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My work explores scars through encapsulation, a desire to enclose and express the emotional scars of memories or physical scars of the body. Life’s experiences impact the living, leaving behind scars that we feel the need to understand. Through the mediums of metal and mixed-media photography, I utilize found and created imagery, as well as a triality of text in order to preserve and remember these scars.

Have You Ever Had Broken Heart? is a collection of essays that interrogate memory, loss, and grief through the intersection of personal narrative, films, the actress Frances Farmer, and woman saints and mystics from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries who were punished for daring to speak to G-d. The essays engage with autotheory and include a myriad of forms, such as segmented, one sentence, and hybrid works. The films discussed range from the philosophical, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), to Graeme Clifford's biopic, Frances (1982), to catechize the grief of the persona losing her mother and sister to a hit and run car wreck in June 2022. The persona traverses the realm of the mystics and saints, including Marguerite Porete, Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz, and Joan of Arc, examining their respective quests to experience the unseen and often silent divine, while questioning her longing for G-d, and simultaneously believing G-d cannot exist. Yet, within this confusion, she finds herself immersed in memories which carry the presence of her mother's love.

This dissertation explores verbal and visual representations of the abject body in Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (published 1940), Viaje a la luna (1929), El público (1930-1931), and his drawings from 1929-1930. Grounded in queer theory, transgender studies, and Blackness studies, I explore how Lorca’s images of somatic abjection challenge hegemonic ideas of gender, sexuality, and race in the depiction of queer and otherwise marginalized identities. The dissertation focuses on abjection in three major poems from Poeta en Nueva York, beginning with “Oda a Walt Whitman.” In Chapter 1, I identify an Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy between the figure of Whitman and the urban maricas, and explore how the abject effeminacy of the latter, and their excessively feminine performances, challenge the heterosexual reproductive order. Chapter 2 examines the abject fluids of vomit and blood in “Paisaje de la multitud que vomita” and “El Rey de Harlem.” I analyze the correlation between the mujer gorda’s physical size and her abject, Dionysian “vomiting multitude.” The second part of the chapter reads “El Rey de Harlem” in the light of Frantz Fanon’s racial phenomenology in order to explore Lorca’s representations of Blackness and masculinity. I argue that the primitivist motifs of blood, music, and nature associated here with erotic representations of the Black masculine body create an ambivalent poem that is at once empowering and exoticizing. Chapter 3 analyzes the uncompleted film scenario Viaje a la luna, which I contend portrays queer anxieties about gender and sexuality through the “nervous gestures” and exposed body of the protagonist. Discussion of the scenario leads to discussion of abjection in the drawing Muerte de Santa Rodegunda. I argue that in Lorca’s drawings of mutilated and plant-like bodies, we see a transformative vision of what a body can be, one that pushes at the boundaries of the human. Finally, in Chapter 4, I argue for a genderqueer reading of the transgressive play El público. Performance theory, queer theory of sadomasochism and anality, transgender theory, and explorations of X-ray technology in the twentieth century help me dissect what has been called Lorca’s “impossible play.”

This thesis examines the protagonists in Edna O’Brien’s In the Forest and House of Splendid Isolation and applies Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. In doing so, I attempt to give a richer understanding of O’Brien’s masculine and feminine characters and how their constructed identities are based on their cultural circumstances and positions in their societies. I use Kristeva’s theory of abjection to analyze the single women in these novels, Eily and Josie, who become metaphorical single mothers by the invasions of young men into their homes. Then, I apply Girard’s theory of the scapegoat to the young men, O’Kane and McGreevy, who eventually fulfill roles as sons. These theories give way to the fact that O’Brien’s characters are extremely complex and multifaceted. Furthermore, the theory of abjection and of the scapegoat can give fuller understanding to the real-world problems in In the Forest and House of Splendid Isolation and provide a solution.

With some recent, notable exceptions, scholarship on slum communities has focused on adverse living conditions, precarity, ill-heath and poverty. Working against this tendency, the thesis argues that the discursive positioning of slums as a failure of urban planning, fails to take slums on their own terms. Defined as the mere negative of planned urban settlement, the slum can only be positioned as a problem requiring a solution. Yet with a change of perspective, slums could themselves be seen as solutions to the diverse problems encountered by a multitude of citizens. Ethnographic fieldwork in Kollyanpur slum, Dhaka, Bangladesh, involving in-depth interviews and case studies into livelihood strategies of its residents, highlights the diverse opportunities that families have within the slum to form non-traditional economic and personal relations. While adversity was a feature of Kollyanpur, the changing power relations within and between households and the forms of social transformation produced by policy intervention were significant forces in their own right. The ‘diverse economy framework’ pioneered by J-K Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller’s ‘livelihood triad’ are deployed to theorise the opportunities associated with contemporary slum life, including cheap rent, proximity to work, sense of community and the transformed status of men and women within households and the community. While policy intervention into slum existence may produce measurable improvement in quality of life, slum dwellers remain no less vulnerable to eviction and other forms of precarity. Similarly, insofar as slums become part of the vision of urban planning, they are characteristically deemed to be abject sites redeemable only through urban development. From the point of view of planning authorities, then, the value of slums lies in their potential to be developed in settlements that would conform to the clean and sanitized, visually and spatially orderly, modern city ideal. Given the vulnerability that such forms of intervention and governance can produce, precarity is not simply a function of deprivation endemic to the slum but arises from the failure to recognize the role that slums can play in helping the poor to survive. Instead of finding ways to remove slums from cities, efforts to redress the adverse conditions of slums would do well to recognise the achievements of individuals and communities in slums to develop their capacities for health, social wellbeing and empowerment.

