Visuality means to be literate, having the ability to articulate, in images, through the connective nature that likeness represents as it links with the impetus that conceptualized it and cultural and sociological eddys of perception that mean to integrate an objecthood to maintain the ism the reflection represents. What this means, really, is that images obtain significant meaning through the utilization and provocation of the senses beyond the optical toward aesthetics by way of the soma, or what Marks termed an embodied empathy, a self-identifying connection with the representative image. This is also true for comics as they work through the principles of interactivity, visuality requires a comprehension, an understanding of the inherent structure and nature—the space that allows for the meaning to occur—of visual messages in the sense of suggestion, gesturing towards, and motion as it articulates cause and meaning-filled effect (the image is of x doing these actions y therefore it means z) but its means of significance in comics works through conjunction in the sense of haptic visuality, the relationship shift “of the viewer to the image away from divided subject-object to a merged subjectivity” as it allows the viewer to identify what is seen through identifying with (Janzen 106). In this sense, visuality works through sensorium, the presented phenomenological experience allows for a deeper clarity as the blurred line between seer and seen converge, in the sense that “[t]hings solicit the flesh just as the flesh beckons to and as an object for things. Perception is the flesh’s reversibility, the flesh touching, seeing, perceiving itself, one fold (provisionally) catching the other in its own self-embrace” (Grosz 103). Further, for meaning to occur, the created sensorium demands that conflation of the perceived image as subject, I see myself and know it to be me as I see it, “and find[s] [the perception] sensible in the primary, prepersonal, and global way” that enacts connection (Sobchack 65). In that sense, visuality acts in the “interest and investment in being both ‘here’ and ‘there’” as I sense it, I know it (Sobchack 66).So I began to circulate questions about the paradigm of visuality: what happens when interpretations of the body is taken as the visual verbatim of the social narrative that describes, designates, and depicts it? What happens when the denotation of the body breaks with the socially held connotation? I began looking at the system of visuality that surrounds black bodies, the stuff that creates images of blackness as Blackness.How did this woman, in an act of parrhesia, create me, make blackness? How is this universality created in our sociality? The easiest obvious answer is that the term image is being utilized in a specific way: the aesthetic, the meaning, is derived from the processes of value and worth attached to the conflation of the depicted denotation and its connotation, the easy and obvious notion of what is seen as black means Black. They Might be my Color, but that Don't Make 'Em Biscuits is an examination of the visual medium of comics, critically looking at how depicted black forms re-present the typification of blackness produced in the public sphere, that requires audience participation, and to paraphrase Norman Bryson, means to propagate systems of visuality as a ubiquitous discourse of the always already seen. Like the mixed metaphor of the title suggests, this is an examination of the translation of the processes of embodiment of the black body through a visual medium that appears to be the determination of blackness as Blackness, and is largely taken up as so, by critically investigating what Nicole R. Fleetwood calls the visible seam. This project means to slow down the processes and mechanisms of visuality that structure, construct, and suture black being and reality through a critical lens of the visual, ambient rhetoric, and somaesthetics. In other words, comics, because of their absolute constructed nature, delivers a specific meaning through deliberate broad strokes to employ a particular economy that reflects knowledge and meaning showing what it to be seen. It is important to note that comics representation of the black body is an even further removal, it is to adumbrate the already simplified in order for proper interpretation, one that “allows the writer a quick and easy image without the responsibility of specificity, accuracy, or even narratively useful description” (Morrison 67). In other words, because of the deliberate vaguery, it is easier to discern the focal point in the process through which meaning is made in a cultural context; how the representative form is shaped by the visual in such a way to mine a particular meaning from it, how the underpinning conceptual conventions are tied to it, and how said conventions work through the need to visually reconcile macro ideals with micro applications of the quotidian interaction of conscious and subconscious, the designers and readers.

The intellectual field of Black Studies has historically served as an organ of critique against western normativity. Additionally, the work of black studies has been an opportunity to examine intraracial concerns and debates impacting the black scholarly community and the everyday lives of black folks. My scholarship on Black Camp emerges from these practices and concerns. Camp is a queer aesthetic and cultural practice utilizing incongruity, exaggeration, theatricality, spectacle, and satirical humor to challenge western overinvestment in the stability of gender categories, objects, and behavioral practices. Black Camp extends this practice to unsettle western investment in the idea of race, specifically racial blackness, as a fixed category of distinction. By doing this Black camp disrupts the assumption that camp is a primarily European and Gay male cultural practice; while also addressing silences in black uplift discourse concerning the utility of Clack camp for creating social alternatives– or Otherwise Worlds– for black culture workers seeking to queer normative expectations of blackness

This dissertation explores cultural production about autism—from film, television, literature, and video games to United States legal documents—in order to define and analyze assumptions about white masculinity within the ideologies of neoliberal capitalism. In popular culture, characters with autism are generally limited to operating as either apathetic harbingers of dehumanizing presents and futures (as in science fiction with autistic characters) or as dependents who have a difficult time functioning in modern economies and who must ultimately “overcome” through personal initiative. In both models, autism presents problems of productivity, independence, and finances. In these ways, representations of autism are often intimately connected to neoliberal goals and expose how neoliberal subjects are made to perform. These texts present, then, a means of tracing the evolution of how neoliberalism has impacted culture, identity, and disability. Further, such representations of (primarily men) with autism were produced simultaneously to the idea that a “crisis of masculinity” has resulted from modern social and economic policies. Connecting David Savran’s concept of the “white male as victim” under late capitalism and Sally Robinson’s concept of the “marked man” to Stuart Murray’s notion of the “Hollywood logic of autism,” this dissertation argues that cultural definitions of autism have had key roles in furthering the privatized, enraged affects that sustain neoliberalism. Through this methodology, the dissertation seeks to further define the intersections of masculinity and disability as a potentially hegemonic coalition through which notions of self-financialization, rational self-interest, and rugged individualism are supported. By noting the relationship between autism and neoliberal subjectivity, the dissertation disentangles the mythologies through which disabilities and masculinities are made productive for regimes that create immense amounts of social, political, and economic suffering. It also furthers research on how affective and cognitive disabilities (as opposed to physical, the focus of most disability studies) are constructed through cultural discourse and, specifically, expands understandings of autism by putting different media in conversation with each other.