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Papers by Ayanna Dozier

Liquid Blackness, 2015

The use of menstruation and urination in the films, Cycles (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989) and Water ... more The use of menstruation and urination in the films, Cycles (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989) and Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979) affectively engages with the cinematic image of the black gendered body to produce a body that moves beyond the appearance of blackness. I derive my use of affect from Kara Keeling’s conceptualization of the same in The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense.
"Affect . . . is a form of labor that is intrinsic to the body’s self-constitution. While one’s perception measures the possible or virtual action of a thing on one’s body, affection can be understood initially as the moment in which one’s perception ceases to measure an object’s potential action upon one’s body and begins to sketch out the object’s actual action."
To engage with bodily fluids on the level of affect illuminates the ways in which these fluids sketch out a temporal existence of bodily materiality. Through affect, these bodily fluids offer a perspective of the lived experience of the black gendered body; they extend the black body’s spatio-temporal existence and allow for the possibility to view the black body as a lived body, because we see it as a body in time. As Gilles Deleuze elaborates in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “It is through the body that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought. ‘Give me a body then’ is first to mount the camera on an everyday body.” Further, Deleuze states that “the daily attitude is what puts the before and after into the body, time into the body.” Thus, Zeinabu irene Davis and Barbara McCullough use bodily fluids to transgress the representation of phenomenal blackness, by making visible the “fluidity” that is the lived ‘daily’ experience of black bodies.

Pornography is problematic. And yet, pornography’s influence penetrates society and our way of th... more Pornography is problematic. And yet, pornography’s influence penetrates society and our way of thinking and interacting with sex. Classifying the distinction between what type of pornography can be considered containing artistic merit and what type of pornography lacks artistic merit continues to ignite discussion surrounding the validity of pornography. Gloria Steinem once stated that pornography was crude but that erotica bore an intellectual difference. Andrea Dworkin, the author of Pornography: Men Possessing Women, held the argument that pornography by any name is still pornography, and therefore destructive. Understanding this difference remains a frequent topic within the of discourse of pornography. How, where, and when does pornography transcend into art? The examples of when porn becomes art or when art becomes porn exist within institutions, notably, museums. Whether or not the art works merit the recognition of the art world is a separate discussion; the societal impact and acknowledgement is a crucial factor in deciding how pornography should be addressed in the public domain. The purpose of this thesis is not to add to the debate regarding the validity of pornography, but rather to critically engage with the medium as a site of study that has contributed to the production of art that is activist in nature under the frame of the performance of sex: post-pornography.

Conference Presentations by Ayanna Dozier

Visual Culture theorist Alessandra Raengo asserts in her book, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race ... more Visual Culture theorist Alessandra Raengo asserts in her book, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value, that identity representation in art, “ . . . open(s) a chasm in the visual field that makes apparent that seeing is always seeing as.” (Raengo 5) This argument will explore contemporary visual and sonic performative articulations that seek to disrupt surface configurations of identity through the emerging philosophical concept of social aesthetics. In particular, I am interested in examining Steve McQueen’s 1993 video-performance installation piece, Bear, as an attempt to disrupt notions of fixed institutional (academia or societal) configurations of race and gender through its shifting performative gestures via wrestling or dance in conversation with contemporary performative gestures that seek to assert or formulate black ontology. Gestures that, at times, are weighed with historiography of “monstrous” behavior amongst minoritarian individuals. This narrative of destabilization of identity recalls Amelia Jones’ call for a queer-feminist durational viewing that doesn’t fixate identity as singular constructions of being as well as a type of viewing that pushes back against the arguments of existing in an era of “post-identity.” (Jones 90) Following the long historical traditions of black critical institutional resistance and survival, or what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have generatively defined as the undercommons, the shifting performative minoritarian subject has constantly used and reused techniques of survival and resistance through radical performance and thus instances of them performatively becoming the “impossible” Other. George Lewis’ defines Afrological as a form of logics and aesthetic practices that are socially situated and are thus integrated within artistic performative behavior. This analysis will use Lewis’ term and explore how an Afrological aesthetic exists as a tool for enacting self-determination through performance art. This can be seen within the work of Zora Neale Hurston’s embodied archive performative spectacle, Steve McQueen’s video-performance installations, and Shikeith’s digital performative videos, among others. These artists provide performative examples for how we can see and hear the ways in which movement is able to articulate a call for durational viewing that aims to disrupt narratives of fixed gazes and institutional subhuman constructions of identity in relation to the black body.