This paper traces the liminal hydro-geologies of the Underworld through the works of Homer, Virgil, and Dante with the intention of understanding the Western Underworld as an ecosemiosphere—a mythological place with a close reciprocity to a physical environment. I focus on the entrances and margins of the infernal realm, the places where myth and world merge most intensely. Located in the fluid interspace between the world and the Underworld, this project is fundamentally about permeable boundaries. Particularly because of the boundary-crossing nature of fluids, water guides this journey into the margins of the nether realm. The infernal realm is accessible through certain caves, sinkholes, lakes, and marshes, all of which are geological features generated by hidden groundwater systems. This paper approaches the liminal flows and orifices of the Underworld with the material ecocritical claim that “the ‘environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo 4). Drawing upon Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Bakhtin’s grotesque bodily image, I assert that the wet and cavernous margins of the Underworld are bodily fluids and orifices that lead into the inner abyss.

This thesis investigates the relationship between the body of the witch in popular culture and attitudes and assumptions about the female body. This study was conducted through textual analysis of several popular films and television shows about witches. This analysis is structured around three core archetypes of femininity: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, examining how each of the three archetypes preserve stereotypes about women and how witches can subvert or reinforce those stereotypes. Using the theory of abjection as a foundation, this thesis arguesthat witches have a strong relationship to abject femininity and can therefore expose the anxieties and fears about female bodies in a patriarchal culture. This is not a comprehensive study of witches in popular culture, and further research into the intersections of gender and race, sexuality, and ability is needed to form any definite conclusions. This study is merely an exploration of female archetypes and how the female body is conceived through the witch’s body in popular culture.

With my work I dissect human forms, allowing me to further understand the bodilysystems within myself. By intervening on the harmony of my body, I reveal intestinal, arterialand other biomorphic forms that exist in a state of tension and disorder. Bodies, flayed likefrogs in a high school science class, are my explorative responses to my own anxieties andfears about my body and health. Physically embodying sharp, tight, and sporadic pain, mywork exists between a measured, scientific inquiry and a chaotic, manic probe of the humananatomy.

Mad Girls: Charting Cultural Representations of Psychosocial Disability and Contemporary Hysteria(s) Mad Girls examines what I term a cast-off girl and posits what her relationship to the abject is. My conception is that the cast-off girl exceeds the boundaries of girlhood, embodying the perceived aspects of girlhood that are deemed inappropriate for public display. She points to that which is unable to be contained. I look at artifacts of pop-culture and performance made for and by girls. The girlhood depicted in these works comprises images of the eroticized, infantile, and still totally deadly Within girl-oriented pop-culture, I have identified and named two phenomena around which the performance of the mad girl is centered: girlsonas and skin speaking. The girlsona is a girled archetype and by skin speaking I am referring to how girls’ bodies are often foregrounded as proof of some internal complication. To explore the performance of the Mad Girl, I analyze narratives of self-harm that are disseminated by girls through social media and other online platforms as a form of group identification; representations of borderline personality disorder in the films Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation, Merri Lisa Johnson’s performative writing in her memoir Girl In Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, and ultimately the musical Borderline, as an example of what can go awry when psychiatrically disabled individuals are not foregrounded in attempts to represent their narratives in performance; and the performative personas of musicians Emilie Autumn and Melanie Martinez which are both founded in representations of girlhood-after-trauma exposed through neo-Victorian themes and adolescent drag. Ultimately this dissertation is a call to reexamine the cultural products of the cast-off girl in a our age of quickly changing performance venues.

This dissertation explores how the concepts of the ordinary, of failure, and of abjection shape the works of three French women writers across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I engage with theories of the quotidian, queer and affect theory, feminist literary criticism and work on life-writing, and sexuality studies. Each of the writers under investigation here demands a reorientation to their texts from readers, as styles and subject matter shift to challenge patriarchal discourse.I focus on the last two original works of Colette (1873-1954), which experiment with her short forms and observational style. I connect her insistence on material objects to the everyday existence and corporeal realities of an aging writer. I then turn to Violette Leduc (1907-1972), a little-known protégée of Simone de Beauvoir whose writings on love and sex between women were censored by her publishers. Finally, I connect Colette’s fashioning of feminine identity to that which is systematically dismantled by Virginie Despentes. Despentes (1965- ), a punk rocker and lesbian activist, tests the limits between cinema and pornography in her films and between feminist theory, philosophy, autobiography, and noir fiction in her writing. She portrays a postcolonial, multiracial, and fractured contemporary French society in her sweeping literary frescoes.This study prioritizes descriptions of embodied experience and challenges representations of female desires and sexualities. It also considers failure as a strategy for critiquing systems of power that invalidate, silence, and objectify women and women’s writing. After discussing the difficulties in expressing written accounts of the ordinary and the abject, I explore potential ruptures and continuities for Cixous’s écriture féminine as well as the category of women’s writing.

