Phoebe Oathout

My masters research focuses on the influence of pathologization and technology in the recent shift within transgender cultural production towards the grotesque. While queer art has always been characterized by excess and spectacle, the rise of posthumanism and cyborg theory in the late twentieth century in transgender studies began to set the community’s art apart. Popular transfemme and nonbinary drag artists, such as Hungry, Salvia, and Fecal Matter, are no longer dressing up as ‘traditional’ women on stage, instead opting to serve subhuman looks. In literature, transfuturist texts like Sybil Lamb’s I’ve Got a Time Bomb and Susan Stryker’s ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’ fit a mythos asking what is left after one is reconstructed by doctors. Finally, I am interested in the ways and why queer communities characterize their kinship systems as monstrous.