Queer technologies of relating bodies, voices, and psychological inquiry.
Item
-
Title
-
Queer technologies of relating bodies, voices, and psychological inquiry.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9959198
-
identifier
-
9959198
-
Creator
-
Lang, Jonathan Sanders.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Joseph Glick
-
Date
-
2000
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Psychology, Developmental | Psychology, Social | Sociology, Theory and Methods
-
Abstract
-
Worried that academic writing about sexed and gendered identities might result in the silencing of minority voices, I consider how the development of gays & lesbians may challenge the disciplinary structures of academia in the dominant culture. Foucault said, to learn about the dominant culture, study those it has marginalized. What I have done with Foucault's legacy is to show how a queer standpoint may expose the "closeted" nature of bodies and voices in psychological inquiry. In doing this I develop a symptomatic reading of non-gay identified academic discourse, thus showing that the activity of queer bodies and voices may be understood as a(n unconscious) location where disguised and symbolic problem-solving can transpire to the benefit of all.;The nature/nurture controversy, a founding dichotomy of psychology, has been writ large in the humanities and social sciences wherein debates occur as to whether human nature has an essence determined by biological endowment, or is socially constructed. Post-structural thinking claims that nature is just another socially constructed concept. Reducing nature to culture is reminiscent of effacing the body in favor of the mind: the history of psychology is marked by this tendency, manifesting recently in discursive psychology and in queer theory. Criticizing these approaches, I develop queer technologies that examine the ritualizing and performing of queer desire, and analyze the structural, discursive, cybernetic, and semiotic coding of queer bodies showing how gay longing for community expressed in queer embodied voices and manifested in the situation of dark body erotics may permit the recovery of materially significant others. Although differences in colonized bodies/voices are described/portrayed within a linguistic context or discursive order, our identities are not merely an effect of language---not solely a matter of concepts alone---but, rather our development is a complex set of material processes of adjustment and self-production and self-regulation resulting from our historical constitution in evolved species contexts and the onto-genetic specificity of our individuated lives. The histories of oppression make our bodies materially distinct from each other. Though semiotically significant (i.e., readable), different oppressions make experience of our respective identities opaque and in their extremes of development, incomprehensible to the minds of the colonizers.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