Amelia Jones asserts in her book, Seeing Differently, that identity is inherently connected with ... more Amelia Jones asserts in her book, Seeing Differently, that identity is inherently connected with art as “art is always already identified,” in doing so she posits and resists against current social and academic discussions that push for an era of “post-identity,” as stated here, “Ending with this debate simply reminds us of the paradox of claims to be beyond identity, which pivot around assumptions based on identifications: we are not by any means post-identity.” Contemporary art collectives such as HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, whose existence highlights how minoritarian subjects are treated and displayed within the art world, further support Jones’ assertion. But, there are other artists who address identity politics in society and art who purposefully position themselves outside of the art world and whose ambiguity of what their practices are further initiates their subjectivity and questions the aesthetics in which art is viewed and or deemed acceptable by. Artists such as Mykki Blanco, CHRISTEENE Vale, and others are combining sound and the visual, through the production of the music video, to illustrate just how problematic identity is in society, videos that will be up for analysis in this argument. In doing so, they are also using touching upon elements of hybridity, disgust, and political refusal as articulated in Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s generative term, and book, The Undercommons. Elements that are intrinsically connected to a sense of queerness to contest normative aesthetic values in art and society that may deem such behavior as “bad-drag,” frank discussions of anal sex, and the explicit use of sexuality as offensive. This argument seeks to look at the intersection between sound and art in relation to contemporary queer performance art through multi-modal practices to question how normative aesthetic relations are permeated throughout society and art practices. In doing so, it attempts to unravel how the normalization of such values can have negative impact on the conception of identity within art and society.

Kinky sex saw an increase in media visibility in the 1940s. From comics to film, the frenzy of bo... more Kinky sex saw an increase in media visibility in the 1940s. From comics to film, the frenzy of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) culture was sneaking into mainstream media outlets to make the subversive visible. This increased attention toward the “kinky” may have occurred because of the diversity with the visual representation of gender and sexuality during the Second World War. Comics provided an easy and cheap outlet for visual BDSM culture in both mainstream and underground outlets, as evident with William Moulton Marston’s creation of Wonder Woman to Joe Shuster’s work on Nights of Horror. But nearly overnight this flourishing of BDSM culture diminished as fetishism was scapegoated as a “sexual perversion” that was a visible threat to the idea of the family. This restructuring led to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954 and the strict enforcement of sexuality in media. The categorization of sexual perversion was a form of widespread sexual anxiety that ultimately influenced the culture of Cold War America, a culture who feared that the decay of the family would lead to queerness, and thus moral and physical destruction within the Atomic Age.

I examine the transgressive performances of posthuman sexuality through the cyborg and the subseq... more I examine the transgressive performances of posthuman sexuality through the cyborg and the subsequent use of the pornokitsch aesthetic in science fiction art. In particular, I will evaluate how contemporary female performance artists use these elements to transgress the values of traditional/conservative “female” sexuality. From Mariko Mori’s cyborg performance in Play With Me to Shu Lea Cheang’s SF pornographic film, I.K.U, both represent the cyborg as sexually available and autonomous, albeit with “garish” decorative elements that make the performance explicitly (porno)kitsch. Pornokitsch, as defined Ugo Volli, refers to the negation of the sensual to the point of decontextualization. This aesthetic negation reduces any eroticism associated with sexuality and redirects the attention from the, in our case, female (sexual) object to subject. Addressing the relationship between the female cyborg and the posthumanities I will take into consideration the influential work of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles as a point of departure to further expand upon my own insight of posthuman sexuality and (gender) performance.

Liquid Blackness, 2015