Books by Krystian Marcin Gradz
Animals and Their People: Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies, 2018
EDITED BOOKS by Krystian Marcin Gradz
Series: Human-Animal Studies, Volume: 21, 2018
Animals and Their People: Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies, edited by Anna Bar... more Animals and Their People: Connecting East and West in Cultural Animal Studies, edited by Anna Barcz and Dorota Łagodzka, provides a zoocentric insight into philosophical, artistic, and literary problems in Western, Anglo-American, and Central-Eastern European context. The contributors go beyond treating humans as the sole object of research and comprehension, and focus primarily on non-human animals. This book results from intellectual exchange between Polish and foreign researchers and highlights cultural perspective as an exciting language of animal representation. Animals and Their People aims to bridge the gap between Anglo-American and Central European human-animal studies. See the contents and other information: https://brill.com/abstract/title/36120
Papers by Krystian Marcin Gradz
Performing Identities in Culture, 2024
The chapter is devoted to David Wojnarowicz’s memoir, which not only criticizes, but also dismant... more The chapter is devoted to David Wojnarowicz’s memoir, which not only criticizes, but also dismantles the oppressive social order of the USA in the late 1980s. It employs various theoretical frameworks in making Wojnarowicz’s frequently visceral and unexceptionally intense critique more approachable. In doing so, the text uses Benedict Andreson’s idea of a nation, for it is Wojnarowicz himself who critiques, albeit in a more emotive manner, the imagined community of a national variety. Furthermore, to see how insidious the workings of the oppressive and exploitative social order are, the text draws on Lee Edelman’s reformulation of the death drive, which, according to Edelman, should be embraced, rather than renounced, by non-normative citizens. Finally, Jacques Baudrillard’s conceptualisations of simulacrum and simulation are employed, as, in his memoir, Wojnarowicz touches upon the topic of media manipulation and propaganda that correspond to, and reverberate with, Baudrillard’s theory. Succinctly, the text argues that Wojnarowicz’s critique is performative in the sense of him, and his “people” (the disenfranchised and non-normative people, especially those expendable and inhabiting the social margin), not only finding a voice, but also actively, and performatively, constituting themselves as subjects—the “democratic” privilege of which they were deprived thus far.
Er(r)go, 2020
In the following paper, the author approaches some of the visual work of two contemporary photogr... more In the following paper, the author approaches some of the visual work of two contemporary photographers-Erwin Olaf and Ruven Afanador-in an attempt to see how their work renounces traditional views on masculinity. The photographs chosen for this analysis appear to be a peculiar play with social conventions and expectations related to gender and sexuality. In their work, both Erwin Olaf and Ruven Afanador seem to disrupt and reject the economy of heterosexual desire in favour of a much freer-and unconstrained by propriety-expression of corporeality and sensuality. As a result of such a spectacle of recreation , the body is redefined not only as a means of expressing performativity (or, the surface onto which it is inscribed), but above all as a medium of becoming which functions as a reservoir of ever-changing meanings.
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Books by Krystian Marcin Gradz
EDITED BOOKS by Krystian Marcin Gradz
Papers by Krystian Marcin Gradz