Practice-led PhD in Fine Art (The Glasgow School of Art)
Becoming Monstrous: Queer Feminist Reimagination of Bodies, Spaces and Practices
Engaging with Laura Mulvey’s and Paul B. Preciado’s critiques of Freudian psychoanalytical theories through the lens of 1970s feminism and transgender studies, as well as Eva Hayward’s concept of “transposition,” which explores the transsexual potential of bodily engagement with spaces. This project involves archival research on the illustrated edition of the Chinese tale Liaozhai zhiyi (1766) at the Austrian National Library and collections from the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. Liaozhai zhiyi is a seventeenth-century collection of tales about ghosts, foxes, and strange metamorphoses, depicting what seduces and terrifies while offering a form of metamorphosis and “monstrous feminine” in a Confucian society.
The project revisits both physical and digital archives to uncover the narratives they hold, fostering dialogue with archivists from personal and institutional perspectives through a postcolonial lens. By integrating methods such as moving image, performance, image-sound collecting, painting, ceramic and writing, the research parodies a “becoming” that disrupts epistemologies of sex, gender, and sexuality. It also examines the interplay between gaze and touch—both virtual and physical—reactivating sensory pleasure and incorporating the erotic as a queer feminist intervention in fine art practice that speaks for queering materiality.