The chapters in this thesis discuss some works of the American author Willa Cather. The first chapter represents a reading of "abjection" in My Antonia. The second chapters outlines the power practices among characters in Sapphire and the Slave Girl. The last chapter focuses on the development of the Cather's authorship career.

This thesis largely relies on comparative and textual analyses of/between John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, with specific attention paid to Milton’s Satan and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in order to simultaneously argue for the poem’s influence on Lolita and to define through example a new satanic archetype or lens through which to read works following Paradise Lost’s publication.

This thesis investigates the ways in which the body and metaphor are involved in the expression of experiences which are often difficult to articulate and with which, according to Virginia Woolf, literature has largely failed to engage. Female bodily experience, for instance, has been suppressed as a result of censorship by society and by the self. The aim of this thesis is to explore how certain metaphors are able to express powerful bodily experiences which have often remained unwritten and which literal language cannot accurately portray. To do this, the thesis presents a critical analysis of two of Woolf’s novels alongside an original collection of poetry. Woolf’s middle fiction departs from the conventions of the realist novel, and in Mrs Dalloway (1925) this experimentation takes the form of free indirect discourse in conjunction with highly figurative language. Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I examine the ways in which Mrs Dalloway deploys metaphors about the body to express the dissolution of boundaries between the corporeal and consciousness, and so to express experiences that destabilise character subjectivity. In The Waves (1931), Woolf pushes the use of metaphor even further, such that the demarcation of the corporeal and consciousness is even more tenuous. In reading The Waves I use José Gil’s theory of force to conceptualise metaphors that bring the body into the expression of powerful experience, often bodily but not always. I conclude that the repetition of these metaphors generates a metaphoric environment that expresses a complex combination of bodily and emotional experiences which cannot be accurately articulated through literal language. The collection of poetry provides a different method of exploring the idea of a metaphoric environment, of how the body can be figured in and by such an environment, and of how it can be written. This creative work builds on the critical chapters to experiment with how the body—physical, abstract, human and non-human—can be written such that bodily and emotional experiences that are difficult to articulate can be expressed. The poetry collection, called Maps and Black-feathered Stones, comprises two parts: ‘The Laughter and the Crow’, published in 2017 by Cordite as A Salivating Monstrous Plant, and ‘Ashes and Fire in the House of Portraits.’

“It becomes oppressive when important events, important changes, can’t break through to the surface of life and are continually unable to fulfill themselves. The still invisible and uncrystallized fact that is to be realized in the future is already growing, swelling, beginning to push through into a preexisting reality, which, however, doesn’t want to yield. It gets tighter and tighter, and therefore more and more suffocating. The lack of air increases our feeling of helplessness. We watch the gathering of the clouds and wait for a voice to speak from them, reading us the inexorable verdict of fate.” -Ryszard Kapúscínski Zero Street is a highly subjective visual portrait of Lincoln’s central artery, with the title borrowed from a poem by Allen Ginsberg.Taking my immediate surroundings as a starting point, my thesis examines the physical reality yet suggests states of awareness beyond it. The subject encompasses the ways things become timeworn through use or neglect and the people who inhabit and reflect such worn spaces. In the popular imagination Nebraska stands in for someplace far away and empty. Of course it is far from empty, physically, culturally or historically. At the same time the idea of emptiness as a subject is relevant to me. The sky has an overwhelming presence here: objects placed against it become monumental and we are dwarfed by the scale of the sky and the plains. By imposing the rigidly structured grids of utility and commerce on our landscape it could be that we have filled our spaces with meaninglessness. Emptiness enters my work in various ways, in a direct yet vacant gaze, in views of uncared-for spaces, or in the dull browns and tans of winter. I think of myself a naturalist of sorts, looking for meaning in small things. My working method is to observe, gather and present. My sketchbooks and bookworks are filled with everyday details, collected impressions and unexpected elements. With a broad filter I am willing to accept most anything as potential subject matter. I look at the built environment and the passing of innumerable faces as an assembly of artifacts, and attempt to respond honestly with artifacts of my own making. Printmaking is important to me because of its particular graphic qualities. The decisions I make along the path from idea to matrix to print elevate the final image, while the distancing nature of printed marks ensures that my hand is present but once removed, lending the work a sense of translation. I consider the interaction of color, density, opacity and line weight in seeking to form a unified whole. I find the final print becomes a distillation of many elements, in which I attempt to balance texture and simplicity, sequence and meaning, efficiency and time. For me the ongoing challenge of the medium is to achieve spontaneity within a system. Layering has been particularly important in this work as it allows me to introduce subtleties of pattern and color. A halftone pattern can highlight or obscure, when overlaid it can appear to buzz or glow, and it can stand alone to form its own specific atmosphere, mediated by the look of commercial production. To me layering suggests embedded history, a tension between the surface and what lies beneath. Within the overwhelming presence of the commonplace in this Zero place, the images resonate for me on many levels. Parallel lines of thought: I know of the observation of small things; I know of the discovery that one image can stand in for a larger concept; I sense that perhaps I’m not talking about Lincoln at all but instead presenting other issues entirely. Another thought is more personal, relating to my identification with place and sense of belonging. Having grown up next to one of the largest industrial districts on the west coast, I have always found beauty in dilapidation, “those dead neighborhoods shut away and buried in a corner of a busy and lively town.” My intention in Zero Street is to orchestrate a conversation across images. My work interrogates the circumstances of life in a city that has much in common with other American cities. I question how people, objects, and phenomena can become invisible to us. We shape the world and it in turn shapes how we move through it; rarely, we experience the contingent and constructed quality of our surroundings and see beyond the nothingness of zero. Advisor: Karen Kunc Copyright © Keith Graham 2016

