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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/24800
Title: | Queer Indifference: Solitude, Film, Dreams |
Authors: | Rodness, Roshaya T |
Advisor: | Clark, David L. |
Department: | English and Cultural Studies |
Keywords: | queer theory; cinema; film; AIDS; solitude; dreams; critical theory |
Publication Date: | 2019 |
Abstract: | This dissertation develops an existential-aesthetic theory of the subversive power and lure of limited and recessive forms of social intimacy that it calls queer indifference. By putting queer concerns with the normative politics of identity, visibility, and inter-relationality in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, it responds to expectations of the self-evident value of active bodies, personal recognition, and mutual experience for meaningful social political agency, and argues that recessive relations experienced and cultivated in the fortuitous spaces of “shared-separation” constitute a queerly-imagined rapport with alterity rather than being the source of social deprivation. Queer indifferences, I argue, effect their own ethical engagements beyond the self that are not reducible to readily legible connections to the social, while they may be continuous with such modes of connection. Drawing on a number of critical resources from queer theory, poststructuralist philosophy, film criticism, dream science, and the history of AIDS activism, this dissertation seeks to discover the generative impasses in perception, consciousness, and connection articulated by queer aesthetic media that make themselves seen and heard through the involutions of social legibility and recognition. In social postures such as solitude, techno-mediated encounters with cinematic worlds, and the creative automation of dreamlife, this dissertation locates aesthetic-ethical expressions of justice oriented towards the defiant persistence of queer life. Films such as Brokeback Mountain and Last Address, and the dream diaries of American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, access and communicate a certain inaccessible and incommunicable core of self and intimate expression that elicits relations with the other in appearances of isolation or remoteness, and that generates creative and imaginative possibilities for justice ahead of indeterminate futures. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/24800 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Rodness_Roshaya_T_finalsubmission2019august_phd.pdf | 1.85 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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