Epp, Michael ME

This thesis examines Beyoncé's art within the context of Black feminist thought, specifically focusing on how her work reflects and contributes to the themes of sisterhood, female empowerment, and intersectionality. A comprehensive analysis of her songs and performances will demonstrate how Beyoncé's art advocates for unity, female empowerment, particularly for Black women, and encourages sisterhood and support. The results reveal that Beyoncé's art serves as a powerful tool to challenge societal norms, address racial and gender inequalities, and advocate for justice, especially in the lives of Black women. Through her music and performances, Beyoncé has become a powerful example of using popular music as a medium for social change and cultural empowerment. This research highlights the significance of her contributions to the ongoing conversations surrounding race, gender, and socioeconomic factors, underlining the powerful influence of her art in encouraging a more inclusive society.

Author Keywords: Beyoncé, Black Feminist Thought, Female Empowerment, Gender inequalities, Intersectionality, Sisterhood

The goal of this dissertation is to formulate a critique of embodiment through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and in the context of digital media and intelligent technologies. Along with psychoanalysis, our research methodology and philosophy are informed by Badiou's philosophy of the event, Stiegler's philosophy of technics and infrastructuralism in media studies. Our study aims to uncover and articulate the implicit conditioning by the primordial trauma constitutive of the subject's encounters with the medium. In our analysis of embodiment, we make extensive use of psychoanalytic concepts such as: the breach, the lack, the signifier, the construction of the object, the object-a, the transitional object, fetishism and phobia. Each of the four parts of the dissertation approaches the topic from a specific angle, such as the theoretical critique of the basic concepts of the subject and object, the function of the metaphor in the context of intelligent technologies, the role of technological infrastructure in the embodiment of the trauma, the construction of a transitional object such as a pop song in the context of technological dystopianism. We demonstrate that the cognitivist presumption concerning the pivotal role of intellectual motivation behind the subjective attachment to information technologies can be significantly shaken from the point of view of the psychoanalytic understanding of drives and jouissance. On the basis of Alain Badiou's argument, we show the limitations of structurally-determined forms of embodiment considered by psychoanalysis and draw a dividing line between them and the more rare cases of the subjectivation by events suggested by Badiou's theory. We discuss Badiou's concept of the work of truth as an advanced alternative to the psychoanalytic concept of the object and the paradigm of the construction of the (transitional) object. We distinguish the Badiouian concept of the event from the idea of technological/digital disruption, on the one hand, and correlate the latter with the problems discussed in psychoanalysis such as the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the crisis of the paternal metaphor along with the problems of the futurity and the disruption of intergenerational communication discussed by Bernard Stiegler on the other.

Author Keywords: Badiou, digital media, Lacan, metaphor, transitional object, work of truth