Recent Dissertations

This dissertation elucidates the cybernetic response to the life question of post-World War II biology through an analysis of the writings and experiments of Warren S. McCulloch. The work of McCulloch, who was both a clinician and neurophysiologist, gave rise to what this dissertation refers to as a biological, medical cybernetics, influenced by vitalist conceptions of the organism as well as technical conceptions of the organ, the brain. This dissertation argues that the question ‘what is biological life?’ served as an organizing principle for the electrical, digital model of the brain submitted in “Of Digital Computers Called Brains” (1949) and the formal, mathematical model of the brain required by the McCulloch-Pitts neuron in “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943). I argue that, in discussions in these papers of how the brain responds to stimuli, there is a concept of biological life as perceptual life, rendering the brain a biological object with technical attributes whose activity is the activity of world-building. This dissertation analyzes experiments McCulloch performed on living animals to understand how the cybernetic brain was pharmacological and not merely digital or automatic. Finally, this dissertation analyzes writings on the discipline of biology published late in McCulloch’s life, which concern the information carrying capacity of water molecules, the reproductive protein called the “Biological Computer,” and a thought experiment on building a simulation of man. I claim that McCulloch’s “Biological Computer” includes a model of heredity counter to that of DNA, where form and not the program bears life forward.

This interdisciplinary inquiry brings together studies of political history, religion, the history of ideas, and philosophical anthropology. Approaching the emergence of the idea of Mexico through the lens of political spirituality allows me to draw on contemporary theories of the proper name and the concept as a way to tie spiritual practices to material conditions, discursive frameworks, and practical exigencies. This project contributes to a body of historical scholarship on the role of religion and religious discourse in the emergence of the Mexican nation and state. By exploring spirituality as a practice that is not intrinsically religious, this project seeks to shed light on different ways in which spiritual discourses and practices produce material effects. The dissertation represents an initial step toward a fuller genealogy of the idea of Mexico, its potentialities, promises, and limitations.

“Everyday Eloquence and Mediality in Stand-up Performance” considers how stand-up comedians negotiated the 21st-century shift from mass media (such as newspapers, TV, and film) to participatory digital media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok). Remarking on the proliferation of stand-up practice, scholars have observed the capacity of comedians to amplify refined and subtle identity positions heretofore marginalized in American culture. Indeed, comics from unique intersections of race, gender, sexual identity, ideology, and class position have emerged, and their voices have diversified public discussions about how society is organized. When considering the political efficacy of those voices, however, scholars and laypersons alike continue to evaluate comedians as traditional political agents. As such, comedians’ political efficacy is regularly assessed in terms of a capacity to catalyze institutional change, and evaluated for the real or perceived consequences of their discourse when taken up by the society at large (e.g., jokes either perpetuate or critique social injustices). However, by analyzing five comedians from unique subject intersections as case studies, I argue that stand-up comedians in the age of the online digital public sphere do not function as representative figures for particular subject positions, marginalized or otherwise. Rather, insofar as stand-up is political, comedians foremost affect audiences’ abilities to acknowledge differences, facilitating cultural transformation in a distributed manner. For democratic subjects, it is no longer reliable to turn to politicians, scholars, or traditionally vaunted social figures when considering who is responsible for political change, for the terms of the political practice through which change is effected are increasingly distributed across participants in a non-hierarchical fashion.

The dissertation traces the collaborative back-and-forth between comedians and their audiences through which provisional subject identities are “stood up,” manifested through body and voice. In my account, stand-up comedians are public interfaces through which audiences work through sociocultural preconceptions about the world they are facing. In short, stand-ups reflexively live the experience of having an artificial identity or persona that is taken as who they are, and, in this way, perform the increasingly ubiquitous contemporary experience of reconciling one’s virtual self-presentation with one’s everyday experience of life. Such reconciliation is increasingly an aspect of everyday political practice, as people balance the image they project online (who others take them to be) with who and how they are. As such, the dissertation participates in discussions of political practice in democratic cultures more generally.

