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- Creators: Bebout, Lee
- Status: Published
Description
This dissertation examines racism as discourse and works to explicate, through the examination of historical and contemporary texts, the ways in which racism is maintained and perpetuated in the United States. The project critiques the use of generalized categories, such as alt-right, as an anti-racist tactic and notes that these rigid categories are problematic because they cannot account for the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of racist discourse. The dissertation argues that racist discourse that is categorized as mainstream and fringe both rely upon a fundamental framework of rhetorical strategies that have long been ingrained into the social and political fabric of the United States and are based on the foundational system of white supremacy. The project discusses two of these strategies—projection and stasis diffusion—in case studies that examine their use in texts throughout American history and in mainstream and fringe media. “Everyday White Supremacy” contributes to important academic and societal conversations concerning the how the academy and the public use category to address racism, anti-racist practices, and rhetorical understandings of racist discourse. The project argues for shift away from the use of categorical naming to identify racist groups and people towards the practice of identifying racism as discourse, particularly through its rhetorical strategies. This paradigm shift would encourage scholars, and the general population, to identify racism via the processes by which it is propagated rather than its existence within a person or group
ContributorsLadenburg, Kenneth James (Author) / Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Ore, Ersula (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.
ContributorsBryant, Jason (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013