This dissertation takes the performative body as the site of analysis to critically interrogate the contradictions in the space-time of India in the liberalization regime. By the term liberalization regime, I refer to the unprecedented changes that have occurred in India starting from the late 1980s: the deregulation and opening up of the economy with the signing of "Structural Adjustment Programs," privatization initiatives, the rise of transnational media resulting in the proliferation of consumerist images in the public space, and the "free" flow of information across national borders. These changes have transformed India from a nation driven by state developmentalism to a nation organized by the "free market." Throughout the dissertation, I analyze diverse cultural objects that emerge from and embody this transformation, such as the popular performance form of mimicking called "Mimics Parade," the photo-performance project of the artists Clare Arni and N. Pushpamala, ad-films of Multi-National Companies on national television channels, and an Indo-Japanese theatrical production titled Sahyante Makan: the Elephant Project.

I read these cultural objects as instances of the performative use of the trope that I have termed "nativized bodies." I use the term nativized bodies to draw attention to a representational schema that, rather than invoking an already found authentic native or instituting a modern bourgeois humanist subject completely negating the specificity of the native, self-referentially highlights the complex intersections in the construction of native as recognizable bodies. Nativized bodies reiterate and point to the colonial-modern representational apparatus that constructs them as native bodies through disciplining apparatus and commodification. I posit that the nativized bodies is a seminal way of illustrating the contradictions in the liberalization regime, as the trope foregrounds and brings into tension the "body" as constituted at the intersection of the theorizations of corporeality and deployment of "body" in state-practices, the nationalist discourse, and commodification.

This dissertation analyzes lesbian feminist performance in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s to critically interrogate how this period has been narrativized in histories of feminism. When considering the history of feminism in terms of decades, the 1970s are often idealized as feminism’s zenith, while the 1980s and 1990s are marred by feminist in-fighting, rising conservatism on the national stage, and the culture wars. Clare Hemmings refers to this version of the history of feminism as a “loss” narrative which unwittingly serves those who would mark feminism as over. This dissertation brings together performances that disrupt this loss narrative by advancing ideas that have been associated with 1970s lesbian feminism into the 1980s and 1990s, or by emphasizing common goals over divisive issues. These performances range from plays such as Shirlene Holmes’s A Lady and a Woman to museum installations such as Kiss & Tell’s Drawing the Line. Together, these works unsettle the loss narrative of the history of feminism by perpetuating lesbian feminist ideas, even in the face of conservative backlash.

This dissertation examines lesbian feminist performances that comment on feminist and LGBT issues of the 1980s and 1990s, with each chapter focusing on a different debate. Chapter 1 examines how the sex wars get taken up in lesbian feminist performances and museum installations while considering the perspectives of lesbians of color on questions of sexuality. Chapter 2 turns to issues of kinship and the figure of the lesbian child in performance, which lesbian feminists advanced in the face of conservative family values. Chapter 3 examines lesbian performances that reify the heteronormativity of national identity and considers how state heteronormativity manifests in state-funded arts contexts. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on performances that extend a lesbian feminist anti-capitalist sensibility and commitment to community into the 1980s and 1990s. These performances address the issues of gentrification, homelessness and cuts to social services. By addressing these social issues and the lesbian feminist performances that respond to them, this dissertation looks back at 1980s and 1990s lesbian feminist ideas in order to inform contemporary feminist and LGBT movements.

This dissertation examines masculinities in relation to Pahlavi-era Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, within diaspora, as well as the limitations of an ethno-cultural/gender study through ideologies of postidentification. "Performing Persianicity" functions as trope and designation throughout of constructed formulations and manifestations of masculinities, as well as anchoring reminder of performance as primary filter for the analyses undertaken. "Performing Persianicity" examines citings of masculinities in relation to Iranianisms from the 1970s to the current moment and the navigation of the phenomena under question moves neither chronologically, nor teleologically, but within the backdrop of a matrix under construction throughout the last 40 years.

Chapter 1, "Persianicity Proxies for Maardahnehgee," defines Persianicity as a performative demarcation and effect of ideologies instituted by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Persianization of the subject, or identification as Persian, is argued as a production indebted to engagements with a set of qualities that would strive to make visible resonances marking this strain of masculinity. The turn from the ethnicized Iranian to the diasporic Persian is evidenced through the 1971 2,500th Anniversary Celebration of Iran, the work of comedian Maziar Jobrani, and the film House of Sand and Fog. In Chapter 2, "Mourning Masculinities," the diasporic masculinized subject is introduced within spaces of mourning and through a focus upon gendered subjectivity in relation to the ideologies of loss and trauma. The investigation is undertaken with focus upon Babak Shokrian's film America So Beautiful, using supplemental assistance from photographic archives of Los Angeles.

