Copyright Alanna Beroiza 2018 ABSTRACT
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! Copyright Alanna Beroiza 2018 ABSTRACT Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems by Alanna Beroiza From delivery rooms, to bathrooms, to celebrity boudoirs on the cover of Vanity Fair, gender, in its mainstream, contemporary definitions, circulates around visually articulated binary imaginaries of bodily materiality. These formulations depend on the visibly sexed body to act as a site of subjective “truth,” and this dependence only intensifies as medical, legal, educational, and popular cultural institutions increasingly recognize gender as “fluid.” Without seeking to further entrench the dominance of this model, neither does Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems seek to challenge it—at least, not outright. Instead, this dissertation examines the systems of representation that both enable the visible body to function as a site of subjective “truth” and expose it as a stand-in for the subject in mainstream formulations of gender. The project employs psychoanalytic and systems theoretical modes of critique to investigate the ways in which visual media technologies such as photographs, digital images, and films, both suture and disclose the subjective fiction of gender in their representations of bodily materiality. Additionally, the project explores the ways aural modes of representation—specifically, the voice—both radically undermine, and intensely reify, the totalizing illusions of the visual that sustain the fiction of the body as a material truth in mainstream gender. In critical analyses of texts that range from Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair, to archival images from the Documentary Collection at the Kinsey Institute, to Wynne Neilly’s photographic installation at Ryerson Image Centre, to films by Pedro Almodóvar, Sebastián Lelio, and Chase Joynt, the project demonstrates how scopic and aural systems of representation facilitate the conceptual collapse of gender into sex and visually articulated bodily materiality. In the same breath, these analyses also demonstrate—and the project as a whole insists—that this reductive, yet pervasive, model for gender is but one of many possibilities for understanding subjects and the organization of their experiences and desires. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For this dissertation, I owe thanks to a network of supportive mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. I will never forget the day I met Judith Roof. Already jet lagged, I was subsequently stunned by the discussion that she and I had about gender at Rice’s new student recruitment day in 2011. Seven years later, that conversation has morphed into this dissertation and so much more. Her critical feedback and unflagging encouragement have enabled me to do my best and most creative work. I am deeply grateful for her mentorship. Timothy Morton has been a supportive second reader and a demonstration of kindness in thinking. Melissa Bailar has far exceeded her role as my third reader. I am thankful for her thoughtful comments on my work, the pedagogical opportunities and training she has given me, and for her encouragement of, and collaboration on, several of my artistic research projects. One of the greatest pleasures of this project has been the opportunity to share it with a host of colleagues and friends along the way. These include Derek Woods, Lorena Gauthereau, John Ellis-Etchison, Lindsay Chappell, Laura Richardson, Sophia Hsu, Hannah Biggs, Kristina McDonald, and Beth Hupfer. I owe a special thanks to Alex Adkins, Justine Bakker, Roma Hernandez, Joe Carson, Sydney Boyd, and Ben Kozicki. I count you each as colleagues and dear friends—thank you for weathering the many ups and downs with me. Kara Grant, thank you for helping me to find my voice. To the Ciccarelli-Cornetta family, thank you for welcoming me into your fold and for being my cheerleaders. To my father, Ricardo, thank you for your support. To my mother, Kathleen, and grandmother, Margaret, thank you for a lifetime of love and encouragement. Kevin !vi Ryan, I wish you could see this. David Forrest and Courtney Stock, thank you for your lasting friendship and support. Juliet Morgan, you are my bedrock. Theo, my love, this project led me to you, and you have held my hand through it ever since. I am so happy to share this, and my life, with you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures 20 Chapter 2 Sex, Suture, Cinema 64 Chapter 3 What is Gender Heard? 105 Conclusion 145 Bibliography 151 !1 Introduction On April 17, 2016, writer, activist, and performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon published a short blog post, “Push Harder! Beyond Nonbinary Inclusion,” that concluded with a series of questions and an affirmative statement: How did all of the complexity in the world, all of its difference, all of its context become reduced to two categories only? How did we come to think it was okay to link and define our sexual orientations to binary gender (let alone organize entire movements around them)? How did trans politics come to be about trans people “gaining rights” and not everyone divesting from gender to begin with? How are we upholding institutions, rituals, cultures, politics, and ideas that further entrench the gender binary and facilitate violence against nonbinary people? How did gender become so essential that it has become required for humanity? These questions are not rhetorical. They have answers. And nonbinary people have been on the frontlines of providing them. Vaid-Menon’s questions and statement are a useful point of entry into the problem of gender not simply for their straightforward assertions that gender, in its binary manifestations, is a reductionist mechanism for controlling desires, sexes, bodies, and subjects, but also for the somewhat convoluted ways in which they present these assertions. With their successive repetition of the interrogative “how,” the questions have a lulling effect. They string their readers along from one unresolved issue to the next, never pausing for consideration or comment on what relevance they might have to preceding questions, or to the subject of binary gender more generally. This formally !2 induced absorption goes unnoticed until Vaid-Menon exposes it with their assertion that, “These questions are not rhetorical.” By negating the rhetorical value of the questions, Vaid-Menon does the double duty of pointing out the ways the questions’ formal organization compels readers to invest in them, regardless of their content or answerability, and insisting on their urgency and practicality. They also evoke a comparison between the questions’ hypnotic flow and the often unknowing or unthinking ways in which individuals participate in “institutions, rituals, cultures, politics, and ideas that further entrench the gender binary.”1 Denying the value of form only underscores its significance—not just for this set of questions, but also for the concept of gender that they interrogate. For Vaid-Menon, gender is a structural phenomenon. It is an apparatus that, by way of binary distinction, simplifies individuals and their concatenations of desires into two categories. As they write in the opening sentences of their post, the reduction that gender’s structural mechanism imposes on individuals presents a problem because “there are people in the world who are neither men nor women. It’s not just that they don’t ‘identify’ as men nor women. They are just simply not men nor [sic] women. They are not wrong; the gender binary is wrong.” Insofar as the words “men” and “women” stand in for two unachievable cultural, psychic, and anatomical ideals, Vaid-Menon is not wrong either. At least, they are not wrong in their affirmation that there are people who exist who are neither men nor women. And, they are not wrong to assert that binary categorization produces and maintains inaccurate descriptions of human subjects. Where 1 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!” !3 Vaid-Menon becomes curiously entangled in their own line of argumentation is in their claim that certain individuals “are just simply not men nor [sic] women.”2 Whether or not Vaid-Menon is making a kind of essentialist claim about this group of people (which is certainly possible, given their clarification that the non-woman and non-man status of these individuals is not related to any process of identification), what they are, unmistakably, doing is creating a binary distinction between this group of people and those individuals who would fit within the categories of “men” and “women.” In their insistence on the existence of a non-binary category of people, Vaid-Menon creates an additional binary that is as inaccurate as the one upon which they aim their critique. Binaries are convenient tools for reducing complexity because they set up an asymmetrical oppositional structure where one side is always defined in terms of the other. They construct hierarchical relations by defining the other in terms of the one and presenting this distinction as somehow objective, or “natural.” This is Luce Irigaray’s point in her essay, “This Sex Which is Not One.” Something like “‘feminine’ vaginal passivity” can be taken for granted in a heterosexist system of sexual difference, because this binary distinction operates “on the basis of masculine parameters.”3 “Man” and “woman,” “male” and “female,” “masculine” and “feminine” are not equally defined terms in these distinctions. And, this logic of the binary applies equally to the distinction between “binary” and “non-binary” as it does to any other binary distinction. In each 2 Vaid-Menon, “Push Harder!,” emphasis mine. 3 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is, 23. !4 case, the latter is defined in terms of the former. Or, rather, the latter is defined as that which the former is not. As Judith Roof writes, “the other is a complement, a site of displacement, where the shadowy and fantasmatic ‘not all’ and ‘not I’ lurk their looks back.”4 This “not all” status has a complex role, especially when one considers it in the Lacanian sense, in organizing systems of desire; however, that complexity does not hold up to further structural definition.