1,720,986 research outputs found
Masculinities in drag: a theoretical analysis of female masculinity.
Get PDFMasculinities in Drag offers a largely speculative but theoretically engaged analysis of female masculinity as it is enacted through the forum of drag kinging. Drag kinging is the predominantly lesbian and queer female sub-cultural practice of female-to-male cross dressing, with most drag king performances promoting ‘the woman behind the man’. This emphasis on ‘femaleness’, even as it is ostensibly disguised in male drag, remains crucial to the many dynamics that arise through performing as a drag king and within drag king culture. This thesis promotes that emphasis by exploring and arguing for drag kinging as a performance of female identifications, erotic or otherwise, with masculinity within an exclusively queer female economy of desire. I employ various and varying theories on subjectivity, gender, desire, and fantasy to explore this, and further expand my analysis of female masculinity by focusing on the embodied and corporeal effects of performing as a drag king. This investigation reveals the refusal of drag kings to differentiate between traditional notions of mind/body, material/immaterial, and other adversarial boundaries in order to revel in new-found and provocative forms of embodiment and corporeality. Further, I develop the term ‘drag king embodiment’ to explain and expand on this, and to promote drag king embodiment as the corporeal ‘outcome’ of embodying desires for and fantasies of masculinity. This analysis extends to theoretically challenging accepted heteronormative models of gender, female desire, sexuality and subjectivity. However, such challenges reveal their dependency on these models, in so far as any perversion or subversion of them relies on acknowledging them as constraints – literally and figuratively. The ‘struggle’ against such models is not theorised as an inherently futile affair, but rather is viewed as a defining narrative that informs much of the erotic, sexual, and other dynamics of drag kinging and drag king culture. Exploration and analysis of female masculinity, in all its guises, calls into question the ‘natural’ socio-cultural position of women and their desires. By producing certain configurations of female identity, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and desire outside notions of ‘proper’ feminine identifications is to produce those identities fully inside. Effectively, drag king performances work this ‘weakness’ in the laws that govern ‘femaleness’ in order to promote, eroticise, and celebrate female masculinity.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 200
Dust Country: Stories from a Shifting Land
No full textThis thesis traces the movement of dust through Australian literature and across the continent, establishing both its prevalence and distinctiveness as a literary presence. I propose Dust Country as a framework through which to connect different texts, unravelling constructions of place, space, and landscape in the process, providing a unique aperture through which to explore the relation between land, country, and its representation, inevitably delving into questions of poetics and aesthetics.
Dust has a long history in Western literature, textually and geographically reaching back into the drier East and thus being associated with geographical extremity, absence, death, the desert, the epic form, and the Fall. This lineage culminates in T. S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ In the early settler-colonial history of Australia, dust was a signifier of hostile heat and aridity, of Australia’s difference, even as its prevalence was exacerbated by the ecological destruction provoked by European agricultural methods ill-suited to an arid continent. Yet, dust emerges not merely as a physical disrupter to settlement amidst anthropogenic exacerbated dust bowl conditions that began as early as the 1860s, but, over time, it stimulated a discursive erosion. As a geophysical presence embedded within environmental (and planetary) systems alien to the European imagination, this study traces dust’s presence as a material renegade that unravels established Eurocentric constructions of landscape, intimately connected to literary space and place, the modern novel, and associated aesthetic regimes. The cross-continental movement of dust, traced through its quiet, subtle, yet insidious literary presence, offers new (albeit ancient) pathways and frameworks to think with, through and about land.
