Intermediality and/as encounter: A feminist approach to women’s contemporary, intermedial memoirs

Pyner, Bethany ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5615-0037 2024. Intermediality and/as encounter: A feminist approach to women’s contemporary, intermedial memoirs. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This dissertation provides the first sustained scholarly analysis of intermediality and/as encounter, arguing for the reappraisal of intermediality as a series of encounters between media. I examine the intermedial representations of encounters between and among women and girls, across a contemporary and transnational group of women’s intermedial memoirs set against backdrops of conflict and migration: the combination of prose and photography in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood; the fusing of word, illustration, photography, and archive materials in Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Heimat: A German Family Album; the epistolic film in Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts’ documentary film For Sama; and the integration of archival and reconstructed photography and film in the gallery space, alongside material evidence of these elements’ production in Diana Markosian’s art installation Santa Barbara. By engaging with the encounters staged in these memoirs, I model a pathbreaking, intersectionally feminist, and self-reflexive method for “reading”—or encountering—diverse intermedial forms. A feminist mode of encountering intermediality, I argue, accounts for the ethnocentric and masculinist gaze inherent to technologies and practices of visual culture, as it carefully examines the material specificities of intermedial arrangements, revealing complex ethics of representation, and the rewards of close reading. Moreover, when we encounter intermedial forms—rich with potential interpretative directions—we also enter the encounter, inhabiting the materials in distinct ways. Centring an awareness of the limitations and potentialities of our own positionality, I propose a form of encounter-as-practice emerging from, and extending, intersectionally feminist scholarship that seeks to scrutinise and overcome the inequities inherent to mainstream, fourth-wave feminism. Its self-reflexive practice uncovers surprising and radical alternative readings of these memoirs, as it illuminates the labour essential for producing, and reflecting on, equitable and ethical encounters with others, and as we consume representations of otherness

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Funders:	Arts and Humanities Research Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	9 December 2024
Last Modified:	25 Jan 2025 22:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174617

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