Deconstructing liberated subjects
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Michelle Powell (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Leila Villaverde
Abstract: This dissertation offers a critique of liberatory practices and projects that locate "voice" as the means to and sign of liberation. This work contributes to queer and trans* scholarship on emancipatory practices and offers insights for critical pedagogy. My project situates "voice," and the liberatory projects dependent on it, within a political "economy of vulnerability" that circulates and produces vulnerable bodies. I foreground the transgender student and the quiet student as two types of queer bodies and subjects that are mutually constituted within this economy. Though the pairing of quiet and trans* may seem irregular, considering them together serves as a wedge to get at the larger regime within which the privileging of voice, specific understandings of the body, and contemporary politics of liberation and empowerment operate. I focus in particular on visual and other cultural texts to examine the complex workings of the "economy of vulnerability." This analysis reveals the abstract surveillance machine that produces, for example, both conflicts about trans* access to bathrooms and the politics of school shootings.
Deconstructing liberated subjects
PDF (Portable Document Format)
1575 KB
Created on 5/1/2014
Views: 924
Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2014
- Keywords
- Critical pedagogy, Liberation, Quiet, Transgender, Voice
- Subjects
- Emotions $x Health aspects
- Gender identity
- Transgender people $x Identity
- Discourse analysis