This dissertation traces the shifts in queer figures of life and death over the past three and a half decades in the United States, with particular attention to the dynamics of racialization in these transformations. It places the passage of the HIV ban on immigration (and its subsequent removal) as well as the intensification of post 9/11 national security practices in the context of neoliberal biopolitics. The dissertation argues that the formation of racialized abject figures, such as that of the transgender detainee and the immigrant female living with AIDS, predicates the shift within gay white men from being figures of death into figures of life.This dissertation assembles an unruly archive of queer politics in the US in order to delineate the ways in which certain kinds of bodies come to be marked as queer subjects of life while many others are relegated to death. I trace two crucial moments within which neoliberal biopolitics intensifies its grip over queer lives in the US. First, I situate the emergence of the AIDS epidemic as a kind of social trauma that operates as a form of melancholia within gay white men dealing with AIDS. The loss of lovers as well as sexual cultures is internalized within the ego formation of gay white men. I situate these as psychic processes through which white gay white men are disciplined as responsible subjects deserving of life within the gates of the nation-state. This respectable good life is signified through inclusion within institutions such as marriage and the US army.Contrary to the shifts within white gay men from figures of death into figures of life, the figure of the immigrant living with AIDS emerges as an absolute limit to life within the US. The passage of the HIV ban on immigration operates as a technology of regulation and institutes a certain kind of biopolitical racism. Secondly, then, the dissertation traces the figure of the transgender detainee as a figure of death in relation with the intensification of post 9/11 national security procedures. I situate the attacks on the Twin Towers as a form of national trauma that is played out through the securitization of space. The passage of the USAPATRIOT Act and the REAL ID Act attempts to securitize the US borders as well as everyday spaces. Heightened detention and deportation of immigrants is a regular feature of the national security state. Arguing that the sex/gender binary is fundamental to the political order of the national security state, I show how the immigrant female living with AIDS and the transgender detainee come to represent abject figures precariously standing at the gates of the nation state. Following theorists of trauma and abjection, I conclude with an examination of how the attempts made by the immigrant female living with AIDS and the transgender detainee to narrate their bodily trauma hold potentials for launching coalitional queer activism that can cut through projects of nationalistic neoliberal subject making.

Rapid and ongoing developments in the field of computer-generated imagery (CGI) have reached a point where the synthetic image strives to become almost indistinguishable from the real. This desire for realism in the filmic image has seen CGI thrive in mainstream popular culture: from Hollywood cinema through to advertising. Large visual effects (VFX) and CGI animation companies are often at the vanguard of research and development in this area, driving CGI development toward the production of realism. This over-investment in ‘realistic’ imaging has all but erased the potential for broad experimentation in CGI techniques and aesthetics, and has seen the emergence of an aesthetic realism manifested by the eradication of error and materiality, wherein all traces of the process of production are excised from the image. This research project explores the technical and aesthetic effects of the erasure of error in contemporary CGI and how this affects the capacity of CGI to approach the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva. Focusing on the ‘trace’ in motion capture and its relationship to the power of the close-up image in film and photographic contexts, I look at how digital artefacts can exist as a critical part of a process of experimentation in CGI. These ‘errors’ take the form of unprocessed motion capture data, unfiltered, compression image artefacts and low-sample rate renders, as well as reduced polygonal modelling techniques. Exploring the production of images that embrace these ‘errors’ affords the possibility to introduce ‘fallibility’ and embodied artefacts into the system of image production, and reveal both a material trace of the technology as well as the artist. This research identifies technical and aesthetic processes that introduce a greater degree of haptic visuality into CGI images, as a means of approaching abjection. These experiments in motion capture techniques, code transformations, and close-up lenticular imagery, introduce error and materiality into CGI in order to interrogate the material field and affective (or abjective) power of the CGI close-up. Through these practical experiments, I argue that the viewer is afforded greater access to haptic visuality: a tactile experience of images which is crucial to experiencing the abject, and which moves beyond mainstream CGI's use of grotesque imagery. Further, these experiments reveal the possibilities for the creation of new and engaging CGI aesthetic forms that embrace the digital artefact, and which re-insert the abject body and trace into the digital realm.

In three movements, this paper analyzes the way in which apparatuses of capture and control govern our lives. In the first movement, environmental injustice is used to illustrate how apparatuses create, maintain, and destroy spaces and bodies, and allow or prevent certain bodies to speak. In the second movement, anecdotal theory is presented as a way in which bodies typically barred from modes of discourse can find a temporary platform from which to speak. In the third movement, the paper dissolves into poetics upon realization of its own containment within the apparatus of academia, and points towards a way in which all apparatuses could be overcome. Includes documentation from the art exhibition: Wastelands, Revolutions, Failures.

