Dissertation
MATERIAL BODIES AND TEXTUAL SELVES: REIMAGINING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000006437
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/119568
Abstract
This dissertation explores Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory (2010), Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Michelle Tea’s Black Wave (2016). These works are examined as an archive of autotheoretical and autofictional texts—products of transnational sex-positive, postpornographic feminist and queer theoretical exchange between the United States and France. The arguments of Jack Halberstam, Dean Spade, Lisa Duggan, Cathy Cohen, Sam Bourcier, and Bruno Perreau inform the dissertation and this archive is interpreted as a response to global homonormative turns in feminist and queer activism during a neoliberal, late-capitalist, pharmacopornographic period. Karen Barad’s concept of material-discursive intra-action is used, as well as theories of disidentificatory performance, nomadic embodiment, and queer phenomenology, to analyze bodily experiences presented in the texts and to reveal that the relationship between material bodies and discursive identities allows ways to imagine new conceptions of gendered and sexual subjectivity. While focusing on the value of fluid texts and identities, the dissertation employs queer of color critique as well as Aren Z. Aizura and Jasbir Puar’s theorizations on mobile and pieced identities and their limitations to interrogate how the works perpetuate racial and class privilege within their proposed queer feminist identities. Ultimately, the autotheory and autofiction genres, with their legacy of creating new feminist theorizations and their emphasis on revisitation, permit the configuring of subjectivities that encourage readers to envision ways of being and, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggests, to “look upward,” to discover transnational connections that counter neoliberal commodification systems and far-right extremism, even if they are also embedded within systemic constraints.
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Details
- Title
- MATERIAL BODIES AND TEXTUAL SELVES: REIMAGINING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
- Creators
- Leah Elizabeth Wilson
- Contributors
- Carol Siegel (Advisor)Donna L. Potts (Committee Member)Michèle A Schaal (Committee Member)Nishant Shahani (Committee Member)Pamela Thoma (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of English
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 201
- Identifiers
- 99900591956901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation