Where the Skin Meets

Over the last half century, the analysis of homoerotic themes present in the author’s novels has been a particularly generative subset of Melville studies. Among this body of research, the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby-Dick has proven to be a compelling avenue of research regarding modes of queer representation in an historical period wherein the open discussion of homosexuality was viewed as anywhere from taboo to illegal. This paper builds on the work of other Melville scholars, such as Caleb Crain and Kellen Bolt, in examining the ways in which 19th century ideas of race intersect with the representation of an eroticized male relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. I suggest that the particular lens of racialized eroticism through which 19th century white observers viewed Polynesian men inherently denies the potential for disavowal of same-gender attraction to the non-White subject. This denial necessarily reifies racial hierarchy by giving a White male participant in a homoerotic relationship the ability to dictate its boundaries. I argue that even if, as Bolt suggests, Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg represents a rejection of 19th century American nativist sentiment, Ishmael retains the ability to distance himself from accusations of homoeroticism in a way that is not possible for Queequeg and his exoticized body. I conclude with an exploration of how the Victorian freak-show archetype of the tattooed man connects with Ishmael’s decision to tattoo himself and thus voluntary take on racializing signifiers within his contemporary context.

Queer Youth and Everyday Spaces in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand: A Photovoice Project

<p>Queer people are often ‘othered’ in everyday spaces because of the assumptions, practices, and beliefs that reinforce heterosexuality and cis-gendered bodies as normal and natural. For queer youth, these experiences are further exacerbated by their age and agency. Yet there has been little explicit geographic scholarship focused on understanding how queer youth navigate heteronormativity and practice their subjectivities in different everyday spaces. In this thesis, I draw on the work of queer theory and geographies of sexuality literature to consider how subjectivities are constructed, controlled, and experienced by some queer youth in everyday spaces of Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. I work within a transformative epistemology, and use photovoice as my research method to present the reflective engagements of six queer youth aged between sixteen and twenty-two through their photographs and accompanying narratives. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the participants’ visual and verbal texts yields contradicting and varying experiences of heteronormativity. Processes of subjectivity negotiation, queering space, conforming strategies, and gender performance influence how queer youth are placed within their everyday spaces. Safe spaces, like nature, the stage, and queer youth groups provide queer youth with the ability to be self-expressive, escape from the pressures of everyday life, and be surrounded with other queer people. Such spaces can be enhanced through activism, queer representation, and with the presence of animals and friends. This research contributes academically to research within geographies of sexualities and works towards disseminating these findings through a collaborative zine to support efforts to counter some of the dominating effects of heteronormativity identified by the queer youth.</p>

Queer Youth and Everyday Spaces in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand: A Photovoice Project

<p>Queer people are often ‘othered’ in everyday spaces because of the assumptions, practices, and beliefs that reinforce heterosexuality and cis-gendered bodies as normal and natural. For queer youth, these experiences are further exacerbated by their age and agency. Yet there has been little explicit geographic scholarship focused on understanding how queer youth navigate heteronormativity and practice their subjectivities in different everyday spaces. In this thesis, I draw on the work of queer theory and geographies of sexuality literature to consider how subjectivities are constructed, controlled, and experienced by some queer youth in everyday spaces of Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand. I work within a transformative epistemology, and use photovoice as my research method to present the reflective engagements of six queer youth aged between sixteen and twenty-two through their photographs and accompanying narratives. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the participants’ visual and verbal texts yields contradicting and varying experiences of heteronormativity. Processes of subjectivity negotiation, queering space, conforming strategies, and gender performance influence how queer youth are placed within their everyday spaces. Safe spaces, like nature, the stage, and queer youth groups provide queer youth with the ability to be self-expressive, escape from the pressures of everyday life, and be surrounded with other queer people. Such spaces can be enhanced through activism, queer representation, and with the presence of animals and friends. This research contributes academically to research within geographies of sexualities and works towards disseminating these findings through a collaborative zine to support efforts to counter some of the dominating effects of heteronormativity identified by the queer youth.</p>

Looking Through the Rearview Mirror

Probing the continuities and discontinuities of queer representation and expression in the vast, multiform corpus of French cinema up to 1945, this chapter celebrates moments of queer visual and auditory intimacy and pleasure in both celebrated and little-known or neglected films. It aims to prove that early French cinema, despite its all-too-evident heterosexist matrices and repressive tendencies (notably the negative and often highly crude, fetishizing stereotypes of the “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “cross-dresser”), also discloses unpredictable and non-normative aesthetic spaces or “interzones”—of filiation, desire, and sensation—that resist easy categorization (social, cultural political), elude the gender fixities of the period, and are rich in radical ambiguity and queer suggestion, even subversion. A new, materialist, queer aesthetics and historiography is proposed that ties early French film production and spectatorship to abiding aspects of the French cinematic tradition such as cinephilia and film criticism.

Excessive Attachments: Twenty-First-Century Queer and Trans Video Art in the United States

This chapter provides an overview of the queer video artists who are working in the United States in the twenty-first-century and presenting their work primarily in gallery and museum contexts, either in traditional shows or performance/time-based interventions. Their work is divided into purposefully capacious and fluid categories: reimagining a queer/trans world, restaging the medium, and re-articulating appropriation. Queer affect is considered alongside discourses of self-reflexivity and appropriation that are central to art-historical debates around modernism and postmodernism. Above all, the chapter argues that contemporary queer video art is untethered in its definition but nevertheless constellates around certain themes and bodies. Expanded definitions of queerness often negate the specific strategies taken on by queer and trans artists and privilege a nonspecific and disembodied queer abstraction. The chapter seeks to supplement those lacunae with new ways of theorizing media alongside new ways of theorizing queer representation.

Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.

Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.