This dissertation develops an existential-aesthetic theory of the subversive power and lure of limited and recessive forms of social intimacy that it calls queer indifference. By putting queer concerns with the normative politics of identity, visibility, and inter-relationality in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, it responds to expectations of the self-evident value of active bodies, personal recognition, and mutual experience for meaningful social political agency, and argues that recessive relations experienced and cultivated in the fortuitous spaces of “shared-separation” constitute a queerly-imagined rapport with alterity rather than being the source of social deprivation. Queer indifferences, I argue, effect their own ethical engagements beyond the self that are not reducible to readily legible connections to the social, while they may be continuous with such modes of connection. Drawing on a number of critical resources from queer theory, poststructuralist philosophy, film criticism, dream science, and the history of AIDS activism, this dissertation seeks to discover the generative impasses in perception, consciousness, and connection articulated by queer aesthetic media that make themselves seen and heard through the involutions of social legibility and recognition. In social postures such as solitude, techno-mediated encounters with cinematic worlds, and the creative automation of dreamlife, this dissertation locates aesthetic-ethical expressions of justice oriented towards the defiant persistence of queer life. Films such as Brokeback Mountain and Last Address, and the dream diaries of American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, access and communicate a certain inaccessible and incommunicable core of self and intimate expression that elicits relations with the other in appearances of isolation or remoteness, and that generates creative and imaginative possibilities for justice ahead of indeterminate futures. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation explores a series of limited and obscure relations marshalled under the concept of “indifference” to develop what I call a theory of queer indifference. By bringing concerns from queer theory about socially compulsive forms of inclusion and connection in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, this dissertation expands the political, ethical, and aesthetic potential of such ways of being to challenge existing relations of power. It argues that the dissident force of indifferent relations generates the queerly critical, imaginative, susceptible, and hospitable capacities inherent to doing justice. Experiences of solitude, film-viewing, and dreaming illustrate the social lure of indifferent relations as practices or embodiments that can be understood otherwise than as a source of deprivation. From the un-belonging spaces of solitude, to the film camera’s technological gaze, to the unwitting intelligence of dreamlife, this dissertation examines the “space of shared-separation” between self and other, viewer and camera, and waking and sleeping selves as a type of existence that produces queer relations to social order and that nurtures creative orientations to indeterminate futures. The films Brokeback Mountain and Last Address, and the dream diaries of American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, are the aesthetic core of this dissertation’s investigation of and experimentation with ways of being that are queerly at odds with the way things are.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/24800 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Rodness, Roshaya T |
| Contributors | Clark, David L., English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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