She switches from quiet folk to an epic Spanish ballad from left-field pop to roaring, thrilling blues and from gospel to bluegrass. It’s a big enough sound to cut effortlessly through the inane hubbub of a noisy club, but in the huge, vaulted silence of a church, it’s emotionally good.Īndra’s range over the course of her hour-long set is incredible. Keeping mostly still bar a few rhythmic movements and the occasional widening of her expressive eyes, Andra generates spectacular dynamics for a solo singer and guitarist – so much so that a man halfway back is moved to raise his hand, evangelic church style, during one particularly impressive passage. The next (“We’re in a church, after all”) was a gritty version of John The Revelator, and the last is a tribute to an obvious influence on Andra, Janis Joplin – Mercedes Benz. The first is a brittle, melancholic take on Save The Last Dance For Me, its usual pop sheen stripped away and its core – she explained that it was a love song written by a crippled man for his wife-to-be – exposed like a raw wound. The place is an inspired choice for relatively intimate shows, its high wooden ceilings making for sublime acoustics and its architectural splendour giving each artist a canvas on which to create a memorable production.Īndra is a shy person, not given to frivolous banter, and it’s just her and a scarf-adorned mic stand in the middle of the stage in terms of her “rig”, but her big dreadnought guitar and bigger, soul-lifting voice are more than enough to fill the room.Īware that as a first-timer in Grahamstown, her audience may have no idea regarding her original material, Andra included a trio of interpretations in her set. I compare this with My Right Self, an online photonarrative project that uses the excesses of transgender sublimity to imagine and represent alternate wor(l)ds.Andra Cilliers made her National Arts Festival debut at St Aidan’s, a magnificent de-commissioned (you could tell because there was a bar set up in the corner) church set up as a music venue for the duration of the event, on Tuesday 9 July. The final chapter critiques the “wrong body” trope found in psychological and medical literature, as well as in transsexual autobiographies that follow the Bildungsroman structure. Man” occasions an incitement to discourse about how the sight of a pregnant man renders viewers speechless: speechlessness being symptomatic of a representational limit that signals the transgender sublime. Chapter Three analyzes trans man Thomas Beatie’s online autobiographical account of his pregnancy that is accompanied by a photograph of his pregnant body. Through mobilization of categorical and representational excess. I argue that by recoding binary-gendered institutional practices, such programs re-contour social imaginaries HIV-prevention strategies in public health worlds. The second chapter is an ethnographic study of a trans-specific harm reduction program that negotiates binarygendered “transgender umbrella.” I identify the manner by which it represents, in visual form, the taxonomic excess that conditions transgender sublimity. In the first chapter, I critique a widespread educational model called the Insofar as it demands an interpretive practice based on “shimmering” mobility, this phenomenon harbors a transformative potential: a politics of transgender sublimity promotes categorical excess as a means to enable new modes of subjectivity. Health settings or popular culture-that can overwhelm perception and unsettle familiar ways of knowing. I theorize the effect of proliferation as the “transgender sublime” to account for encounters with representational excess-whether in public Produces representations of rapidly shifting embodiments and identities that exceed sex/gender categorization. By contrast, I understand “transgender” as a proliferative matrix that Usage results in reductive models in medical and educational contexts, as well as closed narrative structures in literary and popular cultural depictions of trans-subjectivity and embodiment. Most often, the term transgender is used as a stable category of personhood, or, alternately, as an umbrella term that encompasses all sex and gender variance. Description This dissertation offers a corrective to limited interpretations of the category transgender across literary and medical discourses, as well as visual culture and new media.
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