TAPS/English
My dissertation examines a range of aesthetic media—film, literature, performance, and photography, among others—to trace how these materials reveal the temporal dynamics immanent to two socio-cultural problems—HIV/AIDS and climate change—that accrued particular urgency throughout the 1990s, and which continue to shape how we understand our present. On the one hand, the AIDS crisis began to slow in the twentieth century’s final decade thanks to advancing antiretroviral therapies; on the other, environmental science evidenced the intensifying and accelerating threat posed by climate change. These oscillations between cataclysmic abbreviation and extension conditioned aesthetic experiments generated by artists concerned with queer survival and environmental sustainability. The objects I study present a catalogue of tactics for articulating and renegotiating how bodies come into contact with histories of somatic and environmental disintegration. They teach us that, whether at the scale of the body or the landscape, there is always endurance in what wastes away, and disintegration in what lasts. This dissertation research is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, and a UChicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality Residential Fellowship.
I also work extensively on dance and performance theory, analyzing how contemporary choreographers and performers generate novel concepts of virtuosity, relationality, and ecology in their work. My writing can be found in ASAP/J, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Canadian Theatre Review, Chicago Review, esse, GLQ, Momus, and publications from the Art Gallery of York University, Berghahn Books, Blackwood Gallery, and Le Lieu.