The tragedy of being: Geneviève Cadieux, Donigan Cumming, Evergon and representation of other bodies

Bodies are performative, transparently acting out gender roles designated and coerced by patriarchal structures. In representation and language, heterosexual white men are inscribed as seeing, speaking agents, while homosexual, non-white and feminine others appear in lacking affirmation of masculine privilege. Yet what happens when bodies transgress constitutive signs? This is the subversive model of Sophocles'. Antigone, a problematization of gender that Genevieve Cadieux, Donigan Cumming and Evergon privilege in photographic representations of the body. This thesis addresses these artists' abject strategies of intervention through psychoanalytic, film, and queer theory, and more broadly linguistics. Employing concepts of masquerade, the impossibility of the phallus is revealed, while the politics of looking is raised through surface modifications of the veil. Furthermore, silent and shifting voices interrupt and dislocate a language that cannot articulate pain, as the sensory shatters stereotype through abjection, offering a possibility of reconciliation through caress.