School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe performance of perversion in Kafka's literature and its adaptations( 2019)The interpretation of Kafka’s literature has always presented major problems for critics, who have attempted to simplify the figures and metaphors contained in the stories by offering possible explanations. Starting from the view of Kafka’s perversions as logical absurdities in a specific time and place, this thesis interrogates their role as a dominant element in Kafka’s poetics. I argue that performativity and performance are central to representations of perversion in Kafka and its effects over the fictional characters. I use a predominantly psychoanalytic approach to Kafka’s life and a post-structuralist analysis of his stories and their filmic and theatrical adaptations. The frequent perverted elements and the predominance of perverse performances, particularly revealed through the presence and need of a spectator, are explained by the different stages of Kafka’s life. Through this analysis it can be concluded that Kafka’s perverted view of life originates in his relationships with other people, particularly figures of power. Perversions abound in Kafka’s literature, but here I focus on gender, animality and Law. I argue that gender, animality and law/punishment are strictly connected by the need for a performance to define them. My work establishes perversion as the originating factor of Kafka’s narrative. His intent is to challenge standards by performing their perversion and showing how this has nefarious consequences only when an audience is present. If there were no performative expectations based on arbitrary standards, there would be no perversions to confuse and shock the audience and no punishment would be needed for the perverted individuals.
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ItemExtreme males: autistic masculinity in three bestsellers( 2015)Inspired by Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autism can be understood as an extreme version of typical male behaviour, this thesis will examine whether this view is reflected in the representation of autistic males in best-selling fiction (“Extreme Male Brain” 248). It will investigate autism representations in the context of hegemonic masculinity, by comparing the behaviour of Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jacob Hunt from House Rules, and Don Tillman from The Rosie Project to Linda Lindsey’s masculinity norms. These include anti-femininity, emotional reticence, success, intelligence, toughness, aggressiveness and an obsessive heterosexuality (Lindsey 241-7). While Christopher's surprising violence, extreme intelligence, insensitivity and stubbornness are masculine traits, his asexuality disqualifies him from being an extreme male. Jacob’s masculinity is shown in his aggressiveness, intellect and physique, but is undermined by his ambiguous sexuality and patchy career history. Don’s physical appearance, heterosexuality, stoic attitude and intellect are all masculine qualities, unlike his need for social guidance and apparent virginity at the novel’s beginning. All three characters are white and compensate for a lack of emotional awareness with hyper-rationality. Their paradoxical masculinity may account for their novels’ success. This thesis finds that these three fictional autistics are not extreme males by the standards of hegemonic masculinity.
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ItemAestheticising deformity: an essay on Cute and the Young-Girl( 2018)This dissertation makes an argument for understanding Cute as a distinguishable aesthetic category whose emergence across the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is intimately related to visual and verbal discourses of idealised girlhood. It performs its thesis through employing Cute to aide analysis of contemporary art photographic representations of the Young-Girl. The project sits at the intersection of art history, gender studies, queer studies and girlhood studies, and offers an original and significant contribution to each. The dissertation is broadly split into two sections. The first is a delineation of Cute as aesthetic category. This section outlines both the history of Cute, its emergence and development, and the aesthetic, non-aesthetic and cultural properties of Cute, their role in defining and distinguishing Cute as aesthetic category. The second section considers what Cute as aesthetic does in contemporary art photography focussed on the body of the Young-Girl. Unfolding over three art photography series, each created by a single young woman artist, this analysis is categorised according to the culturally-specific manifestation of Cute and the Young-Girl represented. Tomoko Sawada’s ID400 (1998-2001) meditates on the relation of Cute (kawaii) and the Young-Girl (shōjo) in Japan. The relationship of the Young-Girl (girl) to Cute (cute) in the US is explored through Holly Andres’ The Fallen Fawn (2016). The transcultural aesthetic of Cute and its relationship to the social category of the Young-Girl is considered from the vantage of postcolonial settler-nation Australia through Tracey Moffatt’s Invocations (2000). The dissertation argues Cute exists as a dual aesthetic category – both in the realm of popular culture as everyday aesthetic, and in the realm of visual art as art aesthetic. In the realm of popular culture, Cute evidences an aestheticised deformity; a violent alteration