Browsing by Author "Thomas, Kylie"

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    Between life and death : HIV and AIDS and representation in South Africa
    (2007) Thomas, Kylie; Higgins, John
    This dissertation examines the relation between political and semiotic representation and takes as its focus the marginalized social position of people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa. It argues that this position can best be understood as a space between life and death. It engages with Michel Foucault's concept of "bio-power" to interrogate what kinds of subjects are produced when power seizes hold of life and, in particular, what becomes of subjectivity when the body is abandoned by power; and also draws on the work of cultural theorists Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler to consider how conditions of life in South Africa in the time of HIV and AIDS both articulate with and exceed the bio-political. The dissertation first presents a brief account of the history of the epidemic and government responses to it, and then goes on to analyse a series of visual and textual representations of people living with HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa.
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    Changing the lens of stigma : an exploration of disclosure in self-portraits by South Africans living with HIV in the Through Positive Eyes Arts Initiative.
    (2012) Ress, Hanni Eran; Thomas, Kylie
    This thesis analyses a collaborative arts initiative, Through Positive Eyes South Africa. The thesis focuses on how photography and personal narrative can contribute to changing the lens through which HIV-positive individuals see themselves and the way they are perceived while also problematising the complexities around disclosure and containment in the face of stigma. There are many projects that have sought to alter the dominant lens of stigma around HIV/AIDS in South Africa but the Through Positive Eyes initiative is unique in its process of self-documentation as the group openly confronts the complexities of living with HIV/AIDS. The thesis shows that challenging stigma through art is not as simple as the claim first appears; in fact, it emerges that even in giving full agency to the participants, the boundaries between the private therapeutic process and the public visual encounter are themselves intertwined and blurred by stigma.
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    Zanele Muholi's Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives
    (2010) Thomas, Kylie
    This paper focuses on the work of South African black lesbian photographer Zanele Muholi and raises the question of how experience that is deemed unspeakable can enter representation. If we always read images through ‘‘codes of connotation,’’ through what Roland Barthes terms the ‘‘studium’’ of our knowing, how is it possible to overturn ways of seeing that render lesbian subjectivity invisible?2 And if lesbian subjectivity is made visible through suspending the structures of recognition, what are the political implications of occupying such an ‘‘outlaw’’ position? How does being beyond recognition open or close the field of political possibility? The paper makes two theoretical claims: one, that Barthes’ influential concept of the ‘‘punctum’’ can be understood as a mode of queer reading, and two, that Muholi’s work constructs an archive that insists on the specificity of lesbian lives and loss through a complex strategy of ‘‘passing.’’ My reading of Muholi’s portraits that constitute her ‘‘Faces and Phases’’ series explores how her photographs work with the ambiguities of ‘‘passing’’—passing away, passing between states of gendered being, and passing through the prohibitions against making lesbian experience visible and mourning lesbian loss. In this way, the paper argues that Muholi’s most recent body of work ‘‘queers’’ both the conventions of memorial photography and her own earlier representations of lesbian subjectivity.