School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.
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ItemThe Secret Object of Sacrifice after Luce Irigaray( 2019)This thesis studies the concept of “new sacrifice” in the work of Luce Irigaray. According to Irigaray, the patriarchal order is founded on the masculine subject’s hidden sacrifice of the woman-object—the secret object of sacrifice. She proposes that the emergence of a new sacrificial order requires the formation of a new sociality and economy, one which sacrifices the patriarchal order and in turn allows for the cultivation of the feminine. Critics argue that Irigaray’s vision is utopian and that she does not clarify the way in which a new sacrificial—theorists also use the word “nonsacrificial,” however for this thesis I use Irigaray’s own phrase “new sacrifice”—order may emerge. I argue that Irigaray’s account of a new sacrificial process of becoming occurs through a mystical encounter with abjection, where the object becomes (a new kind of) subject. To support this argument I turn to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Moten’s theory of Blackness in the preliminary chapters of this thesis. The differences and similarities between the work of these theorists and that of Irigaray allow me to identify a latency in Irigaray’s work in regard to the secret object of sacrifice, its transformation, and the emergence of a new sacrificial order. After comparing philosophical texts, I apply the theory I have developed to literature and film texts.
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ItemThe menstrual imaginary and 'The Butcher's Daughter'( 2016)A number of important writers and artists focus on the once taboo subject of menstruation in their work, drawing attention to the topic of women’s bleeding and the female cycle. A menstrual imaginary is a latent poetic source of inspiration in women writers and artists, an imaginary domain outside of language, which is drawn on through symbolism, particularly through references to blood, to eruptions of blood, and women’s cycles, as well as all procreative functions. Whilst, Julia Kristeva theorises menstruation on the side of the abject, my work alternatively seeks to rescue women’s menstruation from the patriarchal abject. Moreover, I draw on the writings of Hélène Cixous who argues for the importance of a voice of ‘milk and blood,’ although it is mostly at a subterranean level that we can find evidence for a menstrual narrative running through her work. I use Cixous as a springboard for exploring the concept of a feminine writing in red ink, in direct contrast to her ‘white ink,’ as well as consider the domain of woman’s ‘volcanic unconscious,’ in relation to the creation of a menstrual imaginary. Furthermore, I read important classical texts such as the stories of Persephone and Demeter, Medusa, Oedipus and the Sphinx, and the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, against-the-grain for a menstrual imaginary. I also survey a number of poets and writers who explicitly adopt menstrual imagery and blood to depict a menstrual imaginary. Finally, I write my own menstrual imaginary in the form of a poetry manuscript.
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ItemIdentity and identification: gender, rewriting and Little Red Riding Hood( 2014)This thesis offers a psychoanalytical reading of versions of the Red Riding Hood folk tale, from Charles Perrault to Anne Sexton. It explores how these versions denaturalise culturally constructed gender norms and demonstrates that all versions of the Red Riding Hood tale present a journey towards the dissolution of the self.