“Genealogies of Environmental Media” analyzes a feminist genealogy of art and media practice that reconstitutes the relationship between bodies and environments through what Shannon Jackson calls “social works”—artworks that are engaged at the nexus of aesthetics and politics. I attend to social works that focus on the environment, and in so doing, reveal a feminist strategy of performance that I refer to as the choreographic body. The choreographic body enacts the labor of performance and alters the embodied experience of spectators and participants. As media bodies, choreographic bodies are semiotic and historically contingent, advancing environmental work in ways that foreground how the performing body exposes environmental infrastructures that are occluded from view. In the social works I analyze, the choreographic body occupies a site of reflexive mediation that bears on the environment, lacing feminist art with media histories. I trace the changing status of the choreographic body alongside environmental social work beginning with filmmaker Maya Deren’s choreocinema and dancer Anna Halprin’s community dance to illustrate how the choreographic body developed as a feminist strategy—shifting from explorations of the body in front of the camera in the outdoors, to dance’s shifting location from inside the studio to outside on Halprin’s dance deck and in the wider California community. This foundation then recasts performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles through the lens of dance as an overlooked, but central, part of her environmental practice. I read Touch Sanitation and Marrying the Barges: A Barge Ballet/Touch Sanitation Show in light of how she utilizes the choreographic body as an overlooked feminist strategy. This positions the bodies of participants in a larger choreography of performance. Finally, I analyze Invisible-5, a travelogue/audio tour of Interstate 5 in California that brings awareness to environmental injustice, as a way to think through the shifting role of the choreographic body in more recent work and ask where it might lead us as scholars and activists.
In an analysis of the copyright case Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions Inc. and Alec Peters (2016), which centers on a high-budget Star Trek fan film, I consider how the case frames digital-age media fandom's challenges to the law, and concomitantly, how the case frames the law's challenges to media fandom. Even while legal action of this kind does not dampen participatory culture on the whole, it raises questions about the legal definition of a fan and the limits of fair use doctrine, and it delineates the changing relationships between media industries and fans. Paramount/CBS v. Axanar Productions reveals the tension between the gift-giving ethos of fandom and online crowdfunding as a type of gift; it also reveals the negative industrial and legal reactions to fan filmmaking and crowdfunding as threats to the way film has traditionally been constituted. I analyze Axanar's use of Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, the introduction of Paramount/CBS's restrictive fan film guidelines, and finally, the rejected fair use argument proposed by the defense. I take up the rejected fair use argument by situating it alongside the case history of appropriation art in order to consider another way to argue for fan films as transformative works.
On April 21st, 1898, Congress declared war against Spain, and the Public Baths Association of Philadelphia declared war against uncleanliness by opening the doors of the Gaskill Street baths. 1 This thesis began as a term paper for a graduate seminar in public history at the University of Pennsylvania. By the end of the semester it was evident that my subject, public bathhouses in Progressive Era Philadelphia, deserved more attention than I had been able to devote in that project. My interest in the topic continued to grow during a summer internship at the Tenement Museum in New York City. Like the tenement, the bathhouse is a building type once neglected by architectural historians and preservationists because of its unglamorous function and presumed lack of association with leading designers of its day. 2 Drawing on the methods of social history, visual studies, architectural history, folklore, sociology, and anthropology, this thesis aims to correct that perspective. Public baths were central to the work of Philadelphia's social reformers and the lives of those they sought to reform. 3 As the first public bathhouses in the United States to offer both bathing and laundry services to patrons, the Philadelphia variant was also a key site of architectural and technological innovation. While exploring this story, I also
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