Feminist Impositions: Performing Parasites in Contemporary Digital and Performance Art Fisher, Anna W creator 2012 xiv, 367 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2012) Chun, Wendy Director Joyrich, Lynne Reader Schneider, Rebecca Reader Munoz, Jose Reader Brown University. Modern Culture and Media sponsor theses digital contemporary art ParasitismFeminismPerformance RPB 20121023 engEnglishThe dissertation makes the case that recent digital and performance art practices have compelled a reappraisal of Western feminism, which has become increasingly vulnerable to charges that it is an outmoded analytic for attending to the densely networked set of relations that structure consumption and production within late capitalism. The project tries to imagine what a non-emancipatory, non-progressive, non-autonomous feminism might look like and how experimental art practice offers a site for modeling such a feminist approach. Focusing on U.S. and Western European digital and performance art after 1995, the dissertation asks how experimental art practices have challenged the popular devaluation of feminism, as well as notions of feminist value, following a number of important historical shifts since the ‘60s and ‘70s, when feminist art emerged as a category of cultural production.<br/> <br/> The dissertation advances parasitism as a performative model for surmounting such recent impasses within Western feminist theory. Named by the Greeks (parasitos), the parasite was once a standard character in ancient Greek comedy, complete with its own mask. Rather than an unproductive or superfluous figure, the parasite is an important actor with unique potential for thinking about political questions in an age of interdependent circulation and use. The chapters catalog an arsenal of procedures by which a younger generation of artists has already begun to re-image feminism by performing it back to itself, assimilating its internalized ironies, awkwardness, and equivocality for its tactical gain.<br/>10.7301/Z0Z31WZGIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations