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" Towards a Local Queer Aesthetics: "
Ula, Duygu
Aleksic, Tatjana
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1105563
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2314066909
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| Main Entry
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Aleksic, Tatjana
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Ula, Duygu
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| Title & Author
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Towards a Local Queer Aesthetics:\ Ula, DuyguAleksic, Tatjana
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| College
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University of Michigan
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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226
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| Abstract
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Towards a Local Queer Aesthetics: Queer Cultural Productions from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Turkey examines how non-normative sexualities are depicted, formulated and negotiated outside of North America and Western Europe through an analysis of queer contemporary art, film and other cultural productions from the Western Balkans. I position these cultural productions both within their historical, political, cultural and religious contexts and within queer studies broadly defined, in order to make explicit the dynamics between nation states and sexual minorities, and between local and global discourses of gender and sexuality. Taking my close readings of individual cultural productions as a starting point, I contend that representations of non-normative sexualities are embroiled in local ethnic, political, religious and cultural dynamics, which shape the ways in which sexual minorities perform and negotiate their identities. I also argue that these cultural productions contribute to the creation of a distinctly “local queer aesthetics,” which I propose as a new theoretical framework to disrupt the western-centric formulations of queerness that dominate queer theory. In my individual chapters, I interrogate the impact of state institutions such as legislature, censorship boards and ministries on Turkish cinema and Turkish contemporary art; analyze the relationship between sexual identity and ethnic and national belonging through my readings of Zenne by directors Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper and Go West by Ahmed Imamović; investigate how female homoerotic and homosexual intimacies in Balkan and Turkish films like Fine Dead Girls and Vicdan disrupt national scripts; and propose a new theoretical framework of a “local queer aesthetics” to interpret the work of queer artists such as Nilbar Güreş working in the region, contribute to the field of queer visual studies more broadly. I frame these queer cultural productions as a visual archive in conversation with queer of color theory and queer theory from the global south. To that end, I draw on the scholarship of theorists such as Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, Anjali Arondekar, Geeta Patel and José Esteban Muñoz to explore the possibilities local archives and area studies afford us for challenging the seemingly universal premises of Western European and North American queer theory and theorizing queerness anew. This project offers a new comparative perspective in that it brings together countries that are neither completely disconnected from nor informed solely by the academic and public discourses of gender based in Western Europe and North America, and whose discourses of gender and sexuality have been shaped deeply by their individual nation building projects. Reading queer cultural productions from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Turkey together offers us a transnational and interdisciplinary methodology that eschews binary East/West comparisons and that highlights the theoretical, artistic, cinematic and activist possibilities that arise from sustained and in-depth attention to local and transnational queer contexts.
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Comparative literature
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Film studies
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LGBTQ studies
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