence manifests itself in a twofold way: norms not only regulate, normalize and manage bodies that are already intelligible into reified forms, but also through their exclusionary logic produce unintelligible bodies that are unlivable. Situated within contemporary feminist and queer movements, this thesis bridges between aporias and problems emergent from them and critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This thesis identifies and indicates normative violence and erasures inherited in the popular rhetoric of the movements and diverse theoretical accounts of the body. Finally, the argument is made that feminist and queer readings of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty provide possibilities for undoing normative violence by resignifying norms temporally and performatively via collective action. / Graduate / janicefe@uvic.ca

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Sara R. Luly / In Das Leben der Hochgräfin von Rattenzuhausbeiuns, written by Bettina von Arnim and Gisela von Arnim Grimm, the material used to dress the bodies of young girls is unexpected and non-traditional. There are characters clothed in dresses made from the pages of books, bearskin coats, butterfly wings, onion root wigs, and many other bizarre materials. The main protagonist, Gritta, experiences, what Katheryn B. Stockton conceptualizes as “sideways growth,” or a non-linear, non-heteronormative childhood. The initial book-dress foreshadows the developmental possibilities for the protagonist Gritta. In this paper I argue that the text uses clothing made of non-traditional materials to construct queer girlhood for the female characters, and in doing so provides possible paths of “sideways growth.”

mother / me is a visual exploration and analysis of the biological and constructed maternal realms of artist Gray Swartzel’s life. Orienting and navigating childhood influences, Swartzel explains his desire to use Craigslist to seek out surrogates, or mother figures. Interrogating his queer body within the psychological space between himself and his biological and surrogate mothers, he challenges and interrogates conceptions of the nuclear family, critiquing heteronormative assumptions of family. Swartzel tasks himself as an agent to inspect family as a social construct within a larger Lacanian orientation, while seeking out the objet petit a, or cause of desire in such relationships. He details the influences of early twentieth century glamour photography and maternal theory and outlines how they manifest in performances of the self. mother / me is an experiment to investigate the queer relationship between camp and the twenty-first century dandy through the collaboration of a mother and a child to construct visual images.

Sex in public: public performances of gay sex examines how (re)presentations of gay sex in the theater challenge, complicate, and interrogate the concepts of public and private in contemporary culture. Specifically, Sex In public argues that (re)presentations of gay sex in the public forum of the theater forces audiences to confront how the concepts of public and private circumscribe, influence, and control the lives and bodies and queer white men. Employing the queer theoretical works of Michael Warner (Publics and counterpublics and The trouble with normal), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Epistemology of the closet) and Michel Foucault (The history of sexuality volume I) Sex In public specifically considers how (re)presentations of white gay male sexuality and sexual activity are particularly effective sites of analysis when confronting hetero-normative hegemonic divisions of public and private. Through in-depth performance and textual analyses of Tim Miller's seminal queer solo performance piece My queer body and Peter Carpenter's dance theater piece Bareback into the sunset, Sex in public illustrates how sex and sexuality performed in public, which provoke both the participants and a witnessing audience to feel shame, can construct community and build coalitions across social identity categories. In Sex in public, I claim that gay male performance in the forum of the public space of the theater is a "space of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative" (122) and which carries with it "the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself" (124). / text

The thesis elaborates upon a question which literary techniques Jeanette Winterson applies in her novels The Passion and Written on the Body to portray queer body. The thesis conceptualizes queer body as crystallizing in discontinuous relationships between the categories of sex, gender identity and compulsory heterosexuality within Butlerian heterosexual matrix. The possibility of discontinuous relationships between them - gender disorder - is realised in the act of beholding queer body. Conceptualization of queer body embedded within the Butlerian heterosexual matrix has not been elaborated upon in the full scope of Jeanette Winterson's work. Literary criticism deals with the body in Written on the Body, not, however, in the context of Butlerian model of heterosexual matrix. Articulation of queer body is realized by deconstructive techniques of Jeanette Winterson's writing. These are comprised in the motifs of mirroring in The Passion and palimpsest in Written on the Body. Ontological anxiety in The Passion brings queer body. Magic realism in the novel gives queer body magical skills which make gender disorder possible. Queer body is abject in the novel. In Written on the Body genderless narrator describes queer body as his/her body. It is an adorable and morbid body. The queer body in this novel...