Date of Award
August 2019
Degree Type
Thesis
Department
Art
Advisor(s)
Jude Lewis
Second Advisor
Juan Juarez
Keywords
art, gender performance, masculinity, materials, queer theory, sculpture
Abstract
Masculine normativity has largely dominated and defined the narratives of art history, including access to privileged tools, skills, and aesthetics. This masculine paradigm has structurally embedded an ideology that promotes and normalizes ideals like order, stoicism, logic, and perfection. My art transgresses normative masculinity in order to expand its conceptualization through use of materials, practices, and performances. I select objects, imagery, and performances which are historically tied to personal experiences, aesthetics, and spaces where I have navigated across norms and traditionally accepted boundaries. These objects function as constructed bodies which articulate nonnormative masculine materials and experiences, and form queer networks of material integration and dialectics. By using technology, disparate media, and skills, the material properties communicate with and against each other through signification, assembly, and material agency, to create nonnormative networks charged with gender performativity and queer identity. This queer methodology of rejecting normalization, both hetero and homonormative, fosters radically creative opportunities to play and to build out a narrative history of experiences, objects, images, and texts that reflect a complex identity, fluid across traditionally normative and masculine conceptualizations. The boundaries of masculinity are being transgressed in order to create a new, more fluid and tolerant conceptualization of masculinity.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Bryant, Ethan Garrett, "Asses Rubbing: Expanding Masculinity Through Gendered Material Networks and Nonnormative Performativity" (2019). Theses - ALL. 356.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/356
