Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

Dancing Across Difference: Transforming Habitual Modes Of Being In The World Through Movement, Kimberly Dority

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although some important scholarly work has been done on race, and whiteness, in relation to habit, my account addresses the role of movement in habit through dance. Dance is well-suited for exploring habit since dancers cultivate an intimate knowledge of their bodies as habitual dancing bodies. I argue that dancing can offer critical insight into how habitual modes of being in the world may be shifted and changed. Dancers’ mastery of movement not only consists in sedimenting habits within the body, but also involves actively exploring how one’s own bodily movement can be altered (Ravn 2017; Damkjaer, 2015; Ingerslev, 2013; …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

A Queer Politics Of Imperceptibility: A Philosophy Of Resistance To Contemporary Sexual Surveillance, Andie Shabbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis journeys through a series of events to develop a concept of “imperceptibility” as a mode of resistance to contemporary sexual surveillance. The events I examine include biometric recognition of gender and race at airport security checkpoints, the heteropatriarchal colonial surveillance of Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock, various protest actions, and the political potentials of glitch art. Exploring their unexpected points of connection, my goal is to bring into view acts of resistance against sexual surveillance that already operate below and above the threshold of everyday perception.

The project advocates for a philosophy of resistance that underscores the political …

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …