Applying a decolonial trauma-informed framework that brings together different disciplinary systems, this project investigates responses to the stigma associated with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in the literary work of two Canadian and two South African writers. I approach the literary journalism of Stephanie Nolen and Jonny Steinberg and the novels of Tomson Highway and the late Phaswane Mpe as testimony in which Steinberg, Nolen and Mpe contest Western epistemologies and Highway foregrounds Indigenous knowledges. The four texts reframe stigma as operating within much larger systemic violences and operations of power than can be envisioned within a politics of recognition, indexed to the expository logic of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s paranoid position. Locating HIV-related stigma as emerging within the context of intergenerational collective trauma rooted in colonial violence makes possible the kind of reparative work that Sedgwick envisions, as well as an engagement with the infinite possibilities of encounter as an ethical response to this socially polarizing phenomenon that has proven so difficult to dislodge. Attentive to specific racialized and minoritized colonial histories, this project unravels the entanglement of events and conditions that coalesce around HIV in watershed moments when decolonial work collides with ongoing histories of colonial violence. Such a trauma-informed, decolonial lens offers a non-positivist framework to unsettle, potentially, the stasis of stigma reduction.

Westernized medicine can be said to illustrate its history and structure, as well as its current understanding of the capacity and appearance of the human through its visual representations of the body. Scientific images, this paper argues, become a site for interrogating the tangle of idealism, truth, objectivity and knowledge in how knowledge is actively used, replicated, paralleled and otherwise functions. First, asking how depictions of the medicalized body inform the epistemological foundations of medicine, and to what end, this work opens up the question of methodology, arguing that the integration of the modes of arts-based practices can bring medicine toward a much more realistic picture of the world. A parallel argument is a similarly concentrated interrogation of the affective quality of arts-based methodology, which is commonly understood to be the nucleus of work on the political dimensions of non-representational theory. I complicate the dominant scholarly preference for an ontologically rooted affect theory, finding it theoretically non-viable for art and humanistic medicine by thinking through subjectivity, autobiographical accounts of illness and epistemological flexibility. I see a path forward using a biologically and evolutionarily rooted affect theory, noting the ethical implications of its differences for a humanistic approach to medicine.

This doctoral thesis complements earlier scholarship by Marina Warner concerning the Boogeyman as a figure representative of monstrosity and otherness by assessing these topics through an interdisciplinary lens. Employing a methodological approach that incorporates research from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and film studies, I analyse the Boogeyman within the context of the traditional fairytale and the modern horror film, and thereby reveal the key facets of this figure in the Western cultural imaginary. Specifically, I demonstrate that the villains of the contemporary slasher film (a subgenre of the horror film) are cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman through a comparison of their physical and psychological attributes. Examining the archetypal properties of these characters, I argue that the traits that characterize the Boogeyman are the result of the fact that he is a composite of three archetypal forms: the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. I address three key questions: (1) what particular physical and psychological qualities are associated with the Boogeyman; (2) how the persona of the Boogeyman is constituted in the public consciousness; and (3) what moral, philosophical, and psychological role does he serve in Western culture. Over the course of this thesis, I demonstrate the fact that the Boogeyman represents the amalgamation of three archetypal components. Firstly, he embodies the role of the collective Shadow and functions to personify violent and anarchic characteristics that are repressed by the community and projected onto monstrous figures in the popular consciousness. Secondly, he is a manifestation of the negative attributes associated with the archetypal Father (referred to in literature as the “Terrible Father”) who punishes individuals that defy hegemonic values. Finally, he is a cultural embodiment of the Death-Demon, a conceptual figure that personifies anxieties related to death, and the degeneration of the body. This thesis provides a comparative analysis of a series of case studies that clearly illustrate the characteristics synonymous with the Boogeyman in the Western cultural imaginary. I begin with an examination of Bluebeard, a homicidal villain featured in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection of fairytales titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé. In her seminal text No Go the Bogeyman, Warner posits Bluebeard as a clear example of the folkloric Boogeyman due to the fact that he is physically grotesque and morally repugnant. In Perrault’s story, Bluebeard is a villain who marries and then murders a series of women for disobeying him, and subsequently stores their bodies in his private chamber. Extrapolating the salient characteristics of Bluebeard as the folkloric Boogeyman, I assess these traits under an archetypal lens and demonstrate that Bluebeard/the folkloric Boogeyman is a manifestation of the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. After determining the archetypal properties of the folkloric Boogeyman, I highlight the presence of these same qualities in popular villains from the contemporary American slasher films of the 1970s and ’80s. Specifically, these characters include Michael Myers from Halloween (1978), Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th (1980), and Freddy Krueger featured in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Through my analysis of these terrifying figures, I situate them within a larger archetypal context of monstrosity and simultaneously establish their role as cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman. This examination reveals the placement of the Boogeyman within the cultural imaginary as a violent disciplinarian who reinforces moral boundaries through sadistic acts of violence and paradoxically brings both chaos and harmony to the collective by preserving social borders. By extension, I demonstrate the link between the slasher film and the fairytale, both of which serve a didactic function, imparting hegemonic values to the public concerning sexual politics, social propriety, and moderation.

