Abstract:

"Wonder's Collapse: Formations of Trans-American Sexualities" explores the collapse (of open and vulnerable bodies and dwellings) as a topography of racial and sexual excess, what Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter terms "extra-human ground." It theorizes a grounding and ethical performance of awe in bodily and social (sexual, racial, economic) relations. Towards this end the dissertation considers African American writer Gayl Jones's Eva's Man and The Healing , Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik's La condesa sangrienta (The bloody countess), African American writer Victor La Valle's short story Trinidad , and Puerto Rican Luis Rafael S?nchez's short story ?Jum! Herein wonder is the still life perched at the center of violation, and the sexual and racial taxonomy that haunts, hunts, and collapses movements across historically fraught American landscapes. The dissertation moves between considering the grammar of wonder as manifest in the parenthetic pause and elliptical flash in literary representations, to investigating the pause and flash in experimental film (video and photography) and its engagements with topographies of ruin. In Rita Gonz?lez's experimental short video "St. Francis of Aztl?n," a wandering party boy becomes a wondrous saint in stilettos; he recovers transient life, the carcasses of small animals, makeshift homes, and lost objects on the periphery of the metropolitan city. The dissertation concludes its consideration of the performance of wonder's collapse in the midst of sexual and economic ruin in Chilean photographer Camilo Jos? Vergara's invinciblecities . His time-lapse photography wanders and maps the wonder and ruination of Camden, NJ, a city overwhelmed by structural violence and where Walt Whitman once lived and is entombed. In their acute perceptions of violation, subjection, and sexuality, these artists hone wonder's vulnerable movements, its fits, and give shape to its collapse.