Eddy, Charmaine

This thesis examines how co-creators Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro's 2014 graphic work, Bitch Planet, is in all conceivable ways a seminal and prescient example of — to use their term — "non-compliance" in the comics form and industry. From its inception as a feminist dystopia, written by a white woman and illustrated by a Black man, in an industry that is over-represented by white men, Bitch Planet is a prime example of activist comics that is situated perfectly within the "Blue Age" of comics, to use the term coined by comic scholar Adrienne Resha. This is evident in the main narrative of Bitch Planet in which, in an industry still over-represented by white characters, the main cast of characters are four Black women and one Japanese-American woman, each of whom we see come up against a theologically patriarchal white supremacist system that imprisons them for crimes that are gendered, racialized, classist and ableist. DeConnick and De Landro's collaboration with other artists extends from Laurenn McCubbin's satirical paratextual in-universe advertisements on the back page of each comic which complement Bitch Planet's main narrative to an invitation to world- building to the greater comic community, allowing creators with marginalized identities to craft short comic stories that satirically and deeply explore the socio-political issues developed in the main narrative of Bitch Planet. The final act of "non-compliance" comes out of the expansion of authorship of Bitch Planet to the readership via the letters pages, and beyond: highlighting readers' Twitter messages, connecting with them through Tumblr, and posting pictures of fan "non-compliant" tattoos within the pages of Bitch Planet.

Author Keywords: Bitch Planet, comics, critical race studies, dystopia , gender studies, intersectional feminism

This thesis considers the fanfiction genres of slash-fiction, and Alpha/Beta/Omega fiction through an analysis of fandom's embedded gift economy structures. Previous research on fanfiction and fandom structures have often characterized the gift economy nature of these spaces as countercultural and as separate from the frequent exploitation inherent in economic-based systems. There has been less attention paid to considering the potential disruptions that can come with unregulated and large-scale sharing. This thesis undertakes a critical discourse analysis of Alpha/Beta/Omega slash-fiction with a focus on commodity fetishism to reveal how the subgenre's relationship with the fanfiction gift economy complicates and at times counters the conception of these spaces as a 'queer utopia.' The purpose of this research is to dismantle traditional archetypes within Alpha/Beta/Omega fanfiction by exploring how male Omegan characters become fetishized cultural commodity objects internally through interactions with Alpha characters and externally through the desires of fanfiction readers and writers.

Author Keywords: Alpha/Beta/Omega, Commodity Fetishism, Fanfiction, Gift Economy, Queer Theory, Slash-fiction

The following thesis problematizes different theories of subject formation in relation to morality, accountability, and consciousness raising. Focusing on the conditions subjects emerge in, I argue that socially transformative subjectivities emerge in movement through spaces. The theoretical discussion departs from the premise that morally accountable subjectivities drive social change. The politics of positionality that anchor the subject in a particular social location conceptualize morality as the result of critical consciousness raising. The causal nature of the relationship between the subject's ability to reflect back on itself and its moral capacity is problematic for it leaves the reflective subject in a position of epistemic and moral authority. Rather, a subject who does not fully know itself nor the conditions of its being has the ability to engage in moral inquiry. Grounding subject formation in epistemic uncertainty construes the subject as inherently accountable to other unknowing subjects. Transformative subjectivities emerge out of epistemic resistance and uncertainty. The particular understanding of morality that underlies the rethinking of my moral subject emanates from its relational constitution. A morality of care prioritizes the responsibilities a subject has to others. In the context of Covid-19, relational subjects act in accordance with a morality of care that leads them to intervene in the lives of others who are threatened by the virus and left unprotected by institutional structures. The desire to interfere is cultivated when subjects emerge in ontological fields generated through epistemic intervention. One way to create such interventions is through counter-hegemonic cultural production such as works of art.

This thesis examines what the term "transgender narrative" represents at this particular time and location. I do this by examining various methods of transgender storytelling through different forms of media production, including autobiography, film, novels, and online platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube. In chapter one, I look at the production of novels and the value system by which they are judged ("gender capital") in transgender publics and counterpublics. In chapter two, I examine the history of the autobiography, along with the medical history closely associated with transgender identity and bodily transformation. The third chapter examines notions of violence and memorial behind the deaths of transgender people and the ways in which certain political revolutions are formed within a counterpublic. I deconstruct varying notions of identity, authorship, and cultural production and critically examine what it means to be transgender and what it means to tell stories about transgender people. I will conclude with how these stories are being shaped through social media to become more innovative and move away from the rigid value system of gender capital previously mentioned.

