Some of us are “too much.” Too large, too thin, too freaky, too plain, too outspoken, too dark, too light, too old, too vulnerable. Some of our bodies are over-determined, always-already imbued with an excess of meaning. Some of our bodies pose “problems” through their very visibility and corporeality. And, yet, if too is to be excessive, it also means to exceed; to exceed the expectations of that which has been culturally predetermined, the boundaries around normative subjectivity, and the forms and modes of identification that were previously imaginable. Excessive Vision(s): Multi-Mediated Intimacy, Visuality, and the Body is a study of excess as a strategy for creating new forms of sociality. Specifically, I look at how making visible bodies that have been marked as “too much” opens up the possibility for the deployment of marginalized identities in more expansive and fluid ways. This process of intentional re-visioning of the excessive body reveals, in turn, a new way to relate to non-normative bodies that can be grounded in intimacy rather than distance. How do we create the circumstances under which atypical, non-normative, unruly, minoritarian bodies can be the grounds on which to build sociality? One way to do so, I contend, is not through the normalizing, flattening process of turning “difference” into an asset that makes marked bodies “useful” to the logics of the state. Rather, we need to be ale to articulate the multiple and contradictory ways of being in social worlds together. In doing so, the process of becoming—coming into being as a legible body—is troubled and revealed to be a non-static, ongoing engagement with other bodies that are always orienting themselves in new and strange ways. I argue that if “excessive” bodies (fat, black, and queer) engender dis-ease, discomfort and a need to protect the cultural forms and ideologies that construct the Self through exclusion of those disruptive forces, the excessive body is never fully absent and resists the forces of containment and erasure. There is always a remainder, a residue that haunts the margins. This project is concerned with the residual effects and affects of cultural forms that imbue the excessive body with the potential for intimacy and not distance.
Ahmid-Kargbo, Majida,
"Excessive Visions(s): Multi-mediated Intimacy, Visuality, and the Body"
(2018).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/8jrn-1v61