This project analyzes teenage pregnancy prevention media campaigns sponsored by Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 2006-2015. Constructing teenage pregnancy as a serious social problem, the Milwaukee campaigns use raced, classed, heteronormative, violent rhetoric to abject teenage mothers and instruct the public in how to feel about them and their offspring: disgusted and angry. I argue that teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns constitute a form of biopower, which influences all teenage women to construct their sexual subjectivity and behavior in relation to what I call “the straight path” and the “path to happiness.” I demonstrate that teenage mothers are positioned as queer in their relation to power, through their engagement in sexual activity deemed unnatural, useless, and dangerous to society, and through their reproduction, which is decoupled from reproductive futurity and is positioned as (re)producing failed citizen subjects.

This project examines the effects of the homeless body and the threat of homelessness on constructing a national imaginary that relies on the trope of locatability for recognition as a citizen-subject. The thesis argues that homelessness, the oft-figured specter of public space, functions as bodies that are “pushed out” as citizen-subjects due to their inability maintain both discursive and material location. I argue that figures of “home” rely on the ever-present threat of dislocation to maintain a privileged position as the location of the consuming citizen-subject. That is, the presence of the dislocated homeless body haunts the discursive and material construction of home and its inhabitants. Homeless then becomes the uncanny inverse of home, functioning as an abjection that reifies home “place” as an arbiter of recognition in a neoliberal national imaginary. The chapters proceed to examine what some consider homeless “homes,” focusing on the reduction of the homeless condition to a place of inhabitance, or the lack thereof. This attempt to locate the homeless body becomes a symptom of the desire for recognition as a placed body. The thesis ends on a note of political possibility, figuring the uncanny as a rupture that evacuates language of signification and opens up space for a form of recognition without an over-determined identity.

The manifestation of a public "gay identity" at Stonewall has made possible the emergence of an openly gay literary tradition that continues to the present day. When viewed collectively, contemporary gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered writers exhibit extraordinary range in their choices of subject matter, form, and theme, yet critics have tended to categorize gay domestic narratives, particularly those written by "white," "middle-class" men, as participating in a cultural project that promotes normativity through its representation of gay subjects as "assimilative" and "sexless." In other words, these critics regard authors who concern themselves with the homespace and with familial relationality as participating in a cultural project that makes "gay identity" palatable for straight readers, thereby rendering a more transgressive "queer" subjecthood virtually invisible. By examining the literary blueprints for queer homespaces that have been drawn up by several contemporary American male writers, this dissertation project aims to counter the assumption that a privileging of "gay" homelife necessarily results in an assimilative loss of queer-ness and sociopolitical potential. In reading Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964), Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir (1983), Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man (1994), and Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World (1990) through the lenses of architectural studies, queer and feminist theories, poststructuralism, and affect theory, I seek to recover the queer homespace as an unsettled and disruptive site in which heteronormativity is challenged and the obscured connections among domestic practice, social oppression, and queer resistance are revealed. In so doing, I seek to expand notions of both queer literary identities and the material sites from which queer resistance has been and might be waged.

Abstract: This paper explores the theatrical staging of genocide using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to highlight the impossibility of understanding and fully comprehending genocide. Traditional staging methods typically use a cohesive narrative structure which limits and edits the event to provide a stable conclusion. The debate of representing genocide does not centre solely on why one tries to stage these events but has shifted to emphasize how and if these events can be represented. Many theatre groups recognize the benefits of non-traditional staging methods. Groupov’s Rwanda 94 (2000) highlights the inability of the abject to be performed and the impossibility of containing genocide by the length of the production as well as the integration of several art forms. In the exploration of visuality in Hotel Modern’s Kamp (2005) the challenges of representing pain and violence are foregrounded. The ability to view the Holocaust is impacted by the intersection between film and the use of small puppets.

“Hunting and Writing the Whale” investigates the persistent resurfacing of the maternal body in Moby-Dick and examines how the masculine identities of the characters Ishmael and Ahab are constructed in response to their anxieties toward the maternal. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva and contemporary theory of womb envy, I argue that Ishmael and Ahab each struggle with defining and maintaining their identities in the presence of a maternal body that both attracts and repulses. Whereas Ahab’s dogged attempt to maintain a fixed identity results in annihilation, Ishmael embraces a more fluid existence informed by a maternal semiotic that he endeavors to manage through the project of writing.

In Orientalism, Edward Said identified how the Westerner “spoke for” and represented the silent Orient. Today with the burgeoning call-center business with India, it seems that the West now wants the Orient to speak for it. But is the voice that Western business requires in India a truly Indian voice? Or is it a manipulation which is a new form of the silencing of the Indian voice? This dissertation identifies how several Postcolonial Indian writers challenge the silence of Orientalism and the power issues of the West through various “speaking voices” of narratives representative of Indian life. Using Julie Kristeva’s abjection theory as a lens, this dissertation reveals Arundhati Roy as “speaking abjection” in The God of Small Things. Even Roy’s novelistic setting suffers abjection through neocolonialism. Salman Rushdie’s narrative method of magic realism allows “speaking trauma” as his character Saleem in Midnight’s Children suffers the traumas of Partition and Emergency as an allegorical representation of India. Using magic realism Saleem is able to speak the unspeakable. Other Indian voices, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and Rohinton Mistry “speak history” as their novels carry the weight of conveying an often-absent official history of Partition and the Emergency, history verified by Partition surviror interviews. In Such a Long Journey, Mistry uses an anthrozoological theme in portraying issues of power over innocence. Recognizing the choices and negotiations of immigrant life through the coining of the word (dis)assimilation, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings are analyzed in terms of a “speaking voice” of (dis)assimilation for Indian immigrants in the United States, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “speaks (dis)assimilation” as a voice of multiple ethnicites negotiating immigrant life in the United Kingdom. Together these various “speaking voices” show the power of Indian writers in challenging the silence of Orientalism through narrative.

This dissertation traces the figure of the sexual abject in modern Tamil literature produced between the mid nineteen sixties and the first decade of the twenty first century. Drawing primarily from psychoanalytic scholarship and Western literary criticism, I look at abjection as a structural form of marginality that threatens and reconfigures meaning and subjectivity, thus enabling the possibility of self-remaking. I draw attention to the consistent textual equation between femininity and abjection and note a shift in the representation of the sexual abject in Tamil literature produced from the nineteen sixties onwards that is multiply marginalized along axes of sexuality, caste and religion. For the sexual abject of this period, embracing abjection, I suggest, is the only available means of exercising any agency even at the risk of reinforcing the structural constraints that constitute and limit such agency. I focus on the abject body that now marked low caste and poor, becomes a strategic site of resistance against sexual violence and exploitation.

Camp is a style of art that is closely tied in with Queer Theory; both topics are of great importance in understanding John Waters‟ contribution to both the art world and the gay community. His work sexualizes the unsavory, glorifies the abject, yet it is done in such a manner that laughter ensues. This is a product of camp art, which explained by Susan Sontag in her article “Notes on Camp”, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful and anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex to „the serious.‟ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”1 I‟m interested in using the Camp theme along with Julia Kristeva‟s work with the abject and Queer Theory to delve deeper into the artistic style of John Waters. Much like the content of his films, his artworks play into that frivolous side of the serious, he accentuates the frivolous by his inclusion of the abject finding something artistic and beautiful in the least desirable of locales.John Waters is best known for his accomplishments as a filmmaker and director in films that just push the envelope far enough to upset many people‟s idea of normality by likening the absurd to the normal, treating the normal in turn as Other. He accomplishes this through the medium of Camp, which he continued to utilize in his art making and collecting. Following in the footsteps of Andy Warhol, he applies similar tactics in finding desirability in persons and items not readily associated with beauty per se. The photographic still; 12 Assholes and a Dirty Foot, along with his films Pink Flamingos and Pecker showcase his interests while the city of Baltimore provides the backdrop for his work and remains the thread that ties his work together.

Within society, a variety of attitudes concerning urbanized spaces exists. Some people adore cities while others detest them. More specifically, there is often a fear of those that dwell in the city. These perceptions are based on difference of class, race, sexuality, or deviance from the constructed social norm. The portrayal of cities in film, both negatively and positively, is a well-established trend. This thesis offers insight into perceptions of the city, its spaces and culture, by bringing together processes of othering,abjection, socio-spatial exclusion, and territoriality to try to explain fear andapprehension of urban space. Cinematic film is a valuable source of geographicknowledge, and John Waters’ work speaks to urban spaces and inhabitants deemedundesirable by the hegemonic groups in society. This thesis elucidates his production of the city; his films depict his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland as a refuge of delinquents, miscreants, and perverts.

In the past milk has represented white, hegemonic society in the US through its association with middle-American wholesomeness and its red-checked table cloth. The recent shift from the good-guy-drinks-milk motif of films of the past to the villains-drinks-milk motif in films of modernity rejects the ideal society that milk represents through grotesque representations of its consumption and its consumers. In such recent US media as The Strain (2009), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-2009), Mr. Brooks (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and The Professional (1994) milk's representation perverts its myth indicating a souring of society-as-we-know-it. As milk turns “bad” in these films, whiteness and those norms and values associated with whiteness lose their quality of invisibility and can be inspected accordingly. The following pages ultimately investigate representations of milk in the media and suggest that recent changes in those representations subvert the hegemonic image of the virtuous white body, his God-given beverage, and the issues often overlaid with race such as class, normality, cleanliness and morality.

Abstract: This thesis examines representations of cancer in contemporary art, with a particular focus on unruly, un-idealized bodies at risk. In bringing together the discourses of art history and medicine, its aim is to engage conventions of visualizing cancer, and more importantly, to highlight the ways in which contemporary artists challenge dominant representations, re-imagining the cancerous body from an embodied perspective. Chapter One provides a context for images of cancer by examining an artistic account of how medicine constructs the body against an artist’s representation of her own cancerous body. Theorizing cancer as an abject condition, Chapter Two examines representational strategies for visualizing cancer that trouble distinctions between inside/outside, self/other, subject/object, healthy/diseased. Building on themes of gender, health, and identity, Chapter Three considers representations of chemotherapy-induced hair loss and baldness as the most visible signs of cancer, but highly unstable and performative ones that call the representational status of the disease into question.