Author Keywords: autobiography, gender, sex, social media, transgender, transsexual

Despite - or perhaps because of - her popularity as a best-selling poet, the work of Mary Oliver has been minimized and marginalized within the academy. Nevertheless, Oliver's readership is an expansive and devout one made up of a wired yet insular North American public in search of reconnecting with the natural world. I propose that through Oliver's poetry readers access the affective, sensory responses to nature first encountered during childhood. This return to "the child" is deliberately used by various publics to share communal goals. Drawing from such frameworks as ecocritical and trauma theory, I explore environmental memory, ecstatic places, and the sensuousness of nature and language to consider ways in which diverse publics claim and use Oliver's work. I provide a close reading of selections of Oliver's poems to argue that her work's appeal speaks to a revived perception of the necessity of nature to the human spirit

Author Keywords: Attentiveness, Childhood, Language, Mary Oliver, Nature Poetry, Senses

This thesis explores the work of Black queer authors who write and reproduce cities in their texts. James Baldwin and Dionne Brand create knowable and readable spaces of the cities in which they write. By studying the work of these two authors, this thesis seeks to understand how Black queer people navigate city spaces, and how Black queer authors create a literary imaginary about the cities in which their novels are set. Thus, the cities of New York and Toronto become knowable sites through the novels of Dionne Brand and James Baldwin. Using Black queer theory, Black diaspora theory, and Black literary theory, this thesis engages with the novels, essays, and interviews of James Baldwin and Dionne Brand to determine that urban spaces are both liberatory and traumatic for Black queer people.

Author Keywords: Baldwin, Black Queer Studies, Black Women, Brand, Diaspora Studies, Lesbian

The overarching argument of this manuscript concerns Lacanian Realism, that is, the Lacanian theory of the Real. Initially, my argument may seem quite modest: I claim that Lacanians have been preoccupied with a particular modality of the Real, one that insists on interrupting, limiting, or exceeding the various orders or agencies of the human mind. The implications of such a position are worth considering. For example, one must, as a consequence of holding this position, bracket questions pertaining to Things outside of the Symbolic and Imaginary psychical systems. Careful study shall expose the extent to which this position has infuenced each of the major felds inspired by Jacques Lacan: clinical psychoanalysis, radical political philosophy, and mathematics or topology. My task has been to explore the consequent occlusion which psychoanalysis has suffered in each of these three felds and to tease out the possibility of a return to the Real.

Author Keywords: Alain Badiou, Anarchism, Hysteria, Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis, Slavoj Zizek

The future-poetry of Dennis Lee published in Testament (2012) is the culmination of four cycles of creativity in his lifetime, each seeking a Real beyond the nihilism of technological modernity. Ultimately, Lee wagers the role of the poet and the future of poetic language on Earth on a non-modern that risks entangling the poet who enters void and embodies its meaninglessness.

CHAPTER ONE: To approach this wager, the thesis first identifies the sources in philosophy of a Canadian Romantic modernism embraced by George Grant in collegial exchanges with Dennis Lee during the period of Civil Elegies (1972). Grant elicits a politics out of Nietzsche; Lee extends a poetics out of classical experimental modernism, made intelligible in this thesis by Mallarmé's "cadence" or "rhythm" of things in nothingness and by Beckett's word-play at the impasse of naming. CHAPTER TWO:

To think beyond the mastery of the world by technique is to encounter a choice between silence as assumed by Grant and nonsense as explored by Lee during the period of Alligator Pie (1974) and The Gods (1979). CHAPTER THREE: The example of Paul Celan and his revisiting of Hölderlin provokes Lee to attend upon cadence at the level of the discrete word, an experiment with the dissolution of language and selfhood anticipated in the period of Riffs (1993) and Nightwatch (1996). Here, the undermusic felt

to belong to the life-world (Lebenswelt) impacts as affect, in contrast to Celan's alienated death-walk. CHAPTER FOUR: In the spirit of "post-internet poetry," and by means of the spontaneous polyphonic scoring of cadence, Lee transforms the modernist impasse at the void into a further contradiction, the living of which may allow the poet access to a

non-modern, but at a cost: the loss of poetry to incomprehension and insignificance, the reduction of the poet to a medium of the void, the dissolving of structure into materialities colliding in chance.

Author Keywords: Dennis Lee, George Grant, Nonsense, Paul Celan, Technological Modernity, Void

This dissertation utilizes the psychoanalytic theories of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva as a lens through which to read the novels of American author Samuel R. Delany. I argue that concepts proper to Kristeva's work--namely abjection and/or the abject--can provide a way to think what it might mean to be utopian in the 21st century. Delany's novels are received historically, which is to say his work speaks from a certain historical and cultural viewpoint that is not that of today; however, I claim that his novels are exceptional for their attempts to portray other ways of being in the world. Delany's novels, though, contain bodies, psychologies, and sexualities that are considered abject with respect to contemporary morality. Nonetheless, this dissertation argues that such manifestations of abject lived experience provide the groundwork for the possibility of thinking utopianism differently today. Throughout, what I am working toward is a notion that I call Abject Utopianism: Rather than direct attention toward those sites that closely, yet imperfectly, approximate the ideal, one should commit one's attention to those sights that others avoid, abscond, or turn their nose up at in disgust, for those are the sites of hope for a better world today.

Author Keywords: Abject, Delany, Kristeva, Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Utopia