The state uses public funeral practice and large-scale national mourning as an opportunity to affirm cultural and sexual norms as state values, as evidenced in state and military funerals. My dissertation, "Queering U.S. Public Mourning Practice: Funerals, Performance, and the Construction of Normativity," argues that funeral practice in fact exposes the precarity of traditional kinship and sexual practices while simultaneously constructing the heteronuclear family and heterosexuality as norms. I argue that public funerals appropriate practices and aesthetics coded as abject, socially excessive, and queer in order to demonstrate their distance from these national "others." My investigation divides loosely into two parts. I begin by juxtaposing the funerals of national heroes (Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan and fallen soldiers of the Iraq war) with the funerals and mourning practices of LGBT people and people of color within these sites. These first chapters propose a politics of visibility which calls attention to the relationship between the invisible and the hypervisible. In the second half of the dissertation, I turn to funeral and memorial practices already framed by difference: New York's African Burial Ground and the virtual altars devoted to the memory of Gloria Anzaldúa. With these two chapters I argue that the normative operates as a performative tool wielded to gain access and rights or as a foil to mourning practices that contest borders of memory and death.

This project began with a desire to define and articulate what I have termed cinematic performance, which itself emerged from an examination of how liveness, as a privileged performance studies concept, functions in the 21st century. Given the relative youth of the discipline, performance studies has remained steadfast in delimiting its objects as those that are live--shared air performance--and not bound by textuality; only recently has the discipline considered the mediated, but still solely within the circumscription of shared air performance. The cinema, as cultural object, permeates our lives--it is pervasive and ubiquitous--it sets the bar for quality acting, and shapes our expectations and ideologies. The cinema, and the cinematic text, is a complex performance whose individual components combine to produce a sum greater than the total of its parts. The cinema itself is a performance--not just the acting--participating in a cultural dialogue, continually reshaping and challenging notions of liveness, made more urgent with the ever-increasing use of digital technologies that seem to further segregate what is generally considered real performance from the final, constructed cinematic text.

Liveness and presence have remained defining forces within the field. In her now-canonical Unmarked (1993), Peggy Phelan assertively concludes, "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (146). At the end of the same decade, however, Philip Auslander begins to play devil's advocate in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999) by troubling what he sees as a "reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized" (3). Through a genealogical consideration of live and mediated forms of performance, Auslander concludes that the live cannot be considered outside of or as separate from the mediated (7).

With the rise of digital products, and the ever-increasing incorporation of the digital into our daily lives, Auslander's initial troubling of the traditional concept of liveness expands and becomes more complex. The cinema, as an art and as an analytical object, continually foregrounds its absent presence, its present absence. By the turn of the 21st century, cinema studies had firmly established claims of indexicality in the relationship of the cinematic text to reality: the celluloid captures the light, is imprinted by the profilmic event. Yet, the rise of new media and digital technologies at the end of the 21st century have allowed for the creation of photorealistic scenes created wholly outside the images captured with the camera, requiring no relationship to the profilmic event.

At the same time that cinema seemed to be losing its indexical relationship to reality, and as digital technologies increasingly permeated the fabric of daily existence, zombie cinematic production witnessed a renaissance in popularity and surge in quantity. It is no small coincidence that zombie cinema also rose in popularity during film's transition to sound (1930s-1940s), again during the proliferation of televisions into every American home (1960s), and then again most recently with the explosion of digital technologies. In each of these moments zombie cinema thematizes presence, absence, and liveness. Combining performance theory, film theory, new media studies, and zombie popular culture, this project seeks to account for the most recent surge in zombie cinema and zombie culture, arguing that 21st century zombie cinema performs new media.

