Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Gender und Genre in melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen der Gegenwart - Far From Heaven, The Hours, A Single Man

Die Dissertation Gender und Genre in melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen der Gegenwart untersucht das Medium Film anhand von Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), Stephen Daldrys The Hours (2002) und Tom Fords A Single Man (2009) als Quelle des Wissens über gesellschaftlich-normierte Geschlechterrollen und sozialkonstruierte Genderkonzepte. Die Arbeit versteht sich als eine nachhaltige Schnittstellenforschung zwischen Gender-, Literatur-, Film- und Medienwissenschaften und zeigt die Öffnung der Germanistik für den medial geprägten Kulturwandel, welcher den deutschen bzw. den deutschsprachigen Kulturraum betrifft. Gender und Geschlecht destabilisieren die Gesellschaft und die „heterosexuelle Matrix“ durch das individuelle Suchen, Finden, Konstruieren und Anerkennen einer eigenen, individuellen Genderidentität. Dieser Prozess kann unter Zuhilfenahme des Erzählens von Geschlecht im Film verdeutlicht werden, denn die audiovisuelle Fiktion modelliert Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und das Wirklichkeitsverständnis der Rezipienten. Wobei offen bleibt, ob die Fiktion die Realität oder die Realität die Fiktion imitiert. Denn es gibt nicht nur eine Wahrheit, sondern mehrere, vielleicht unzählige Bedeutungszuschreibungen. Die drei paradigmatischen Literaturverfilmungen wurden jeweils in Bezug zu ihren Literaturvorlagen von Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham und Christopher Isherwood gesetzt. Sie können als Beispiele für ein wissendes, postmodernes Pastiche des Themen-Clusters Diskriminierung/Homophobie/Homosexualität/„Rasse“ gelten. Alle drei Filme verhandeln durch gemeinsame, melodramatische Motive (Spiegel, Telefon, Krieg, Familie) die Darstellbarkeit von Emotionen, Begehren, Sehnsüchten, Einsamkeit und dem Verlust der Liebe. Durch Verbindungslinien zu den Melodramen von Douglas Sirk und mittels den Theorien von u.a. Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Carolin Emcke, Thomas Elsaesser, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Kappelhoff und Laura Mulvey wurde das Begriffspaar Genre und Gender her-ausgestellt und im zeitgenössischen Geschlechter-Diskurs verortet. Das im Verlauf der Arbeit erarbeitete Wissen zu Gender, Sexualität, Körper und Geschlecht wurde als ein Gender-Genre-Hybrid verstanden und im Genre des queeren bzw. homosexuellen Melodrams (gay melodrama) neu verortet. Die drei Filme sind als ein Wiederbelebungsversuch bzw. ein Erweiterungsversuch des melodramatischen Genres unter dem Genderaspekt anzusehen. Die Analyse und Dekonstruktion feststehender Begriffe im Kontext der Gender- und Gay Studies und dem Queer Cinema lösen produktive Krisen und damit emanzipierte Verfahren aus. Diese müssen immer wieder neu beschrieben werden, damit sie wahrgenommen und verstanden werden. Daher sind die drei melodramatischen Literaturverfilmungen ein fiktionales Dokumentationsmodell gesellschaftlicher Konflikte, welches anhand individueller Schicksale verdeutlicht wird.

Hole in the Head: a Play, Accompanied by a Conspectus of Knowledge, Both Repressed and Researched, that Directly Influenced the Playwright in Her Development of a New Work

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

El deporte y la actividad física como mediadores de modelos corporales : Género y sexualidad en el aprendizaje de las masculinidades

Este artículo parte del análisis de algunas contribuciones teóricas sobre la conceptualización del cuerpo en las sociedades contemporáneas, que nos permitirá dialogar con las experiencias reflexivas de un grupo de chicos sobre el aprendizaje de la(s) masculinidad(es)i en sus vidas. El énfasis fenomenológico y político del cuerpo en los estudios feministas -con la noción de corporización- ha sido fundamental para problematizar las variables encarnadas de género, raza, edad, clase social, (dis)capacidad, etc. que no sólo operan en una relación de poder sobre nuestros cuerpos, sino también como locus de agencia y resistencia. La teoría queer con la deconstrucción de la sexualidad normativa -gracias a la noción de performatividad- será clave para entender el papel fundamental que la sexualidad desempeña en la construcción de la(s) subjetividad(es). Los relatos de los chicos nos permitirán explorar el papel que la actividad física y el deporte tiene en sus vidas como mediadores en la construcción de subjetividades "masculinas", muchas veces como un espacio opresor de identidad de género y opción sexual, y abrir la reflexión a las visiones hegemónicas de cuerpo que median tanto la educación física en las escuelas, como en el deporte de competición y/o de elite, y sus representaciones en los mass media.

El deporte y la actividad física como mediadores de modelos corporales : Género y sexualidad en el aprendizaje de las masculinidades

Este artículo parte del análisis de algunas contribuciones teóricas sobre la conceptualización del cuerpo en las sociedades contemporáneas, que nos permitirá dialogar con las experiencias reflexivas de un grupo de chicos sobre el aprendizaje de la(s) masculinidad(es)i en sus vidas. El énfasis fenomenológico y político del cuerpo en los estudios feministas -con la noción de corporización- ha sido fundamental para problematizar las variables encarnadas de género, raza, edad, clase social, (dis)capacidad, etc. que no sólo operan en una relación de poder sobre nuestros cuerpos, sino también como locus de agencia y resistencia. La teoría queer con la deconstrucción de la sexualidad normativa -gracias a la noción de performatividad- será clave para entender el papel fundamental que la sexualidad desempeña en la construcción de la(s) subjetividad(es). Los relatos de los chicos nos permitirán explorar el papel que la actividad física y el deporte tiene en sus vidas como mediadores en la construcción de subjetividades "masculinas", muchas veces como un espacio opresor de identidad de género y opción sexual, y abrir la reflexión a las visiones hegemónicas de cuerpo que median tanto la educación física en las escuelas, como en el deporte de competición y/o de elite, y sus representaciones en los mass media.

El deporte y la actividad física como mediadores de modelos corporales : Género y sexualidad en el aprendizaje de las masculinidades

Este artículo parte del análisis de algunas contribuciones teóricas sobre la conceptualización del cuerpo en las sociedades contemporáneas, que nos permitirá dialogar con las experiencias reflexivas de un grupo de chicos sobre el aprendizaje de la(s) masculinidad(es)i en sus vidas. El énfasis fenomenológico y político del cuerpo en los estudios feministas -con la noción de corporización- ha sido fundamental para problematizar las variables encarnadas de género, raza, edad, clase social, (dis)capacidad, etc. que no sólo operan en una relación de poder sobre nuestros cuerpos, sino también como locus de agencia y resistencia. La teoría queer con la deconstrucción de la sexualidad normativa -gracias a la noción de performatividad- será clave para entender el papel fundamental que la sexualidad desempeña en la construcción de la(s) subjetividad(es). Los relatos de los chicos nos permitirán explorar el papel que la actividad física y el deporte tiene en sus vidas como mediadores en la construcción de subjetividades "masculinas", muchas veces como un espacio opresor de identidad de género y opción sexual, y abrir la reflexión a las visiones hegemónicas de cuerpo que median tanto la educación física en las escuelas, como en el deporte de competición y/o de elite, y sus representaciones en los mass media.

Queering U.S. History Museums: Heteronormative Histories, Digital Disruptions

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Moving beyond heterosexism? The good, the bad and the indifferent in accounts of others’ reactions to important life events

Latterly the psychology of sexualities has diversified. There has been increased engagement with queer theory and a heightened focus on sexual practices alongside continued interrogation of heteronormativity via analyses of talk-in-interaction. In this article, I offer an argument for juxtaposing the incongruent in order to further interrogate manifestations of heterosexism in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people’s lives. In this case, accounts of others’ reactions to a happy event and to a sad experience. By drawing on two contrasting data corpuses – 124 people planning or in a civil partnership and 60 women who had experienced pregnancy loss – there is increased potential for understanding variation in ‘normative’ and/or heteronormative interpretations of LGBTQ lives. I suggest that, despite significant legal and structural gains for LGBTQ communities in a number of Western countries in recent years, and lively internal debates within the psychology of sexualities field, critical examination of manifestations of heterosexism should remain a central focus.

“Somos quem podemos ser”: os homens (trans) brasileiros e o discurso pela (des)patologização da transexualidade

This research analyzed the discourse of Brazilian transmen in relation to (un) pathologizing of identity (trans). Therefore, it seeks to analyze the perception of the meanings attributed by Brazilian transmen to their experiences within the context in which their experience is considered a psychiatric disorder, which can be (or not) be diagnosed by doctors and psychologists. Whereby, obtaining such permissions becomes a necessity to perform bodily changes, as well as referrals for modifications of civil documentation. The methodology used was discourse analysis and research techniques were semi-structured interviews and systematic observation of the meetings of Cartografias Trans group, psychotherapeutic care group of transpeople to the Centro de pesquisa e atendimento à travestis e transexuais - CPATT in Curitiba , Paraná. The theoretical framework of the research suppoted mainly, but not only, in the studies proposed by queer theory. In this sense the research found by entering the field and analyzing the data brought, among other things, the existence of a strategic discourse by Brazilian transmen toward depathologization of their identities, manifested mainly on the notion of to have the identity (trans) pathologized does not make them sick.

Entre elas: políticas públicas e cidadania de travestis e mulheres transexuais de uma ONG em Natal/RN

The core of this research it is anchored in the analysis of the relationship between experiences and experiences of transvestite and transsexual women and citizenship category in Natal. For this, we analyzed, at first, the unfolding instilled in acting from the agenda of a Non Governmental Organization of the city, the Atransparência. In a second, and more importantly, time, reflections of those actions were followed in the daily and transgender women in the city belonging to NGOs. Methodologically, work is characterized as a qualitative research, with ethnographic deployment, made possible through interviews with semi-structured questionnaires. The analysis of the collected material was possible from the discourse analysis (Foucault, 1996), as well as qualitative analysis (Caregnato and Mutti, 2006). Theoretically, it was done the exercise to think queer theory conciliated her with the prospect of criticism of eucorêntrismo of power and knowledge, with fundamental emphasis on the relationship between theoretical national queers - Bento (2014), Miscolci (2014), Pelúcio (2014 ) and Pereira (2012) - authors and descolonial such as Mignolo (2008) Quijano (2005).

War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Literature

“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.

Inventing "French Feminism:" A Critical History

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

Fucking Failures: The Future of Fat Sex

In the context of the obesity ‘epidemic’ fat people’s sex lives are cast as sterile, sexually dysfunctional or just plain non-existent. This article analyzes medical discourses of obesity and sex in order to argue that fat sex is constructed as a type of failure. Using insights from antisocial queer theory, fat sex is further shown to be queer in its failure to adhere to the specifically heteronormative dictates of what Edelman (2004) calls ‘reproductive futurism’. The analysis finally engages with Halberstam’s (2011) notion of queer failure to demonstrate how deconstructing notions of success and failure might offer fat political projects new ways to imagine the future of fat sex.

A Hint of the Lavender - The Gay Gangster in British Crime Cinema

This chapter traces the image of the gay gangster in British cinema. It draws upon film history and Queer theory to attempt to understand the fascination of this marginal character.

Femininos de montar - Uma etnografia sobre experiências de gênero entre drag queens

The paper presents a discussion about gender and body in the drag queens experience at Natal city (RN). From the different concepts that characterizes the identity processes on subjects who perform gender transformation (transvestites, transsexuals and female impersonators), the justification for studying the drag character is observed as a means to understand matters that are important when you take such a position. Therefore, there is a need for a linkage between the various concepts responsible for this definition, in addition to considering the historical and cultural process responsible for the creation of such categories, identities and stereotypes among these individuals. In this sense it will be possible to carry out a critical analysis on the different social loads present in each representation, and understand what is at stake in the attribution of classifications and terminologies that are applied to different expressions of metamorphosis. This ethnography considers the debate from a field research conducted at LGBT social establishments and other performance spaces of these people, verifying their dynamics in these places and investigating relationships between performers, personas and characters and also backstage scene in which they participate