CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Poza Poyatos, Alberto |
|---|---|
| Title | Phantastic Futurities: Towards A Fluid Aesthetics Of Desire. An Affective queering of Li Ang's short story 'Curvaceous Dolls' |
| Summary | In this thesis I want to offer an affective reading of Li Ang 李昂 short story “Curvaceous Dolls” (“Yǒu qūxiàn de wáwa 有曲 ;線ݨ 4;娃Z 03;”) (1987). My project is motivated by a queer (kù’er 酷兒) movement that was already contesting the normalizing forces of the taxonomical model of identity in Taiwan since the 90’s. Following this kù’er discourse, I aim to challenge the homophobic reticent poetics that shrouds popular discourses towards LGBTQI people and usually co-opts queer literatures with the purpose of either normalizing its characters — albeit through abjection — or with that of portraying them as samples of the decadent values brought about by modernity. I demonstrate that departing from a skeptical stance regarding the usefulness of identity categories allows the reader to potentially engage in the interpretation of 80’s and 90’s Taiwan queer literatures from a position that can be used against the aforementioned aesthetical-ethical silent tolerance and its invisibilizing and degrading results. “Curvaceous Dolls” is a Taiwanese fictional text that has been received in the English speaking world mostly as the tale of repressed lesbian desire assuming that such a labelling was a progressive move that would visibilize the character and give her a consistent significance. I consider that this story serves as a good reminder that actually, oppression usually starts in the apparatus through which meaning is acquired in a phallogocentric system. As I argue, the theoretical presupposition of her lesbianism has rendered the female character intelligible under an identity based model at the cost of making the reader blind to her fertile affective world. To avoid the constraining effects of identity categories I look at the 1997 edition of Howard Goldblatt’s English translation from 1986 through affect theory, psychoanalysis’ object-relations theory and French feminist philosophy. Through self-tailored concepts such as semiotic discourse and borrowing others such as “phantasy” — from Melanie Klein, who considers the concept encompasses ideas but also bodily feelings — my work shows that staying away from an understanding of identities as the materialization of patterns of desire and focusing instead in the character’s wishing experiences, their iterable affective components and their role in the character’s development is actually a more effective way to visibilize the protagonist and account for her agency. My contributions are thus twofold, first as a literary interpretation with the political purpose of challenging the normativizing identity-based model and also theoretical inasmuch as I bring biologicist and psychoanalyst views on subject formation into conversation under the rubric of the affective and the semiotic meaning. Eventually, this leads my argument to an understanding of “phantasy” as that which not only affects the development of the subject — the character in my textual analysis — due to its past affective experiences but more importantly, as something that enables her to imagine an alternative future based on them. |
| Supervisor | Timar, Eszter; Eliasova, Vera |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/poza-poyatos_alberto.pdf |
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