CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Buyuktas, Pinar |
|---|---|
| Title | Agency of the Flesh Humanness, Obscenity, and Death in Bruce LaBruce's Otto; or, Up with Dead People |
| Summary | In my thesis I explore the normative orderings of humanness and sexuality and take issue with the discursive accounts of the possibility of corporeal agency. I focus on the fleshiness of humanness which provides new possibilities in rethinking the body, and it demonstrates that the body is not a monolithic term that can be taken at face value. Thus, my focus is not merely on the agency of the body which is already a central concern in the feminist literature as part of the debates on mind/body distinction; I focus on the fleshiness of humanness and how it gets invoked in relation to death and sexuality by the imagery of the zombie figure. I see the figure of the zombie as a productive antidote to how the human in liberal humanist discourse is commonly defined. I use the fictional figure of the zombie as a conceptual tool to investigate the limits of our thinking about the corporeal realm. I have chosen the director, Bruce LaBruce’s film Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and do a visual analysis of the movie. LaBruce handles the topic in a playful and sarcastic way and provides an alternative approach to exploring the exclusionary workings of normative and binary understandings of livingness through the personal narrative of a zombie. |
| Supervisor | Barát Erzsébet |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/buyuktas_pinar.pdf |
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