AXE 1 : Creating disorder

Organization

Overview

Our research group explores the creation of disorder from an interdisciplinary perspective (film and media studies, history, linguistics, literature, performing arts, music). We investigate the evolution of aesthetic, generic, linguistic, social norms in the English-speaking world and their destabilization. We are interested in figures and voices embodying transgression, subversion and resistance, and in the formal experimentation and category disorder  they can produce. Ethical and political questions linked to the subject’s agency and emancipation are paramount, insofar as any anomaly or disorder (whether social or personal) can be invested with creative, inventive and experimental potential. Political and aesthetic concerns are, as far as we are concerned, inseparable. Our interest in spectacular transgression and in performance as a means for the subject to assert herself leads us to focus on drama and the theater as well as on relations between music and literature.

Our research project will explore the following issues:

1. Identity Trouble: figures of transgression and the destabilization of gender, racial, sexual identities.
2. Tensions and classifications: testing or calling into question normative practices and discourses, notably classifying systems.
3. Subversions and recreations: the politics and aesthetics of experimentation and recycling.