Browsing by Subject "Spectatorship"
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Item Drumming Asian America : performing race, gender, and sexuality in North American taiko(2011-05) Ahlgren, Angela Kristine; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Dolan, Jill, 1957-; Paredez, Deborah; Jones, Joni L.; Wong, DeborahTaiko is a highly physical and theatrical form of ensemble drumming that was popularized in 1950s Japan and has been widely practiced in Japanese American and other Asian American communities since the late 1960s. Taiko’s visual and sonic largesse—outstretched limbs and thundering drums—contrasted with pervasive stereotypes of Asians as silent and passive. This dissertation uses ethnographic participant-observation, archival research, and performance analysis to examine how North American taiko performance produces and is produced by the shifting contours of racial, gender, and sexual identity and community. Taiko groups create, re-shape, and challenge familiar notions of Asia, America, and Asian America through their public performances and in their rehearsal processes. While sometimes implicated in Orientalist performance contexts, taiko players use performance strategically to commemorate Asian American history, to convey feelings of empowerment, and to invite feminist, anti-racist, and queer forms of spectatorship. This dissertation explores taiko’s roots in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, its implications for 1990s multiculturalism, as well as its intersections with contemporary queer communities. My analysis focuses on three case study groups whose origins, philosophies, and geographic locations offer a diverse view of North American taiko and the Asian American/Canadian communities with which they are associated. Chapter One considers how San Jose Taiko’s early articulation of their identity as an Asian American taiko group continues to influence its practices and performances, particularly their taiko-dance piece, “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” and their national tours. Chapter Two examines how Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko negotiates its members’ diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities within a Midwestern context that values multiculturalism. Chapter Three considers how the all-women’s group Jodaiko conveys Asian American lesbian identity and invites queer spectatorship through theatrical performance choices and its members’ everyday gender performances. My analysis extends from my ethnographic participant-observation, which includes personal interviews, attendance at workshops and performances, and spending time with performers; archival research in formal collections, groups’ internal documents, and my personal archive of taiko programs, posters, photographs, DVDs, and other ephemera; and performance analysis that is informed by my twelve years of experience as a taiko performer.Item Malice in Wonderland : the perverse pleasure of the revolting child(2010-05) Scahill, Andrew, 1977-; Staiger, Janet; Kearney, Mary; Fuller, Jennifer; Benshoff, Harry; Mickenberg, Julia“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.