Abstract
This study explores the historicisation of gender-queerness. Acknowledging the task as both intrinsically impossible and simultaneously essential, the thesis holds these seemingly oppositional positions in productive, fricative tension. It approaches the research through and with the body - specifically the queer, trans*, performing body.Via accounts of my performances, visual, installation, photographic and live artworks, and the improvisatory, emergent and unruly methods engaged in their creation, I demonstrate how creative methods and embodied and performative practices can generate ‘substantial new insights’ (Nelson, 2013) into historicised gender-queerness. I propose visceral and affective experience as valid ways of knowing, in the context of queer and trans theory, arguing for a queer, creative, trans*historiographic praxis centred on the performing, gender-queer(ing) body. I situate this body within the material cultures and practices that construct and surround it - as a tool, a method, a bio-temporal site of resistance and an embodied an-archive.
Starting from Heyam’s assertion that “the battle for trans rights today is being fought on the battlegrounds of history” (2022, p.23) I respond to their question, “When we talk about trans history, what are we even talking about?”(2022, p.2), and Halberstam’s provocation, asking “what it would mean to build a set of interlocking histories around people who regularly and sometimes deliberately fall out of the historical record?” (2017, p.9). In response, I argue for a re-thinking and re-feeling of how we do history.
Discussing challenges facing researchers of queer and trans history, and how practitioners address these through historiographic approaches that queer or trans the research process itself, I draw on Freeman, Pryor and Lorenz, whose work concerns the historiographic potential of embodied and performance practices in relation to queer and subaltern histories. I apply Freeman’s concept of erotohistoriography (2010) and Lorenz’s epistemology of drag: radical, abstract, transtemporal (2012).
The thesis contextualises and curates a body of performance-based artworks created over the course of the project, deploying a bricolage of creative practices in conversation with critical theory, to evoke quasi-dramatic experience and affective response. Closet Dramas contextualises a photographic series as performance-for-camera-or-ghosts – a temporally queering process trading in opacity and failure as queer strategies (Anna T., 2020, Halberstam, 2011). Too Solid Flesh documents and expands on a performance-lecture, channelling early modern concepts of embodiment through the contemporary gender-queer body. Pricklings I & II document two durational performances that stage queer and trans bodies as sites of polyvocal, transtemporal conversation through citational practices and codes of gesture and materiality. Fag Ends de-centres the body and the human, foregrounding subaltern materials, investigating mudlarking as counter-archival practice, and communal craft practices as an intrinsically trans methodology (Vaccaro, 2015).
Date of Award | Oct 2025 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Ailsa Grant Ferguson (Supervisor), P.A Skantze (Supervisor) & Kate Aughterson (Supervisor) |