This dissertation mobilizes Brinkema's radical formalism (2014) through Deleuze and Spinoza to read masculinities as forms. Specifically, I closely read Western films and masculine crisis films from 1990 to 1999 to map how cinematic forms constitute the potential to alter normative modes of masculinity. To launch this endeavor, I rely on a theoretical hybrid of Brinkema-Deleuze-Spinoza that foregrounds genre films as vibrant forms of difference. This foregrounding unfolds through an engagement with Altman's theory of film genre (1999), Neale's work on genre films (2000), and Grant's view of film genres as iconography and ideology (2007) as well as the work of Deleyto (2012) and Herzog (2010 and 2012) to re-conceptualize film genre in relation to form. I proceed to use my theoretical hybrid and attention to forms to interrogate film theory as a means of seizing gender and, moreover, masculinities from discourses of representation and spectatorship, which tend to limit readings of gender and masculinities to socio-cultural and political meanings. This interrogation engages Mulvey's revision of screen theory (1975), Rodowick's work on difference (1991, 1994), Perkins's approach to mise-en-scène (1972), Bordwell's neo-formalism and post-theory (1996, 2005, 2006), Sobchack's phenomenological approach to spectatorship and affect (1992, 2004), and del Río's Deleuzian conceptualization of affect and performance (2008). Then, with an insistence on the close reading of cinematic forms, my dissertation undertakes two case studies: the Western and the masculine crisis film cycles of the 1990s. Considering the work of Gates (2006) and Grant (2011) on masculinities in popular cinema, my close readings reveal masculinities as taking shape, assuming structures, and forming as they affect and are affected by relations and becomings. These close readings of cinematic forms generate theoretical speculation that engages masculinities studies research, including Bly (1990), Connell (1995), Kimmel (2006 and 2013), Reeser (2010), and Buchbinder (2013). Through theoretical speculation, my dissertation conceptualizes masculinities as forces of creation that materialize as forms. What is at stake in this dissertation is a methodology that denies transcendent ideals and essentialist claims of masculinity with concepts that harness the potential to continuously read masculinities as what has yet to come.

The deindustrialization of cities represents a moment of cultural and political weakness and insecurity about what it means to be urban. Specifically, within Windsor and Detroit the traditionally rooted modes of production and habitation that have framed the cultural and political landscape as well as the identities of these urban centers are in a state of massive transition. Within these urban centers we find engaged residents mobilizing critical, self-critical and projective dispositions capable of meeting the challenges of their context, as well as issuing inquiries that put the inquirer on the spot, produce discomfort, and have potency: the capacity to change the way the inquirer thinks, acts and inhabits urban landscapes. These practices are vital responses to the questions that drive our lived-experience of city life and are in the end matters of survival. This work deploys an interpretation of the new category of philosopher forecasted by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil in order to explore this moment when culture and politics meet at street level in the transitional deindustrializing cities of Windsor and Detroit. This is a difficult moment to make articulate. Many of the criticisms and prescriptions at work in the particular projects that we will examine are expressed as action: performed critique. These urban centers themselves have the capacity to become foxholes of sorts. Cities have a degree of receptivity to urban activism, and thus can become discrete political entities that mediate between culturally rooted criticisms and the larger political landscape. These cities in turn have the capacity to generate larger political effects. Urban activist initiatives, addressed in this project both theoretically and in their particularity, are rooted in the local and the biological in a manner that intimately ties experiences of suffering at the hands of economic and political systems responding to their acts of resistance. Activist collectives aim to inflict a wound to the overall culture, thus inoculating not only the immediate urban culture, but culture more generally with something new and empowering. This work explores the tension between embedded criticisms and proposals performed by urban activists and the trenchant forces that frustrate these actions.