American Studies
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Item Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery's Haunting of the Still Image(2019) Mobley, Izetta Autumn; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery’s Haunting of the Still Image interrogates race, disability, slavery, and the visual, arguing for a reorientation of disability studies toward a comprehensive analysis of how Atlantic slavery structured the West’s conceptualization of the abled body. Slavery haunts the aesthetic impulses, discursive engagements, and visual formations that construct both disability and race. Slavery and disability have been historically mutually constitutive, establishing a network of power relations that define how the United States understands citizenship, sovereignty of the body, capital, labor, and bodily integrity. Troublesome Properties’ intervention places photography – specifically nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, cartes de visites, and portraiture –in conversation with race, disability and slavery, inviting a critical look at the social resonance of photographic production. This interdisciplinary project is deeply invested in the nineteenth century and critically considers how visual imagery establishes concepts of disabled and abled bodies. The visual and material analysis of visual culture and photography links my discussion of disability to racially marked bodies, explicitly illustrating how slavery haunts how we see and tie Blackness to disability. The illustrations, photographs, medical records, biographies, and ephemera of conjoined African American twins Millie and Christine McKoy serve as evidence of the troubled definitions of consent, care, property, and exploitation inherent in enslavement, disability, and display. Octavia Butler’s 1979 speculative novel, Kindred, anchors my discussion of the impact of disability on Black disabled women. Black scholars, artists, and historians have consistently employed photography as a visual tool to assert the humanity of Black people. The photographic suite Dorian Gray by Yinka Shonibare, a series that makes overt the parallels between disability and colonialism, are placed in conversation with W.E. B. Du Bois’ American Negro exhibit, demonstrating how race, disability, and the visual construct notions of which bodies matter, when, where, and why. In Troublesome Properties, I argue that we must approach visual production, material culture, and disability studies with the intention to reclaim the marked, raced, gendered, and disabled Black body, using slavery and an optimistic pessimism to construct a complex genealogy for disability studies.Item Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures(2019) Savig, Mary Beth; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Stitches as Seeds: Crafting New Natures” explores how fiber’s material specificity agitates universalizing notions of nature. The interpretive lens is inspired by the relational and iterative processes of much fiber art. Akin to patchwork quilting, the dissertation pieces together disparate practices including collage, needlepoint, paintings, photography, performance, and poetry together with readings of spaces such as museum dioramas, aquariums, sideshows, plantations, and parks. Queer and feminist theorizations of art history, material culture, and new materialisms frame the methodology. Ultimately, the dissertation reflects on how fiber advances more experiential possibilities for addressing urgent issues of social and ecological justice. Each chapter focuses on a fantastical invocation of nature. Allyson Mitchell’s installation Ladies Sasquatch (2006-2010) is a sculptural vignette of erotic and menacing lesbian sasquatches—pieced together with thrifted hobby crafts like macramé and latch hook hangings—cavorting in a utopian wilderness. Aaron McIntosh’s Invasive Queer Kudzu (2013-ongoing) facilitates quilting bees for Southern LGBTQ people to stitch their personal stories onto fabric kudzu leaves. Invasive marshals ever-growing vines of quilted kudzu to invade stereotypes of the American South. Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef (2005-ongoing) merges feminist politics with experimental mathematics to encourage an international network of volunteers to crochet the vibrant, hyperbolic shapes of coral reefs. The crocheted reefs orient their makers towards a radically empathetic perception of nature. As immersive and socially-engaged artworks, they illuminate the questions: Who defines nature and decides what is natural? Specifically, the fiber-based techniques leverage the historical denigration of the medium as a domestic and feminine hobby into a subversive and enduring tool of social activism. The artists’ stitches are like seeds. As they are sewn/sown, they fabricate new natures. These seductively artificial renderings of nature unravel the illusion that nature is actually natural, or neutral from surrounding cultural struggles. As such, the dissertation considers how the artworks entangle notions of the material, the social, and the spatial.Item TRANSATLANTIC DISBELONGINGS: LOCATING LIBERATORY WORLDMAKING PRACTICES IN NIGERIAN DIASPORIC WOMEN’S ART(2018) Akinbola, Patricia; Sies, Mary Cobin; Ater, Renée; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Transatlantic Disbelongings: Locating Liberatory Worldmaking Practices in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art” examines how women artists of the Nigerian diaspora use contemporary visual art, performance, film, and literature to contest and redefine their familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its diasporas. Foregrounding the work of five women artists: Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor, who straddle multiple geographies, identities, and allegiances, this project analyzes how they resist popular understandings of what has been deemed proper conduct for women in Nigeria and its diaspora—a process I call “disbelonging.” My use of disbelonging refers to the process by which female diasporic artists embrace and employ anti-respectability and queerness to recode, remix, and resist oppressive colonial legacies surrounding gender, sexuality, and national belonging in a Nigerian context. Their works depict visual and literary landscapes where women move freely through time and space, engage playfully with one another, prioritize their own desires, and unapologetically embody contradiction and taboo. This dissertation argues that their artmaking is worldmaking, which creates opportunities to reconfigure understandings of transnational flows and unsettles oppressive conceptualizations of community and family to embrace a range of affiliational tensions.Item Archival Body/Archival Space: Queer Remains of the Chicano Art Movement, Los Angeles, 1969-2009(2011) Hernandez, Robert Lyle; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary queer archive methodology I term "archival body/archival space," which recovers, interprets, and assesses the alternative archives and preservation practices of homosexual men in the Chicano Art Movement, the cultural arm of the Mexican American civil rights struggle in the U.S. Without access to systemic modes of preservation, these men generated other archival practices to resist their erasure, omission, and obscurity. The study conducts a series of archive excavations mining "archival bodies" of homosexual artists from buried and unseen "archival spaces," such as: domestic interiors, home furnishings, barrio neighborhoods, and museum installations. This allows us to reconstruct the artist archive and, thus, challenge how we see, know, and comprehend "Chicano art" as an aesthetic and cultural category. As such, I evidence the critical role of sexual difference within this visual vocabulary and illuminate networks of homosexual Chicano artists taking place in gay bars, alternative art spaces, salons, and barrios throughout East Los Angeles. My queer archive study model consists of five interpretative strategies: sexual agency of Chicano art, queer archival afterlife, containers of desire, archival chiaroscuro, and archive elicitation. I posit that by speaking through these artifact formations, the "archival body" performs the allegorical bones and flesh of the artist, an artifactual surrogacy articulated through things. My methodological innovation has direct bearing on how sexual difference shapes the material record and the places from which these "queer remains" are kept, sheltered, and displayed. These heritage purveyors questioned what constitutes an archive and a record, challenging the biased assumption that sexuality was insignificant to the Chicano Art Movement and leaving no material trace. The structure of my dissertation presents five archive recovery projects, including: Robert "Cyclona" Legorreta, Joey Terrill, Mundo Meza, Teddy Sandoval, and VIVA: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles. The restoration of these artists also reveals the profound symbiosis between this circle of artists, Chicano avant-gardism, and the burgeoning gay and lesbian liberation movement in Los Angeles. My findings rupture the persistent heterosexual vision of this period and reveals a parallel visual lineage, one which dared to picture sexual difference in the epicenter of Chicano art production.