The introduction provides a theoretical background, outlining the beginnings of this project and providing some initial grounding in the theoretical terminology that structures the project. In Chapter One, I provide the historical and genealogical grounding, surveying the history of zombie cinema. Chapter Two, "Inaugurating the 21st Century Zombie: Embodying Biomedia and Liminality in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002)," begins my analysis of new media--in this case, Eugene Thacker's concept of biomedia--and how it emerges within and is represented by zombie cinema, leading to an assertion of zombie liminality. I continue to expand upon new media and zombie cinema in "Liveness and Living Dead: Remediation and Intermediality in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007)," introducing the concept of remediation and demonstrating some of the potentialities of liminality. Chapter Four, "Networked Dispersal: Performance Process, Multiplicity, and Connectivity in 21st Century Zombie Cinema," expands from the single film examination to a larger consideration of 21st century zombie cinema and how it performs network connections. In the last chapter, Visceral Viewing: Zombies "In Real Life" (IRL), I step away from screened representations of zombies to a consideration of zombies embodied in real life: zombie walks, zombie theater, and community formations. I conclude by returning to the beginning: cinematic performance. And here I offer a continuation of the project, a new branch, taking-up another aspect of cinematic performance and considering how digital post production creates performance and is its own performance.

"There are wonders that I want to perform" says the name of Ireland's first African-Irish theatre company, Arambe Productions, which derives from the Nigerian saying ara m be ti mo fe da. The company performs stories of the African-Irish community, yet their dramatizations ponder a larger reality of an Ireland that has gone from a country of emigrants to a nation re-shaped by inward-migration. The sudden shifts brought on by the mid-1990s Celtic Tiger economic boom and unprecedented immigration have plunged the Irish population at large into a state of wondering. What does it mean that the non-Irish born population residing in the Republic grew from less than 5% to more than 12% in a little over a decade? How will Ireland model a vision of interculturalism that avoids the failures of multiculturalism in Western Europe and the U.S.? How have race and gender created a hierarchy amongst migrant communities and subjects? Through performance, Arambe Productions transforms such wondering into a process of "working together," signaling a second meaning of the company's name: harambee in Swahili means "work together." The company's collective labors aim to create a post-Celtic Tiger intercultural vision of Irish identity and belonging. But can this vision be performed into existence?

My dissertation project, "Performing the `New Irish': Race, Gender, and Interculturalism in the Post-Celtic Tiger Nation," argues that performance is at the center of conceptualizing interculturalism as social policy, philosophy and aspiration in contemporary Ireland. While some might see interculturalism as referring to two cultures meeting in the moment of performance, I argue, rather, that in Ireland today, the term refers to the process of inventing a new pluralistic Irish identity, one that accommodates Irish-born as well as migrant communities. Irish interculturalism connotes practical policy measures regarding integration, access to social benefits and services, and public eduction about racism, but it also translates into cultural initiatives that stress the arts as a zone of contact between diverse populations.

My research examines theatres, public festivals and arts/social organizations that make use of performance to theorize interculturalism as embodied practice. Theatre companies like Arambe, Camino de Orula Productions, Calypso Productions, and NGOs like Spirasi, Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, and the Forum on Migration and Communication bid for cultural recognition of minority groups through performance, arts, and media activism. These efforts are endorsed by diverse governmental and non-governmental bodies, which range from the Office of the Minister of Integration, the now-defunct National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, to the Irish government Task Force on Active Citizenship. The diverse sponsors and forums for these projects, however, generate tension between state-managed visions for interculturalism and the goals of community-based or non-governmental groups advocating for an interculturalism from below which remains critical of the Irish state's treatment of minority groups and management of inward-migration more generally.

My investigation of the interplay between social and aesthetic theories of interculturalism exposes the embodied challenges of analyzing relationships between the Irish state, minority communities and the nation at large. Using ethnographic methods, I position performance as the crucible in which Irish theories of interculturalism are tested and reimagined through the work of bodies who must bear the labor of social change. I trace the struggles to craft an analytical language around race and ethnicity in Ireland frames these projects, and how the intersection of gender with these former categories complicates this task. My sites range from the Abbey Theatre stage to the Migrant Rights Center's photography exhibit by domestic workers and the Dublin St. Patrick's Festival Parade in order to capture the diversity of venues in which performing bodies are called upon to embody post-Celtic Tiger social change. My case studies interrogate whether these projects have the power to push against material limits of social access, paths to citizenship and racism/discrimination and reveal that these performances frequently reinscribe relationships of power between minority and Irish-born communities by falling back on top-down models of interculturalism. Perhaps it is through the reiterative power of performance that the wonders of an egalitarian Irish interculturalism can come into being, but these moving bodies must first be situated in broader matrixes of power which index the role of race and gender in shaping the future of post-Celtic Tiger Irish identities.