Instead of considering the exemplars of diverse political and cultural identity who model community norms, the dissertation instead examines comedians who I consider persons who, in their own ways, embody claims that exceed the existing norms that make identities recognizable, and whose self-mediations do not merely combine or emulate the conventions of existing (but under-represented) social possibilities. These figures are not defined by merely rejecting conventions of their apparent representation identities. Rather, they transgress ideal and conventional structures of recognizability, by negotiating, inhabiting, and projecting an alternate sense of how familiar conventions may yet be taken up. In this way, their political practice is not about incorporating marginalized diversity into a greater liberal humanism, for they creatively enunciate differences within, not outside, established subject positions of American political culture. In articulating possibilities for life beyond already established differences upon which marginalization is possible, they contribute to their audiences’ political capacity to behold—and flourish in—lives presently unrepresentable and obscured by prevailing identity categories.

The dissertation is a rhetoric, an account of public practice meant to guide that practice; its analytic for interpreting others’ self-expression can guide a reader’s own self-presentation.

My dissertation, Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary, argues that travestismo is a critical tool by which to read the unstable and contested production of gender, sexuality, and race in contemporary Latin America. My project’s point of departure is the definition of travestismo itself. Travestismo is usually depicted as a sort of unidirectional gender migration from male to female embodiments. This is why I argue that “travesti” as a name cannot be easily translated as “transgender.” Travestismo does not share the transgender indifference to the direction of gender migrations. The fact that travestismo presupposes a particular gendered destination has been read by some scholars as a sign of its reactionary tendencies. The femininity that travestismo constructs as a “final destination” feels dated. The desire for (a sort of anachronistic) femininity at the heart of travestismo seems troubling for some queer, trans, and feminist scholars. However, this tension reveals more about a desire of U.S.-based queer studies to sanitize their objects of study than of travestismo per se. My dissertation contributes to several interdisciplinary fields. My project makes the case for a displacement of the category “transgender” within transgender studies. Travestismo, that vernacular trans identity, is not a name “that sits easily with transgender.” Moreover, yet, my dissertation elaborates on the productive tensions of thinking and imagining travestismo and transgender as proximate to each other, and not in antagonistic ways. In contemporary transgender studies, transfeminism is a framework that offers possibilities for thinking and linking the many forms of oppression and violence that cisgender women and transgender subjects share. In this sense, my dissertation is a transfeminist take on the name travestismo and its imaginary. Thanks to this transfeminist perspective, in my project travestismo is not a break with feminism, but an expansion of feminism to its limits. My dissertation also proposes that queer studies and theories have a lot to gain from an engagement with travestismo, but only if these fields allow themselves to be transformed by such an encounter. My project can be read as an invitation for the cultivation of a hemispheric dialogue around the name “queer.” Such a dialogue in order to be fruitful needs to surrender the name “queer” to the possibilities and limits of translation. I argue that “queer” and “travesti” can be thought together because both names share a refusal to signify only one thing and in only one way. My project contributes to the 2 much-needed effort of displacing the U.S.-based mark of birth of queer theory, cultivating trans-disciplinary and trans-national dialogues around the vernacular name travestismo. Travesti Memory and Politics: Toward a Peruvian Transgender Imaginary opens up the term travestismo with a method I call “travesti memory.” Travesti memory meshes the praxis of remembering and imagining, allowing for unpredicted becomings. In the first chapter I question the romance of ethnography and travestismo, a fixation on travestismo as exclusively an object of ethnographic research, and discuss some of its implications. I offer, through an engagement with postcolonial and queer psychoanalytic theories, an account of the losses that ethnography implies in the effort of imagining a different travesti trajectory. In the second chapter, I move to a close reading of Claudia Llosa’s film Loxoro, a film about transgender kinship and starred by transfeminist activist Belissa Andía. This chapter reads the film next to the political trajectory of its leading actress. Here I argue for the possibility of a language for travestismo that brings justice to travesti’s tears. The third chapter examines the work of the philosopher and curator Giuseppe Campuzano, with a particular emphasis on the work that the name hysteria performs in his essay “Reclaiming Travesti Histories.” The resonances between hysteria and history mobilize gender as an analytical tool with the promise without guarantees of unpacking transgender oppression. In my final chapter, I turn to the LGBTQ theater play Desde afuera, to think on the racialized connotations of travestismo. Here I focus on the collective pronoun nosotrxs and its power to repair some of the scars and wounds produced by racist and homo-transphobic national projects. In the concluding part of my dissertation, reading the photographic record of Campuzano’s performance TransformaT, I propose an imaginary in which travesti death is not-so-final. My dissertation takes Peru as a case study, because this nation offers a radical instance of the aliveness of colonial, racist, and sexist normative violence in the southern cone of Latin America. Precisely for that reason, I trace assemblies of movements, memories, energies, bodies, trajectories, and images, which under the name travestismo are doing a lot of much needed critical political work in contemporary Peru. Throughout my dissertation, travestismo works as name that cannot be easily digested nor accepted by neoliberal logics or dynamics. Travestis, unlike many gay men and lesbians, are not sanitized subjects that aspire to be docile consumers. In my dissertation, I argue that travestismo is both a gendered and racialized category. My conclusion makes a case for thinking travestismo as a name that cultivates a bond with racialized indigenous subjectivities. That queer bond offers a promise for destabilizing the dangerous conjunction of racist, sexist and homo-transphobic normativities. I mobilize travestismo as memory work that refuses to forget queer racialized bonds.

