This thesis forms an inquiry into the queer figurations that emerge from the general discourse of COC Nederland and their employment in the organisation of queer citizenship. Through a combination...Show moreThis thesis forms an inquiry into the queer figurations that emerge from the general discourse of COC Nederland and their employment in the organisation of queer citizenship. Through a combination of qualitative code analysis and discourse analysis, three main figurations have been identified: 1) The Rights-Holders/non-Rights-Holder, 2) the Victim and 3) the Community Member. Strengthened by various queer, feminist and critical citizenship studies, this thesis uncovers the schemes in which these figurations influence the delineation of citizenship. By diving deep into various encounters between the state and the above-mentioned queer figurations, this thesis shows how queer citizenship is organised. Through these encounters, it is shown how the Dutch state and COC Nederland cooperate in discursive practices of constructing figurations in a semiotic relationship. Examples of encounters that are treated are: equal marital rights, the culturalization of citizenship, the mobilisation of queer victimhood, police presence at Pride and the rainbow symbol.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their...Show moreThis thesis explores Woolf’s relationship with eugenics, illness, and disability, a relationship that is characterized by ambiguity and contradictions, and has divided the critics in their assessment of Woolf’s work in relation to disability and illness. This thesis is an intervention in this debate by analyzing how Woolf conceives of and conceptualizes notions of illness and disability. This thesis further aims to investigate whether she can be considered a proto-crip theorist. It argues that Woolf’s ambiguity and contradiction in her attitudes towards disability allow for and encourage a crip theoretical reading, and that ultimately, Woolf can certainly be called a nascent crip theorist in her rejection of bodily normativity and in her celebration of non-normative bodyminds, as well as in the ways in which she deconstructs ableist ideologies. The result is a thesis that offers us significant insights into how Woolf in particular and modernist art, literature, and culture in general, conceived of disability, but it also allows us to trace the continuities and differences between attitudes toward disability during the early twentieth century and these attitudes in the present day.Show less
Research master thesis | Literary Studies (research) (MA)
closed access
In this thesis I want to create an intersectional, queer intervention in animal studies taking previous animal, critical race studies and queer theory intersections – ecofeminism, material feminism...Show moreIn this thesis I want to create an intersectional, queer intervention in animal studies taking previous animal, critical race studies and queer theory intersections – ecofeminism, material feminism and queer ecology – into account within the context of literary studies and cultural analysis. Therefore, I want to ask: In what way do intersectional alliances – both theoretical and artistic – formed from an animal and queer studies perspective, affirmatively (re)imagine (material) queer intimacies human-nonhuman relations to contribute to an nonanthropocentric framework? To answer this question, I want to employ the term/concept queer as both a critical and productive tool that enables transgression of disciplines and even the academy itself, into the material reality of non-human animals to examine human-animal relations and intimacies.Show less
This research project serves as a case study to examine whether queer theory and traditional iconography can be two distinct yet interrelated entry ways through which a fifteenth century artwork...Show moreThis research project serves as a case study to examine whether queer theory and traditional iconography can be two distinct yet interrelated entry ways through which a fifteenth century artwork can be more cohesively understood. In order to do so it questions how the St Sebastian Triptych (ca. 1493-94) by the Master of the Holy Kinship, at display in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, constitutes meaning as a painting-with-doors in its format and iconography, and how it articulates its own queerness. This research finds that the Triptych should be understood as a ‘panel with doors’. The Triptych contains painted clues on the inner and outer sides of the wings which demarcate the different spaces of the triptych and connect the inner and outer sides. The narration has the form of a ‘representatively hidden narration'. It appears that the St Sebastian Triptych constitutes its meaning through a gendered juxtaposition of the themes ‘martyr’ and ‘healer’ in the outer and inner wings. St Sebastian is both martyr and healer because of Christ, of which he is an image bearer. The outer wings introduce both themes by juxtaposing female martyr saints opposite to male healer saints. This gendered juxtaposition is also present in the inner wings, where it is applied to St Sebastian’s life and death. The tripartite format allowed the Master of the Holy Kinship to thematically oppose the wings, while he used the middle panel as a place of synthesis. The middle panel merges the opposed elements of the inner side wings. The result is a strongly ambiguous middle panel in which the body of St Sebastian forms the axis and apogee. St Sebastian is shown here both as martyr and healer, passive as well as active, feminine yet male. It is this ambiguity which grants this triptych its enchantment and religious and emotional power. This ambiguity is also the reason why the St Sebastian Triptych can be called ‘queer’. The triptych expresses its queerness in the sensuality and ambiguity of St Sebastian’s body in the middle panel, because it transcends the gendered division as presented in the outer wings. By thematizing pain (martyrdom) and redemption (healing), the St Sebastian Triptych ultimately refers back to Christ’s passion and resurrection. The St Sebastian Altarpiece is part of a larger Christian tradition of hagiographies and visual arts in which an overlap between pain and seduction and between fear and desire is frequent.Show less
Bachelor thesis | Film- en literatuurwetenschap (BA)
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Onder zijn pseudoniem Yukio Mishima publiceerde Kimitake Hiraoka de roman Confessions of a Mask. In dit werk dat de basis vormt voor zijn oeuvre legt Mishima relaties bloot tussen identiteit,...Show moreOnder zijn pseudoniem Yukio Mishima publiceerde Kimitake Hiraoka de roman Confessions of a Mask. In dit werk dat de basis vormt voor zijn oeuvre legt Mishima relaties bloot tussen identiteit, subject en samenleving. Mishima benadrukt de problematiek van deze relaties en de crisis die gepaard gaat met hun definiëring. Met behulp van het werk van Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick en Judith Butler wordt duidelijk dat deze centrale crisis in de roman niet simpelweg een constatering is maar tevens een retorisch hulpstuk, een katalysator. Mishima manipuleert middels crisis zowel de tekst als de lezer ter bevordering van zijn ideologische agenda.Show less