This thesis uses the theory of abjection to understand differentiations in non-heterosexual identity performances in two distinct spaces - the 2005 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (SGLMG) parade and its associated press coverage, and latrinalia (graffiti found inside public toilets). At the same time, this thesis also presents evidence for a new concept of neo-normativity, where the stereotypical is normalised, both internally and externally, and actively reproduced. Neo-normativity, in turn, succeeds in explaining the many abjected relationships that between non-heterosexual communities and the stereotypical and quintessentialised performances. At the 2005 SGLMG parade such quintessentialised (or neo-normalised) performances were treated with both contempt - for being stereotypical and narrowly representative of the very diversity of non-heterosexual communities - as well as a tool for attracting commercial sponsorships which have growingly become an integral part to the continued survival of the annual parade. On a different level, another expression of abject was also revealed when these neo-normalised performances are persistently criticised by academics, news reporting and official photography for being stereotypical and non-representative which in itself are both a recognition as well as an ejection of the non-normative aspects of non-heterosexualities. Such an expression of abject was also evident in latrinalia found in several public toilet facilities throughout Greater Sydney were the interplay of desire and ejection were played out in a more covert manner, all the while highlighting the marginality of non-heterosexualities in these presumably heteronormative spaces. This application of abject theory emphasises neo-normative performances as permanently peripheral, a marginality of which makes these performances (and identities) intrinsically Queer.

This research considers the performance of situated subjectivity where the state and the individual vie for dominion over the drives that construct the body as what one has (the body as object), as what one is (the body as subject), and as what one becomes (the absent body). To turn power into pain, the State prospects the body of the subject to anchor its power through abjection. In so doing, it compels that body to channel the abject as a power to be wielded as a weapon of the weak, thus forcing into view the true interior of the State. Sections I and II position a discourse of trauma in Singapore using a parenthetical framework that is constructed by and mediated through the criminalized and punishable bodies of two young Asian males. The first discusses the carefully constructed ob-scene (off-stage) nature of the obscene (abhorrent) execution of convicted drug trafficker Van Nguyen in 2005 (the body as object); the second examines its inverse – the public spectacle of creative ‘death’ imposed upon artist Josef Ng (the body as subject) through government condemnation and expulsion for an alleged obscene (immoral) performance at 5th Passage in 1994. To do this, the thesis engages with the enforced interchangeable processes of disembodiment (for the display of symbolic violence) and embodiment (for the exertion of physical violence). Comparisons are also made of the way the State demonstrates its preparedness to turn the display of power into a process of exacting the ultimate pain from the punishable body. This is perpetrated on the one hand via a spectacle of invisibility that keeps the mandatory death penalty a secretive process, and on the other, its inverse, the publicly staged media spectacle of persecuting performance artist/s and 5th Passage. The events that follow led to the defacto banning of performance art and 5th Passage’s demise in 1994, ending my role as its artistic director. By relocating the performance of death from the high courts and offices of Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry (the site of symbolic violence) and Changi Prison (site of physical violence) into plain sight in the Australian media, the press is discussed as an instrumental force in deploying a penal counter-aesthetic to pierce through Singapore’s veil of secrecy surrounding its executions. The thesis demonstrates how this engendered a ‘seeing through’ that galvanized acts of intersubjectivity and the performance of social witnessing in Australia as an attempt to save Van Nguyen from the gallows. The institutional censorship of an artwork about the execution in 2005 is discussed to show how signifying practices such as visual art continued to agitate the state’s performance to construct itself as a “global city for arts and culture” on one hand while crushing artistic subjectivity when it is perceived as dissent on the other. This glimpse into the fragility of the Singapore nation’s divergent desires, where one performance portrays the disintegration of another, recalled the originary cultural rupture at 5th Passage in 1994 when artists engaged in performance were sensationalized in the Singapore media as social deviants. As an extension of state apparatus, the media is shown to repress artistic subjectivity through its creation of a controversy that led to the illegitimization of scriptless performance art, thus producing a distinctively Singaporean cultural artefact – the absent body. Out of the personal and social trauma framed by this confrontation with the state, Section III presents a body of visual work that I have since produced in the period marked by these two events (between 1994 to 2008) as a reply to the state. From this place of banishment, the thesis traces its evolvement into the body machine (Rich Manoeuvre series) as part of a practice that sees it for what it is within the paternal order, to locate the points where fragility occur.

ABSTRACT My work places emphasis on the anxiety and allure felt at the possibility of ingesting an object belonging to or displaced from the body through the language of abstract art. It links the fears and fascinations felt in situations of perceived abnormality and bodily aggression, to the objectification, or conversely abjection, of objects through images. I investigate a collapse in division between what the perceived identity of a thing or person is, and what it is not. Each painting rejects an ideal of beauty as portrayed through stability, clarity, and compartmentalization, and embraces beauty as the interconnectedness of opposing forces, specifically in the relationship between repulsion and allure. The contemporary language of consumer culture is reflected in this body of work by the way time, visual information, and sensory stimulators are overlapped, manipulated, and restructured. The viewer is sucked into the action of the space, the physicality of the paint, and visceral allusions, and upon entering the painting is overwhelmed by information shifting and churning. Without a distinction between elements of the painting to grasp at, the experience itself becomes everything.