This study examines the representational strategies that Cubans have employed in order to come to terms with violence in their revolutionary history and the extents to which such strategies have worked in the service of alibi as opposed to critique. Accordingly, the study looks most closely at the discursive and visual portrayals of the mambí, guerrilla soldiers of Cuba’s wars for independence (1868-98) and, not incidentally, icons of Cuban identity and revolutionary ethos. Within or relative to these very portrayals and the same wartime history, however, stands the specter of the reconcentrado, victims to Spain’s “camps of reconcentration” and by far the largest and most tragic casualties of the wars. Drawing on rhetorical and contrapuntal reads of war literature and historiography, political cartoons, monuments, and revolutionary era cinema, I tease out the myths and iconography by which the mambí has come to bespeak racial fraternity, virility, cunning, martyrdom and liberation, whereas, by stark contrast, the reconcentrado bespeaks vulnerability, imperialism, anonymity and atrocity.

In this respect, four representational strategies stand out: the reconcentrado as (i) a campesina or señorita damsel in distress under the threat of rape by Spaniards and in need of a machete-endowed savoir; (ii) an emaciated, sickly mass of anonymous children with vacant gazes and no voice, carnal evidence of an atrocity that, presumably, speaks for itself yet clearly cites Holocaust iconography; (iii) interned mambisa or patriot who stoically bears her and her children’s agony; or (iv) as sheer absence, where only the mambises, their heroic machete charges, and the cry “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” are visible and audible. Whichever the case, the actual history of antagonistic and coercive acts within or by the Liberation Army and any collateral responsibility for the unjust dead are disavowed; in lieu of critique, thus, the reconcentrado is rendered an alibi for revolutionary violence, centralized power, and nationalist interpellations in which sacrifice for the Patria constitutes the “sublime.”

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the reconcentrado could signify otherwise. Given her agony, the paternalism with which she was dealt, and her labors against an unjust death, deaths for which patriotic consolations ring hollow, I argue the reconcentrado, as ethical figure and as historical fact, speaks on behalf of non-violence, democratic voice, and the summons to care for life at its most precarious. Such ethical hails have proven all the timelier in a “post-socialist” Cuba where mambí mythology and revolutionary identity have had to wrestle not only with transnational finance capital and consumerist culture but also the specters of (UMAP) labor camp confinados and Special Period balseros.