School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemA ‘standard’ Topic?: Theatre, Young People and the Everyday Postdigital( 2021)This thesis investigates how theatre examines and interrogates the integration of young people’s everyday experience of digital technologies into theatrical performance. Using a multimodal approach, I examine what I describe as everyday postdigital theatre across four contemporary Australian theatre productions involving young people aged 13-22 in different ways. These case studies engage with everyday postdigital theatre across five mechanisms: networks, replication and simulation, real and virtual, time and space and glitches and mess. These mechanisms are traced across an examination of changed approaches to storytelling, aesthetic innovations and theatre’s technical reconfiguration within larger networks of information and image production. The central contribution of this thesis is that theatre involving young people highlights fundamental shifts that are currently underway in the relationship between digital culture and theatre. These shifts point to the ways in which the digital is an increasingly everyday aspect of the way we perceive and realise theatre, rather than a spectacular feature in its own right. This study is significant because it recognises that theatre ‘post’ the digital does not negate digitality, but rather acknowledges that theatre is now made with reference to, and by often seamlessly integrating, the everyday digital environment surrounding it. By focusing on young people, the thesis provides concrete examples of successes in navigating contemporary digital manifestations. It is a close reading of the subtle pervasiveness of the digital beyond overt mediation and argues for the realness of the everyday digital in theatre.
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ItemSketching out the Tomboy: Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Tomboy Identity in Lesbian Communities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan( 2021)This thesis examines the conceptualisations, uses, and politics of the lesbian secondary gender “tomboy” within lesbian communities in China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the late 2010s. The term tomboy has been widely used by queer women in these communities to describe masculine lesbian expressions, fashion, and/or gender role for over four decades. Screen representations of tomboy originating from within the Chinese-speaking world and from neighbouring Asian regions were particularly popular among these women during the late 2000s and early 2010s. And yet, since the 1990s and increasingly today, a growing section of these communities has been calling for a collective rejection of tomboy, claiming that it reinforces conservative patriarchal and heteronormative values and is therefore anti-feminist. This thesis draws on life stories from those caught between the once-popular use of tomboy and their newfound anti-tomboy feminist sensibilities. It explores the stories of the many women who decided to abandon their tomboy identity in search of their real gender, women who turn to American queer media in hopes of finding true feminist lesbian representations, those who struggle with whether to identify as tomboy or not, and those who in the process of self-searching no longer see themselves as lesbians or women at all. It analyses how contemporary debates about the tomboy in turn shape the ways in which these individuals think about gender, sexual identity, the self, geographies, and cultures. This thesis also examines the contributions that transnational queer screen representations make to popular conceptualisations of the tomboy and these related ideas. It combines textual analysis of relevant screen texts circulating within the communities in question with in-depth empirical interview data revealing participants’ interpretations of these screen texts. This thesis thus offers a critical engagement with the media materials that contribute to the cultural production of the tomboy identity, and more urgently, it is also a critical engagement with the intimate, conceptual, and affective worlds of those who live out this identity.