Abstract

This dissertation argues for the continuing importance of post-structuralist theory for a text based criticism affiliated with the culturally marginalized. This position is argued through a reading of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and Antonio Gramsci, critics such as bell hooks and Richard Dyer, and several recent films, including Tongues Untied, Paris is Burning, and Urinal. The dissertation begins from the assumption that culturally marginalized peoples are not simply denied subjectivity in the modern West, but are rather granted a limited and specific subjectivity which renders them useful by giving them a position in relation to a dominant culture. That is, the Other functions as an oppositional term for the formation of a normalized subjectivity. Recent text based criticism affiliated with the Other has pursued at least two different paths. One strand of criticism has attempted to grant the Other a fuller subjectivity through the deployment of the ideology of universalism. Such an ideology attempts to remake the Other in the image of the dominant. Alongside this response, however, another has occurred. This response might broadly be described as a valorization of the marginality of the Other which does not seek to extend a greater subjectivity to the Other, but attempts to make a resistant and transgressive use of the very lack in and through which the Other is constituted. This dissertation is a continuation and intervention in this second response. It argues that the Other embodies a certain resistance to the normal, and that criticism affiliated with the Other might work to render such a resistance ethically and politically useful. To this end, it calls for an ethical criticism, a criticism ethically committed to altering the existing relations of power so that they might become more easily reversible. Broadly speaking, such an ethical criticism would attempt to make use of the "impure" position of the culturally marginalized, deploying the Other "against" the normalizing practices of disciplinary society. This criticism is "transgressive" in that it works towards a rendering of new reciprocal relations within power, while simultaneously attempting to disclose some of the limits of such a project