Spectacles of the flesh: The formation of deviancy in visual culture

Yasmin Nair, Purdue University

Abstract

This project examines the conceptual and material formation of deviancy under specific conditions of extreme visibility. Moving through five specific sites where visual technology colludes with the formation of a “deviant” body marked as separate from the norm, the dissertation argues that deviancy is construed and constructed when interlinking and frequently contradictory impulses of power and regimentation enact and offer the body as a visual moment of aberration. Focusing on the apparatuses of visual recognition afforded by print texts, anthropology, photography, cinema, and television, I trace the varying ways in which deviancy is articulated in moments of immense cultural anxiety when certain categorisations of sexual practice and identity, gender, race, and ethnicity threaten normative structures of identification. Because deviancy does not operate in paradigimatically similar ways, my project traces, in each chapter, the specific modes by which this immensely powerful construct operates on both the material and conceptual realms. Chapter 1 forecasts the characteristics that define deviancy, and outlines the conditions under which it occurs. In the process, it serves both as an introduction to the dissertation in outlining the chapters and anticipates specific modes of the articulation of deviancy that are apparent throughout the project such as ephemerality and the disruption of sequentiality. Chapter 2 moves to a piece of archival history that has been categorised as a sodomy trial, the case concerning the Earl of Castlehaven in 1631 England. Here I move away from the fixating of this event as a sodomy trial, arguing that there needs to be a fuller consideration of the issues concerning class and gender that emerged from the trial. I stress that deviancy is not limited to a single body (here that of the sodomite) but conditioned by the bodies and narratives that form around it. Chapter 3 focuses on the eunuch or hijra of India. Locating the photographic and ethnographic impulse to capture or record the site of castration on the eunuch's body, I consider the hijra's role in the formation of narratives of citizenship inflected by nostalgia and a sense of loss. This chapter is followed by my work on the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine where the process of making deviancy visible enters into a discussion inflected by debates on transnational identity, and framed by questions of interpretation and global economy that necessarily enter into any discussion of international film. The dissertation concludes with two chapters on AIDS and television, situating the formation of deviancy within the collusion of technology and an epidemic, furthering my speculation that deviancy is sharply evoked by the interpenetration of visual technology with a conceptual and material formation of the body.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|British and Irish literature|Film studies|American studies|Mass communications

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