Interstitial passages: re-enactment of queer bodies of color in art and literature
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Abstract
My project explores the connections between literature and visual art to re-enact and re-imagine queer bodies of color in liminal spaces or porous passages as a means of contesting invisibility, exclusion, and displacement. I engage in the literature of James Baldwin and John Rechy and the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to conceptualize symbolic and physical in-between spaces where racial and gender alternative projects of community, same-sex desire, and love are possible. My analysis focuses on the surveillance of the public sphere in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the constant inhabiting of the upper and underworld of same-sex desire in Rechy's City of Night, and Gonzalez-Torres candy piles and curtains of blue beads. These literary and visual art pieces contributed to my theorization of queer bodies and queer bodies of color that disrupted hetero norms through the re-enactment of the queer body as a locus for participation and community building. I theorize on the unfolding or destruction of the queer body as an opportunity to create an alternative set of signifiers to expand the solidified boundaries around bodies, desires, and belonging. The queer body of color navigates hetero spaces and uses its displacement and exclusion to reimagine itself in interstitial or porous passages as an alternative communal project of otherness.
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Introduction -- Tactical resignification of queerness -- Queer thresholds and queer re-enactments: a project of love and expansion -- Queer time, queer spaces -- Queering space-time, unfolding
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Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)