"Sacrificial Masculinities in Crisis," Chapter 3, unveils tactical and strategic maneuvers wherein sacrificial masculinities are evacuated in the attempted production of a unique strain of Islamic masculinity unrealized prior to the Shah, or within diaspora. The space to secure Islamic masculinized identification is problematized in the face of modernity, and analyzed through the work of artist Sadegh Tirafkan, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, and the situation of activist Majid Tavakoli.

Chapter 4, "Performing Postidentifications," focuses upon borderline presences, wherein the subject is located neither within nor outside of the ethnic, the national, or those "real" behaviors that manufacture apparitions of consistent identification. The installation of the prefix "post" to the idea of identification is achieved through the interrogation of a subject who no longer identifies within borders, nor the ethnic paradigm, and traced through the work of artist Shahram Entekhabi and the personae of rock band Queen's Freddie Mercury.

This dissertation examines representations of national identity in live performance in Korea and the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. My research focuses on how intermedial performance strategies—performances that incorporate pre-filmed elements, often by projecting film or images into the background of a performance—deploy local cultural and political motifs of South Korean national identity. This work encompasses both early and contemporary performances and reveals that the combination of performance and screen has served as a mode of the postmodern movement of cultural translation. The productions I examine—the pyŏnsa (“film narrator”) performances during the Japanese Colonial Rule, the Korean musical The Last Empress (1995) and Hero (2009), YMAP’s dance piece Madame Freedom (2013), and Ping Chong’s Deshima (1990) and Chinoiserie (1995)—address cultural differences, constructing a space in which Korean audiences can both learn the culture of the Western “Other” and imagine themselves as part of a nation. Using critical readings of selected Korean performances, the research shows that the changing cultural and political climate of the South Korean nation-state creates an urgency for artists to express a particular national identity. By illustrating the shifting rhetoric of the relationship between the individual and the state, such works endeavor to challenge the status quo.

This work foregrounds how technologies create and emerge from sociocultural, economic and political discourses. My use of transcode, a term introduced by the semiotician A.J. Greimas and carried into the digital realm by Lev Manovich, refers to how cultural elements such as assumptions, biases, priorities emerge within programming code and software. It demonstrates how cultural norms persist across different mediums and posits that, in many ways, the capacity to be flexible defines cultural ideologies. At the software level, programming languages work like performative speech: grammar which produces effects. When cast as speech, coming from a

body (or bodies) instead of hardware, information structures can be perceived as acting within regimes of corporeality; when cast as software, information structures demonstrate and advertise the capabilities of hardware.

Although often aligned with veracity and stability in its proximity to (computer) science,

software is not culturally neutral. Building on this this foundation, my dissertation challenges the notion of democratic virtual space by showing how normative—limiting and limited—categories of identity continue to emerge in media despite methodologies like keyword tagging and crowd-sourcing and customizable avatars in videogames. Foregrounding lived identity is necessary to analyze media architectures and representations, such as videogames, software structures, and online forums. As one example, avatar customization sequences in videogames (and some social media sites), conflate identity with visuality and notions of a stable self. This flattens the lived experience of racialization, for example, and the nuances associated with affiliation and

identification to mere taxonomies of color.

A wide range of critical theories such as performativity and transnationalism, globalization, digital theory and construction, sexuality and erotics, cultural difference, gender codes/coding, and intellectual property persist across this work. I bring together work by Ian Bogost and Diana Taylor, which respectively introduce concepts of procedural rhetoric and vulnerable archiving processes subject to external influence. In so doing, I show that social identifications are inextricable from sites investigated here, including interactive media, site specific installations, and live performance.

This dissertation will examine black gay theatre/ performance in the United States from 1970 to 2010. My intent is to establish a genealogy of black gay performance by situating performance strategies of visibility employed by black gay men in the late 20th century utilizing various performance genres such as revue, theatrical biography, the "event" and history play. Specifically, I am interested that this writing act as a discursive in interrogating the historiography of the tactics of black gay visibility in contrast to and in concert with traditional heterosexual black masculinities where the overall effort was to distinguish a queer black aesthetic separate from the white gay project. My research is necessarily involved with both gay and black performances in this period, since a study of black gay performance practices cannot be pulled away from the black experience in America. Identity politics is the conduit to self-empowerment for black and gay liberation movements, for similar reasons. Accordingly, the project study will concentrate on three areas: (1) social trends and historiography, (2) select black gay performances in this period, and (3) theories of queer and racial identification.

