Pink Triangles, Blue Feelings: Depression in Queer Contemporary Art
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Authors
McDonald, Robin Alex
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
queer , trans , transgender , art , contemporary art , depression , mental health
Alternative Title
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore how depression is represented, communicated, and/or articulated within queer contemporary art—that is, art created by Two-Spirit, Indig(e/i)queer, queer, and/or trans-identified artists or art that possesses a queer sensibility. Understanding depression simultaneously as a category of psychiatric diagnosis, a historically contingent discourse, and a short form for “bad feelings,” I consider how depression’s histories and contemporary iterations intersect with theories of queer and trans identity formation, the queer abject, gay shame, camp, queercrip temporalities, queercrip phenomenology, dominant popular and academic discourses of LGBT suicide, and various forms of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anchoring these considerations in analyses of performances, video, paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, photography, poetry, and agitprop produced primarily within the lands now called Canada and the United States, I seek to identify in these works what Gregg Bordowitz calls “queer structures of feeling”—that is, the cultural strategies that queer people have invented in order to survive, which leave their traces on subsequent generations of queer cultural production.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.