inflicted on bodies to make them simultaneously more inferior along culturally-constituted lines of infantilisation and feminisation, and – because of this inferiority – more economically and emotionally valuable and desirable. In the realm of visual art, this aesthetic experience is elongated, extended, re-directed, and the affect of what would be an otherwise disturbing image becomes a pleasurable sensuous experience which nevertheless retains a recognition of both the deformity, and the processes that aestheticise it. The interplay between these two affective experiences – between Cute as everyday and art aesthetic – enables the possibility of Cute to stage a subversive cultural critique. Inherently interdisciplinary, located within the realm of sensuous experience and affect, and concerned with abstract representations of cultural relations of power, identity, sexuality and bodies, this dissertation draws its lineage of academic inquiry from no particular discipline, but rather from extended considerations of cultural phenomena such as Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur; Mikahil Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World; Roland Barthes’ Mythologies; Carol Mavor’s studies of fairytales, the colour blue, and boyhood, and; Guy Debord’s La societé du spectacle. Its contribution is the interpretation of Cute as contemporary cultural and aesthetic phenomena. It strives towards a treatise on the subject of Cute and the Young-Girl.
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ItemWhen men were men: masculinity and memory in turn-of-the-millennium cinema( 2017)This thesis explores the imbrications of memory and masculinity in screen culture at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key works in memory studies from this period argue that remembering and forgetting are complex practices informed by psychological discourses (for example, the debates over recovered memory), cultural and media industries (most notably, the news and popular entertainment industries), and commemorative practices (such as the rituals around Remembrance Day). These factors heavily influence how memory shapes both personal and social identity, and this thesis marshals these insights to explain how key film and television texts at the turn of the millennium remember the (imagined) past of masculinity. Many Hollywood productions of the era feature male protagonists beset by problems of memory and identity (including pathologies such as amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder), and this thesis argues that in these works, nostalgic desires for lost masculinity have been supplanted by more traumatic modes of memory, ones which provide more critical and conflicted perspectives on both memory and masculinity. These more sophisticated representations demonstrate how the much vaunted contemporary crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of male reflexivity, as men struggle to come to terms with their loss of a transcendent or universal subjectivity and its replacement with a specific gendered identity that must compete for recognition within an increasingly pluralistic culture.
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ItemConduct unbecoming: reconfiguring gender and genre in 1990s Hollywood cinema( 2017)This study identifies an interplay between gender and genre in a 1990s Hollywood production context, and demonstrates how this undermines gender and genre categories. Late twentieth century post-classical Hollywood cinema experienced significant industrial changes which produced a range of different aesthetic practices. This study will demonstrate that the reconfiguration of the representation of women and femininity in this period has resulted in significant changes to Hollywood genre filmmaking practices. This investigation will make an original contribution by arguing that the intervention of female protagonists into conventionally male roles and genres has prompted some important changes and innovations to the codes and conventions of genre. The analysis will demonstrate how an interplay between gender and genre is enunciated through postmodern appropriation and subversion. An increasing use of genre hybridity, allusion, pastiche, parody and intertextuality has frequently relied on a subversive use of gender, in terms of women and femininity, in order to alter genre conventions. This is not viewed as a symptom of a decline in Hollywood filmmaking practices, but rather as a sign of a postmodern Hollywood aesthetic that addresses changing socio-cultural attitudes to women and femininity. The study examines a range of genres traditionally featuring male protagonists. It explores the direct relationship between unconventional female protagonists, playing roles usually reserved for men, and the resulting changes and innovations to genre conventions. Identifying the interplay between gender and genre highlights the interactive nature of the relationship between these elements and foregrounds the importance of understandings of gender on the codes and conventions of genre. As a result of these changes, the notion of gender oriented genre becomes increasingly reconsidered, especially in terms of the positions of identification that are offered to spectators. The study will focus on how these changes have been influenced by feminism and queer theory and are a response to important movements in the historical and socio-political context under investigation.