Having tracked dust’s movement across Australia and its environmental presence in the early literature, culminating in Judith Wright’s ‘Dust’, this study unearths these aeolian particles as a pervasive and suggestive presence across Patrick White’s Voss, Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline, Dal Stivens’s A Horse of Air and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. It puts forward ecocritically and ecomaterially aware readings of these texts, repositioning them as key in charting a departure from representations of arid Australian environments as landscapes of fear and absence. Across these four novels this study traces a journey from outright fear and hostility: Voss sets out ‘into the dust’ (213) to confront the interior, finding not only destruction but love; the town of Tourmaline is entrapped ‘after the blinds of dust have clattered down’ (15) and deluded by dreams of water, but ultimately finds Tao and equanimity with an ancient, dry, and dusty environment; Stivens’s expedition seeks the elusive Centre of a shifting land, figured in the mysterious Night Parrot, greening the desert with granulated detail, finding vitality and life in the dust; and Carpentaria unearths Country, a mobile and dynamic country known across time immemorial, in its well-trodden dust.
Just as predominant constructions unravel, so do established literary forms: Dust Country impels stories of journeys and movements, of shifting ground, of interpenetrations, of an expansive and epic sense of time and space, of a land that, far from being static or inert, is arguably more dynamic and poetically stimulating than the normative European environments which it has long been judged to be in deficit against.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 202
Mapping the Victorian Social Body (rev.) and Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (rev.)
No full text'Passionately subjective': challenges to identity in the works of Amy Levy
Get PDFThis thesis is a study of the work of Amy Levy, poet, novelist and essay writer who came to prominence in the 1880s and whose life was cut short by suicide in 1889. As a Jewish woman with literary and professional aspirations and with no apparent desire to marry, Levy’s life challenged contemporary notions of gender, religion, race, and sexuality. She produced three novels, three collections of poetry, and numerous short stories and essays. I analyse Levy’s works as literary products, literary criticisms, and as genealogies of late-Victorian identities. Levy’s scholarly and creative writings reflect a keen awareness of literary and cultural movements, often prefiguring discussions regarding feminism and modernism which would not take place until after her death. I argue that her textual productions analyse the power relations at play in 1880s Britain: what actions and, indeed, subjects, are made possible and impossible by the contemporary field of representation. Levy’s apparent interests in literary traditions and debates, genre, poetic convention and the representation of marginal lives and experiences all concern the intersections between discourse, power, and knowledge. I begin with an examination of gender, class, and space, particularly public or semi-public space, in Levy’s work. Her first novel, The Romance of a Shop, critiques conventional femininity through its inverse relationship between class and spatial mobility for its female characters. This is read alongside the 1888 article, ‘Women and Club Life’. I then consider, with reference also to George Gissing’s The Odd Women, how shifts in class and spatial mobility influence the trajectory of the romance plot. Finally, this chapter considers a range of Levy’s lyric poetry, predominately from A London-Plane Tree and Other Verse, showing how the modern city and street are celebrated spaces, where the boundaries of identity can, if temporarily, be transcended. Next, I go back to Levy’s childhood and adolescence, reading a series of letters written by Levy to her sister Katie Levy and others. I read these letters queerly, resisting the imposition of assumed heterosexuality. Together with a selection of what I call Levy’s “queer poetry”, I argue that these are representations of same-sex desire. Building upon the models of identity formulated in Chapter One, I argue that Levy’s representations of subjectivity are markedly queer: they refuse stability, escape recognition, and find fullest articulation in transience. The final chapter considers Levy’s most complex novel, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch. I examine its representations of Jewishness and gender and, importantly, its techniques of representation, revealing the novel’s self-reflexivity. I show, together with Levy’s writings in The Jewish Chronicle and elsewhere, that Levy actively writes back to a history of Jewish literary representation. Finally, reading the short story ‘Cohen of Trinity’, I observe Levy’s most tragic representation of marginal identity and how representation and associated mis/recognition shape subjectivity. Amy Levy’s work critically engages with the creation of identities and subjectivities, anticipating the disruptive cultural politics more commonly associated with the 1890s.Thesis (M.Phil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2016
Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age
Get PDFEmpire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (South Africa), Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (Australia). All three novels commence as conventional Bildungsromane, yet the plots of all diverge from the usual narrative structure, as a result of both their colonial origins and the clash between their aspirational heroines and the plots available to them. In an analysis including gender, empire, nation and race, Empire Girls provides new critical perspectives on the ways in which this dominant narrative form performs very differently when taken out of its metropolitan setting
Empire girls : white female protagonists, the Bildungsroman and challenges to narrative / Mandy Dyson.
