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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2011.
Crossover celebrity artists Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Kara Walker's creation of diegetic alter egos demonstrates how the subjective splitting once attributed to hysteria has become normative within a postmodern cultural context. This mainstreaming of hysteria arose in the wake of the demystification of the modernist notion of the sovereign subject and the supplantation of reality with simulacral images. These two developments led to a cultural shift characterized by the notion that subjectivity is a performance of the self as a series of simulacral images devoid of any original referent. Though hysteria is widely perceived to be a relic of the nineteenth century, I argue that the mimetic condition epitomizes postmodern subjective shifts. Identity, like the "obsolete" malady, is a performance of subjective lack projected upon the surface of the body. This void manifests as dissociative split selves produced by way of hysterical identifications in which the self is (con)fused with an other. As with hysterics, Walker, Barney, and Sherman pose themselves to viewers as a question. They ask audiences to diagnose their protean symptoms and identities. Thus, viewers, like clinicians, are hystericized in the process of attempting to convert performative displays of discordant and ahistorical symptoms into coherent narratives and stable identities. These artists' alter egos compel us to recognize ourselves as similarly fragmented mimetic subjects. In the wake of the postmodern turn, binaristic conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality have become more fluid. Such mutability is the result of widespread recognition that identities are performative. Presenting oneself as raced and gendered in accordance with established codes reifies the ideologies that motivated the performances in the first place. While postmodernism has seen the efflorescence of posts - post-racial, post-feminist, post-human - we are hardly free of the instinct to categorize others. Thus, we live in an intriguing moment in which identities are seen as fluid and evolving yet we cannot seem to relinquish the notions of racial and sexual difference. However, these artists suggest that we are moving toward the possibility of abolishing such divisive identity categories and are beginning to formulate alternative means of defining ourselves in relation to others.
