Faculty Member, Women's Studies
Visiting Lecturer
Thesis Title: Queer Tactilities: Corporeal Ethics in Visual Culture
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Juana María Rodríguez
Gayle Salamon Liz Constable |
About
I specialize in queer and gender theory, film and media studies, cultural studies, and the medical and digital humanities. In June 2010 I completed my PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of California Davis. My dissertation, Queer Tactilities: Corporeal Ethics in Visual Culture, explored the queer role of touch and its ethical potentials in late 20th century visual texts including dance performances by Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy, films by Marina de Van and Claire Denis, photography by Loren Cameron and Robert Mapplethorpe, and medical art installations by Gunther von Hagens.
My current book project, Blood Cultures: Visual Technologies in the Flesh, analyzes the cultural politics of blood in 20th century U.S. visual technologies, and includes chapters on early anatomy films and racialized sexuality in immigration law, cold war contamination narratives and science fiction films, epidemiology maps of disease and the biopolitics of a medico-military view of the body, post-war blood drive advertising and representations of AIDS, and digital blood images in the "war on terror" through entertainment, medical, and military imaging technologies.
Recent articles include "Untimely Forgetting: Melancholia, Sexual Dispossession, and Queer Femininity," (forthcoming in The Shadow's Shadow: Critical and Clinical Perspectives on Mourning and Melancholia, edited by Liz Constable and Naomi Janowitz); "Photographic Traces and Cinematic Returns" (Time and Society 19.1, 2010) and "Anxious Embodiment, Disability, and Sexuality: A Response to Margrit Shildrick" (Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8.3, 2007).
Over the past year I directed a Public Humanities project in Pittsburgh focused on Contemporary Queer Cinemas (pittqueercinema.wordpress.com) that brought together activists, community members, students, video artists and filmmakers, and local theater directors from the Kelly-Strayhorn and Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
At the University of Pittsburgh, I teach courses on feminist theory, queer studies, visual culture, and the digital and medical humanities.