Theater, historically, has served as a site for intense debates about ontology, specifically as concerns distinctions between what is real, in Plato's sense, and what is "merely" mimetic. Similar ontological debates have attended the development of new media technologies, which are often figured as enabling shady activities like impersonation, simulation, and piracy (on the internet, after all, no one knows you're a dog, and Photoshopped images of Iranian missile tests circulate globally nearly instantly), and arousing related questions about authenticity, identity and ownership. My dissertation brings debates about realness and mimesis to three sites of twenty-first century performance: intermedial theater, specifically the Wooster Group's 2007 Hamlet and the mediatized Burton/Gielgud Hamlet it deconstructs; reality television, specifically MTV's "scripted reality" show The Hills; and alternate reality gaming, in particular the 2007 future forecasting game World Without Oil. In each of these sites I examine the ways mediatization and theatricality work, sometimes in concert and sometimes in conflict, to complicate and perform realness.

Questions of realness, authenticity and honesty have long haunted Western theater traditions, and so I use the lens of Western theatrical acting to address related questions in new media performance contexts. While only one of the dissertation's sites of analysis positions itself explicitly as theater, each is a theatrical situation that places its players in a subjunctive stance--one that depends on their acting "as if" circumstances were other than they are--and so evokes the concerns and "ontological queasiness" (Barish) that accompanies the mimetic activity of Western theater. In bringing together these disparate sites of mixed realities, I make a case for the opportunities this mixing and subjunctivity enable: mischievous interventions into supposedly stable differences between the real and its various others (the artificial, the fake, the feigned, the staged or rehearsed). An uncertain real is often described in terms of loss and threat, of radical instability that poses either overt or latent dangers. My argument, however,

prioritizes the ways in which refiguring relationships to realness might be occasion opportunity, especially the opportunity for exploration, excitement, even productive mischief.

This dissertation analyses the dyke body as a site of social networking. I use the term social network to refer to both virtual and real spaces. I do not employ social network as always meaning community; social network refers to affiliations, communal and the collective as well as connections made across and through media. The term dyke is used to push against the notion of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics. The purpose of theorizing dyke as opposed to lesbian or queer has to do with an historic investment in the singularity of dyke and the territory of dyke as other, resistant, and not feminine.

This project draws from multiple theoretical lenses including performance studies, visual culture, sociality, ethnographic research, and archival research in order to place a study of a subculture of dyke into a discourse on performance, sexuality and networks. By looking across a multifarious archive of subcultural artifacts, the dyke body emerges as integral to LGBT politics and to the dissemination of the culture of the dyke locally and globally. Comic books, photography, video art, performance art, theater, legal proceedings, brand identity and the web have certainly been the objects of extensive studies, but collectively relating and reading these objects through the theory of social networking introduces a different concept of dyke – a connected, hyper/crosstextual, crossvisual, transindividual body.

Collectivizing and group formation have been central to LGBT social and political protest in the U.S. This project aims to identify and register some of the alternate ways that dyke bodies have organized underneath and outside of typical LGBT frameworks. This dissertation specifically focuses on the group San Francisco Dykes on Bikes®, however, it also examines other forms of dyke connections in an effort to consider counter-strategies to collectivizing. Sites of Sociality: Performances of Dyke Identifications Through Social Networking looks at familiar and lesser-known cultural production of dyke and lesbian-focused artists as both an epistemological shift in thinking about agential power outside of normative bodies and a tracing of where that power might reside inside and outside of community.

This dissertation examines contemporary political performances inside and outside of Taiwan as a political gesture capable of reacting and responding to the changing milieu. I investigate the process through which performers and activists reinforced or troubled the political dominance between the years 2000 and 2013, an unusual period in which colossal demonstrations against governments ensued. I consider the cultural and economic scenarios in which performance practitioners participate in the discussion of identification and examine the diverse performing methods mediated through transnational and regional discourses. I argue that live performance has become a tactical and playful form of political critique that fights within and against the official norms of identity from which it is constructed.

The main focus of this dissertation is the process through which Taiwanese performances negotiate and oscillate in-between various identificatory (de)constructions resulting from its layered colonization and sensitive relationship to the international. The various artistic approaches signify what I model as the dialectic between the national melancholia and the campy island disidentification of Taiwan. The practices not only contribute to the enactment of a more just and egalitarian Taiwan but also mobilize necessary dialogues across states and borders that partake in performative and political issues abroad.

I ground this argument in the combination of psychoanalysis, transnational discourses, body politics, and the analysis of specific performance examples. The examples include Dreamers (2011), Mazu's Bodyguards (2009), Pirates and Formosa (2011), A Soldiers' Pay (2004), Antigone (2013), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (2009), Occupy Wall Street (2011-), and White Shirt Movement (2013-). I treat "performance" not as an end product but as an ongoing political project probing into the interrelation between political/economic apparatus and media/technology spectacle. I suggest not only that the historical particularities dominate the local cultural productions but also that practitioners transform and reimagine the sense of nation and of island by fashioning divergent theatrical aesthetics in response to the political dynamisms. This dissertation ends by querying how performative articulations of Taiwanese identification function as a means of survival that triggers further discussion regarding the interplay between postcolonial politics and multicultural aesthetics on this island.