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Disorienting the threshold: interface, nonbinary theorizing and fictionalized performance

Resource type
Thesis type
(Thesis) M.A.
Date created
2020-12-11
Authors/Contributors
Abstract
Interface as a set of cognitive relations or process, is deeply performative. As a set of phenomenological, material-discursive entanglements with the world, interface is an experience which grips us, both body and mind. This project has at once, concerned itself with the kind of extension our current interface mythologies afford, and how we ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, be through this space. As filters for knowledge, interface have the ability to expand or contract our understandings of the world. In its contemporary colonial form, interface prefigures agency through an illusion of control, that in the wake of global pandemics, rising sea levels, polarized publics, and pollutant information landscapes, is ruptured. So accustomed to its prefigured plans and narratives, this sudden disjointedness from a cultural and existential center provides an unprecedented ontological opening. This project offers a lensing of how we might reorient ourselves toward knowledge, to expand our capacity for care, understanding and personal, political and environmental relations, by engaging the space in-between, the rupture. Through the offerings of pre- and decolonial, indigenous, nonbinary, and non-western philosophy and thought this project has sought to lay out a decolonial engagement with the colonial wound. Through the fictional aesthetic of Gloria Anzaldúa's reading of the Aztec myth Coyolxāuhqui and her seven stages of conocimiento, I confront the resonances of ego conquiro within myself through creative writing practice—through fiction and poetics as method. I engage the body, lived experience—to interface something like, decoloniality within academic research practice. I begin from the position that in order to decolonize interface, be it screen or institutionalized practice, begins with decolonizing identity: it begins with recognizing the colonizer harbored within ourselves. By incorporating story from indigenous, queer, and other non binary writers and scholars, into this work, I also seek to trouble the authority typically afforded to academic authorship. All of my words have been shaped by the voices I incorporate here and have shed light on the concepts I seek to engage in this project. Rather than presenting an individual narrative, severed from their influence, I offer them in their original forms, alongside my own fictionalized practice, inviting you to share in the experience, the sight, their perspectives have provided my own. My intent is to offer you a similar opportunity; to find yourself within whatever patterns take shape in accordance with the text and your own process of self-actualization. Hence, this is not an abstract, but an invitation. To step into or encounter a different kind of research practice. One that troubles boundaries, colonial regimes of authority, and walks-asking: what are we resisting? What must we confront or let go; what fear, pain and grief must we pass through—in order to become more accountable to our settler-colonial inheritance? And how might the language for creativity offer us a language for healing, for rising?
Document
Extent
119 pages.
Identifier
etd21231
Copyright statement
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Permissions
This thesis may be printed or downloaded for non-commercial research and scholarly purposes.
Supervisor or Senior Supervisor
Thesis advisor: Lesage, Frederik
Language
English
Member of collection
Download file Size
etd21231.pdf 2.67 MB

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