"Fascinated Victims:" Aspects of Abjection in the Films of David Cronenberg" traces the intersections between Julia Kristeva's theory of the abjection and the films of David Cronenberg. While this pairing has been the center of critical attention for some time, remarkably little attention has been paid to the specifically cinematic production and presentation of abjection in Cronenberg's work. "Fascinated Victims" hopes to mine this territory and, in so doing, it aims to foreground more generally the cinematic medium's proclivity for the abject. The primary means of analysis will be close reading of a number of key Cronenberg films, with particular attention paid to the various means through which abjection is produced. Occasional reference will be made to Cronenberg's responses to his films, and to their critical and theoretical surroundings. Although critical consensus seems to be that Cronenberg's use of the abject serves to make women monstrous, the present work will shift that focus for the figure of abjection to those forces, cinematically and diegetically, who are responsible for the process of abject-ing. Chapter 1 provides a survey of the critical literature regarding abjection in Cronenberg's films. Critics treat Cronenberg's films with little reference to his specifically cinematic tools, and find abjection in specific abject "objects," like the parasites of Shivers (1975). The critical failure to discuss Cronenberg in cinematic terms, to analyze the particular effects the cinematic apparatus might have on our understanding of the abject will be connected to the cinematic representation of the abject, demonstrating the need to explicate abjection in specifically cinematic terms. Chapter 2 examines closely what we might call Cronenberg's abjectifying narrative strategies. Through the use of the subjective point of view and the representation of hallucinations, Cronenberg reinforces the abject images on the screen. Furthermore, by connecting the viewer to a protagonist through the subjective point of view, the boundary between character and viewer is collapsed, producing another form of abjection. Chapter 3 will examine the process of adaptation in light of the abject. Because Cronenberg often adapts material from other media, creating hybrids in a manner that recalls the abject, both Naked Lunch and Crash will be analyzed to understand how their status as adaptations reinforce the abject produced by other cinematic means. The adaptation, by fusing media, elides the boundary between cinematic author/text and literary author/text, which recalls the lack of boundary in the abject. As with narrative techniques, adaptive techniques both reinforce the abject on the screen, while producing their own brand of abjection. The conclusion will discuss the use of the abject in the context, of Cronenberg's — and his critics' — attitude toward gender. Because Cronenberg's early films often feature monstrous women, while his later films see a transition to almost exclusively masculine monsters, the issue of gender is central to the use of abjection in Cronenberg's films, and to the wider question of his misogyny. With an understanding of the specifically cinematic means through which Cronenberg represents the abject, the charges of misogyny that critics have leveled at the director will be evaluated.

In Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, extreme opposition is prevalent as the authors describe the makeup of each character, as well as the setting and plot in these novels. What are they accomplishing by portraying such opposition? By using Jacque Derrida’s deconstructive theory and Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection as theoretical guides to navigate these novels, examples of how both authors use extreme opposition in each element of their works are cited and explored. Through this process, the realization that opposing extremes can harmoniously lie side by side and have as many similarities as differences is discovered. By the conclusion, the unifying quality that love plays in both novels, as well as the authors’ intents to change their readers traditional concept of love, is evident.

This thesis explores, in three works of literature, possibilities for redemption via abjection. Julia Kristeva's semanalysis is the primary theoretical tool with which Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) is examined as a nascent work in Caribbean literature. Next, and central to this thesis, the Guyanese Wilson Harris's The Palace of the Peacock (1960) is discussed within Kristevan context and within Caribbeanist literary critical context. Mariella, a central and fluid character in Palace, acts as a semiotic agent of destruction and of abjectly sublime redemption for Donne and his crew of river boatmen in pursuit of Other ethnically mixed peoples in Guyana's interior. Donne's moment of epiphany, wherein he comes to understand how inhumanely he has treated Others, is followed by his 'second' death and rebirth in a celestial palace (along with the rest of the crew), marking his and their transformation from abject slavers to abjectly sublime and redeemed beings. The semiotic linguistic characteristics of Palace are investigated: while written in the style of Magical Realism, Palace contains lexical and dialectal features stemming from African and Amerindian influences. Flannery O'Connor's 'Revelation' (1965) is the final work examined. Via legacies of plantation slavery and ensuing discrimination against freed African-Americans, many works of Southern U.S. literature contain qualities of postcolonial literatures, particularly the element of abject Otherness. In 'Revelation' Mrs. Ruby Turpin's ideas about abject Others are transformed, as she is transformed from an abject avatar of white Southern racism and classism, into an abjectly sublime person who receives a 'revelation' of her wrongs righted in a celestial march of all human beings. Her 'revelation' is markedly similar to Donne's in Palace, both in what she sees and in the language employed to describe what is revealed to her. In Palace and in 'Revelation,' characters are redeemed by their limitations, by recognition of their abjections, and thus from these abject restrictions. Although Behn's narrator aborts her encounter with an Other, she comes very close to actualizing abject sublimity as is evinced in a fractured and digressive narrative, indicative of the narrator's conflicted psyche. At least she is conflicted about New World colonial enterprises and their institutions of brutal enslavement. Rather than abjure abject Otherness, perhaps readers—students of life and of literature—would embrace abjection, the eschewed Otherness within, as a critical agent for and means to the sublime.

This study focuses on the role of the body as a central factor in subverting gender norms. Hypothesizing a model based in Judith Butler’s work on sex and gender performance that places the body in an integral position as mediator of discourse and creator of identity, I posit that bodily disruptions occur when the body re-cites patriarchal discursive assumptions of gender in such a way as to emphasize the constructedness of gender identity. By looking at the body as a type of subversive space, I uncover the hidden methods texts use to undercut gender norms. Using Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, I apply this theory to analyze the ways the body is able to re-cite discourse to question the stability of gender identity. I explore the ways the text plays with the construction of gender through the use of bodies.