Unspectacular Violence: Narrating Trans/Queer Death in Contemporary American Culture

Lee, Christopher

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Lee, Christopher (creator); Rodriguez, Ralph E. (Advisor); Gandhi, Leela (Reader); Quashie, Kevin (Reader); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: visual studies; Contemporary Literature; Transgender theory; Queer Studies
Extent:: ix, 189 p.

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Abstract:: My dissertation explores “Unspectacular Violence,” namely, the registers of anti-queer and racialized injury that fall beyond narratives of individual brutality. To that end, I explore how more broadly-framed motors of harm—for instance, housing insecurity, criminalization, and welfare rollbacks— can be weighed as articulations of targeted violence. By drawing on trans memoirs like Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, as well as visual media like Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel’s film Happy Birthday Marsha!, I identify a cohort of authors and artists—many of them trans and queer people of color—who trouble the central role that individual violence plays in queer media. Through close readings of contemporary trans and queer stories, I work through and against the scripted narratives, genres, and forms by which queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people are relegated to brutal ends. Grappling with the deaths of celebrated trans figures like Paris is Burning’s Venus Xtravaganza and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) founder Marsha P. Johnson, I shift away from carceral and criminal resolutions of individual harm, towards a collective force that protests and confronts the punitive and deathdealing structures underlying trans precarity. The chief aim of my dissertation is to chart the multiple modalities through which trans and queer lives have been subjugated to policing, surveillance, and other institutions of state-sponsored violence, along with the multiple ways that trans and queer communities continue to resist and survive in the face of these overwhelming structures of slow death.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Citation

Lee, Christopher, "Unspectacular Violence: Narrating Trans/Queer Death in Contemporary American Culture" (2021). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:5yztv7x5/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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