Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
Sanctum Drag is a hybrid work that gnaws at the boundaries of personal and public, performative and lived. Within, St. Joseph, as the patriarch of the Catholic Church, is dismantled through a series of elegies, maps, and plays. Throughout, the characters and speakers are auditioning and experimenting towards new means of reproduction, outside of the logic of heteronormativity and marriage. Like the various characters, the form of the text is always shifting, always searching its own edges. The mutating forms create a call-and-response, one form taking up where another form fails. Failure, then, becomes a crucial practice for the speakers and characters, as it is from failure that surprising thought and action might rise, outside of the realm of the normative. To this end, the color red is taken up as tool outside of language to mark a simultaneous motion of rupturing and giving shape to meaning. This project marks itself as an ongoing process, and seeks to remain in a state of flux between unraveling and collecting. This manuscript is influenced by contemporary artists such as Douglas Kearney, Bhanu Kapil, C.A. Conrad, and Lucas de Lima. It finds itself in a lineage with the French Surrealists.
Date
3-27-2018
Recommended Citation
Spotswood, Phillip Gregory, "Sanctum Drag Featuring St. Joseph as a Structural Vulnerability" (2018). LSU Master's Theses. 4636.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/4636
Committee Chair
Glenum, Lara
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_theses.4636