Get PDFBibliography (leaves 281-294).vi, 294 leaves ; 30 cm.by Mandy DysonThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1998
“Petticoated police,” “intimate watching” and private agency(ies): reading the female detective of Fin-de-siècle British literature
Get PDFIn April 1894, the Times Column of New Books and New Editions introduced to its readers "a Female Sherlock Holmes" (12). This was Loveday Brooke, in C. L. Pirkis‘s collection The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. Loveday is one of many professional female detectives who traversed the pages of short stories, both serialised and in collections, during the British fin de siècle. The advertisement suggests that Loveday was portrayed as a female version of a masculine character type, typified by Holmes. In this thesis, I question this assumption as part of my literary ‘investigation’ of the fin-de-siècle female detective. Currently, there is only a small body of work on the nineteenth-century female detective and she remains "mysterious" and "little-known" as William Stephens Hayward describes his protagonist in Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864). This thesis employs ‘investigation’ as a structural and methodological framework to perform its own literary analysis and to make an original contribution to extant critical literature. Investigation provides an effective mode for the examination and articulation of how this figure is portrayed. The narrative trajectory of this thesis shares the key stages of the fictional female detective‘s investigation: the identification of evidence, consideration of its significance and meaning, and deduction based thereon. I read three collections of short stories, each featuring a professional female detective, published in Britain between 1893 and 1901, and treat the literary techniques in these texts as ‘clues’ to representation. Thus, double meanings, metaphors, and analogy, are the proof of a complex chain of “legal, social, moral, institutional and gendered practice” that shaped the representation of female detectives (Kestner 1). In Chapter One, I use vision and related concepts in the analysis of C. L. Pirkis‘s Loveday Brooke. The second stage of my literary investigation focuses upon disguise and I read George R. Sims‘s Dorcas Dene, Detective: Her Life and Adventures (1897). Dorcas‘s facility with disguise transcends mere detective work as it is also portrayed as a means of negotiating fin-de-siécle social mores. The final chapter considers the ratiocinations performed by Florence Cusack in the fiction of L. T. Meade (1899-1901). I consider the interaction between the female detective and contemporary discourses about women‘s mental faculties. Each chapter explores a different element of the female detective‘s investigation, revealing the ways in which Pirkis, Sims and Meade use elements of the detective plot to engage with, and subtly counter, contemporary gender discourses. Each detective transcends the proposed status of a “Female Sherlock Holmes,” as each is an important character in her own right. The detective plot essays female professionalism and independence, expanding the roles allocated to women in nineteenth-century British fiction.Thesis (M.Phil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2016
The Voyager's Sublime: Kodachrome and Pacific Tourism
Get PDFThis chapter outlines the vast rise in tourist numbers on the seas coincided with the arrival of simpler, hands-on means for capturing the journey's 'fascinating sights' and 'colorful peoples' in moving images, leaving behind an unprecedented visual record of the Pacific tourist experience. Image production and consumption are linked to the construction of modern selves: indeed amateur filmmaking, Patricia R. Zimmermann has convincingly shown, was closely tied in the first half of the twentieth century to the assertion of patriarchal, bourgeois and familial self-identities. In amateur films shot on Pacific voyages, color stock would have been chosen for strategic reasons, ideally to supply an impact surpassing what Maxim Gorky referred to as the 'mute, grey' life offered by black and white pictures. By the 1920s and into the early 1930s, this emerging imperial identity was largely structured around a westward-gazing Pacific expansionism, further popularized after First World War through an 'avalanche' of South Seas-themed literary and cinematic fantasy
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