Description
TitleCorporeal language: the material embodiment of linguistic liminality
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-05 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (vii, 54 pages)
DescriptionThis thesis explores how language and materiality encounter each other, shaping the world and how we conceive of it. Language has historically been developed for colonial and imperial purposes, so it inherently excludes people of color, women and queer people as meaning-making subjects. Language in its normative capacity, is also not equipped to reify the complex and dynamic material and social realities of these subjects. However, at the hands of these subjectivities, language as a fundamental mode of production of knowledge, is challenged; its codes and conventions are rewritten, and its semantic and linguistic rationale is disrupted as a strategic and intentional maneuver at dismantling hegemonic power structures. The exploration of moments of rupture, dissonance and disconnect where the material and the linguistic does not coincide, allow for relational, partial, contradictory and discontinuous affectivity and act as sites of generation that produces agential identity formation for these subjectivities. This unsettles the coherent, continuous and unitary conditions of the Western Liberal Human/Self, giving rise to the possibilities of alternative modes of production of knowledge and epistemologies, that work to create new non-identitarian, non-unitary reconfigurations of be-ing human. The project sets up a theoretical framework in the first chapter that guides the critical analysis of the two primary texts chosen for the research. The second chapter focuses on Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, exploring the untranslatability between physical embodiment and linguistic representation. The third chapter is based on Arundhuti Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, analyzing how the queering of literary language can render non-heteronormative bodies visible and portray the vibrant performance of their gender expression. Both of these works signify transformative sites of meaning-making, where newer ways of conceiving, configuring and embodying otherized subjectivities can be discovered.
NoteM.A.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD graduate
LanguageEnglish
CollectionCamden Graduate School Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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