Accompanying a solo gallery exhibition of painting and drawing, SelfSame explores the impact and influence of doubles, twins, and doppelgangers in visual art. Doubles, such as twins and doppelgangers, have an uncanny presence tied to loneliness, melancholy, and death. The presence of doubles in art not only questions the instability of identity and individuality, but calls into play personal reflection, and concepts of mortality. I draw on personal memories growing up as an identical twin to contextualize memory, narrative, and mythology as they are referenced within the artwork.

This essay is an analysis of the character María Josefa in the play 'The House of Bernarda Alba' (1936) by Federico García Lorca. It is hypothesized that the character of María Josefa can be considered a distorting mirror of the femininity presented in the play, and that through María Josefa this femininity is both revealed and problematized. The analysis adopts theories from the field of the (female) grotesque, using terminology both from Mikhail Bakhtin and Mary Russo. Throughout the analysis it is demonstrated how the character of María Josefa challenges the boundaries and norms which are dictated by Bernarda to control the women of the house. These conventions are challenged by María Josefa with the use of her loud speech, her dressed up appearance, and in her physical resistance. In this manner María Josefa is creating and embodying an alternate feminine view that is uncovered through her consistent provocation and by making herself into "a spectacle", a transboundary behaviour that is well interpreted within the theories of carnival, the grotesque body, and the spectacle of the female grotesque.

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

This thesis examines how women perform as leaders within male-dominated professions, including law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. In studying women's performances in terms of the corporeal and spectacular, the investigation seeks to understand how particular women enact leadership through their materiality within specific times and places. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's (1988) theorising of the processes of 'becoming', woman-as-leader is studied as an entity that passes from one incomplete and multiple assemblage to another, rather than as a singular 'developing' identity. The research is located within and between the paradoxes that complicate the performances of leadership for women. One key paradox serving as a rationale for this investigation is that, while 'equity' has become a truism of contemporary leadership, it is clear from formal reports (for example, the 2002 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) report), that many women continue to be marginalised and under-represented as leaders and senior managers. Moreover, those few women who have achieved success often acknowledge themselves as both legitimately and differently - and sometimes awkwardly, located as leaders in the everyday enactments of their work. The investigation of leadership within and between such paradoxes is problematic for a neo-liberal order of thinking, and even for socially critical theory, because of the assumptions that modernist literature makes about women's struggle for political legitimacy (ie, a narrative of progress, emancipation, and/or linear cumulative historical development). It is for this reason that the conceptual tools used in this study are drawn from post-feminist and post-structuralist theory. Such theorising refuses literal categories in favour of 'ironic categories' (Rorty, 1989) where two apparently oppositional ideas are understood to be both necessary and true. To explore women 'becoming' leaders (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988), 'woman-as-leader' is interrogated using Jean François Lyotard's (1984) notion of 'performativity,' Mary Russo's (1994) theorising of the embodied spectacle of 'the female grotesque', and Richard Rorty (1989) and Donna Haraway's (1991) insistence on partiality, doubt, and the importance of 'undoing' the fixity of modernist categories - in this instance, for women. One ironic category of importance to the study is Haraway's theorising of a 'cyborgian identity', a technological assemblage that is part-human/part-machine. This allows acknowledgement that women leaders inhabit realms beyond the boundaries imposed by the same/difference, human/machine, present/past, and real/virtue binaries. Using these tools, the performances of a number of women leaders is examined in an empirical study that focuses on a few individual women located in male-defined and male dominated settings. The empirical work has two key components. First, it provides a reading of three moments in time where a female individual dys-appears (Leder, 1990) in the public gaze, erupting as a unique spectacle in spaces that are both enabling and constraining. It foregrounds the unique complexities of three public performances in which women made a spectacle of themselves, while the analysis refuses to either celebrate the individuals involved, or to bemoan the conditions under which they did so. The analysis demonstrates the value of re-thinking leadership in terms of its complexity for the female as embodied public 'performer'. It then moves on to focus specifically on the (embodied, spectacular) tactics being deployed by women leaders in contemporary professional work. This analysis is located in the professions of law, business, politics, the military, and the academy. The data-as-evidence emerging from the analysis show women leaders to be both and neither enacting and troubling 'proper' (ie, traditional and/or known) leadership conventions. The analysis provides a reading of how, through certain tactical shifts, women work to 'de-territorialise' both the 'forms of content' and 'forms of expression' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) constituting leadership performances. It makes visible the tactical assemblages these women deploy, and the ways in which such tactics separate, combine, and compound the same/difference, equality/inequality, either/or binaries. The specific tactical manoeuvres for achieving legitimacy in the public gaze cluster around four identifiable ironic categories: (i) legitimate cross-dressing (ii) assertive defence (iii) proper blasphemy, and (iv) humanly-machinic. When taken together, the two components of the empirical study compel a re-theorising of 'woman-as-leader' as both insider and outsider, an entity engaging in the on-going work of diss-assembling and re-assembling a leaderly self. Woman is shown 'to be not one, not multiple, but multiplicities', simultaneously (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). This re-theorising provides a more nuanced account of women leaders working to maintain legitimacy, credibility, and propriety as leaders than mainstream theorising of leadership and management currently allows.

This study aims to examine the norm-breaking body in Sara Stridsbergs literary fantasy Drömfakulteten (2006) or The Faculty of Dreams (English translation, 2019) which explores Valerie Solanas’ life. Solanas is known for the feminist text SCUM Manifesto (1968, Swedish translation, 2003) and for shooting the artist Andy Warhol.  Solanas has a very distinct separation between body and mind that is apparent in the novel. She ignores her body and whishes not to be aware of it. She only ever thinks about her manifesto, which becomes her mind. To explore the norm-breaking body, my essay is based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque body. In this work, I also present different theories that have been inspired by the grotesque, for instance; the female grotesque and the gurlesque. While the grotesque focuses more on the body as a biological organism, the female grotesque and gurlesque focus more on how the female body and femininity is perceived in society and how they break the societal norms. The women are making a “spectacle of themselves”, in Mary Russo’s words. I want to apply these theories on the protagonist, Valerie Solanas, and analyze how the grotesque and norm-breaking body is portrayed in the novel. To further the exploration between body and mind I have the decided to analyze the meaning of the manifesto for Solanas, and also the narrator’s role in how her body is described to the reader.

My visual art practice explores the point at which a sense of bodily humour and revulsion may intersect in the world of the monstrous-feminine: the female grotesque, presented as my own obese (and post-obese) body. This exegesis is a written elucidation of my visual art practice as research. As an artist I create performative photographic images featuring taboo or otherwise 'inappropriate' subject matter, situations, materials and behaviours including bodily fluids, offal, internal organs and my own post-obese body. Through these modes of working, I establish and investigate the subjectivity of flesh: Why are we repulsed by the female grotesque? How can this flesh be used to subvert readings of the female body? My research is informed by those understandings of the female body, sexuality and difference described in the work of feminist theorists including Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Ruth Salvaggio and Elizabeth Grosz. I explore the work of influential artists such as Eleanor Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. In this context, I present my own visual art practice as a point from which the monstrous-feminine can be given voice as sentient, intelligent flesh.