The international armed conflict that Russia started against Ukraine became a horrific event not only in the recent history of Ukraine but, to a certain extent, in the life of Europe and the whole world. The Russian annexation of Crimea, "hybrid" warfare that is the combination of conventional and irregular tactics of war, such as using of mass communication, fake-news and propaganda, the invasion of Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014, and, as a result, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused the radical transformation of the international political landscape of Europe. This work is aimed to describe shortly the violation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, the laws and customs of warfare, and other international crimes committed by Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine after the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. This research pays special attention to the analysis of the illegal forced displacement and/or deportation of children from the occupied territories of Ukraine to different regions of the Russian Federation. Considering various thoughts and opinions from both sides, this essay analyzes the underlying reasons for the displacement and further deportation of Ukrainian children by the aggressor describing the effects this traumatic experience already has on the Ukrainian children and Ukrainian society. The analysis of different documents accepted by international organizations and statements of responsible authority's representatives can help to understand the attitude of the world’s community to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its reaction to the crimes committed against Ukrainians, especially when we talk about children, the most vulnerable human category during the war aggression. The correct qualification and documentation of the committed crimes from the very beginning of the invasion and during the active phase of hostilities that are now happening on the territory of Ukraine can help in the future to bring justice to the responsible parties regardless of their level of involvement. The leader of the country who started the war, its military leadership that supports him and the soldiers who directly commit all the atrocities on the territory of Ukraine must be punished for their actions. Such crimes must not be repeated in human history. They should become a part of the national memory not only of Ukraine but also of all war-affected and unaffected countries. Furthermore, as far as the aggressor is concerned, there should be a solid awareness of personal and collective responsibility for what has been committed to prevent the aggressor from repeating such atrocities again.

Fairies Wear Boots explores the imbrication of the early HIV/AIDS pandemic in the United States with queer identity. Responding to being labeled as abject—that which a majoritarian sphere casts out and denies a connection to—queer subjects have defiantly inhabited the abject and self-authored their stigmatized identities. But, how can this be done without reproducing the conditions of one’s expulsion in the first place? Looking at experimental autobiography, the early part of the AIDS epidemic as a historical setting in contemporary novels, and the artist Jerome Caja’s performance and self-depiction as an abject saint, I look to find ways of performing the abject that seek to expand the circle of inclusion rather than fighting for assimilation in a system that sees you as abject. Through examining how AIDS, homophobic violence and social expulsion form an oppositional, but fractured, identity, my intention is not to create a discourse of victimhood, but to think about how self-authoring one’s abject status holds a funhouse mirror up to the majoritarian sphere, and allows us to envision a more inclusive future.

The picaresque genre attempts to represent a subject outside History—in early modern Europe, the newly dispossessed peasant, “dissolute, crooked, thieving and idle”—who will eventually become the modern wage laborer. The genre uses slapstick humor and parody to make for witty stories that to this day retain their power to make us laugh out loud. But alongside the genre’s humor, the picaresque also figures its protagonists’ refusal to submit to the discipline of wage labor. Attending to the ideological and aesthetic strategies of the picaresque, this project examines the ways in which the genre has acted as an apparatus of capture for those living outside and on the margins of the enclosures of wage labor and the home. At the same time, it takes the picaresque as the genre of the lumpenproletariat and a chronicle of the making of new forms of life. The errant path of the rogue in the long picaresque traced here begins in early modern Spain, in La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes, moves through 18th C. England in Moll Flanders, leapfrogs continents and centuries to reappear in 1970s Mexico City in El vampiro de la colonia Roma, and ends with a bang in contemporary South Africa in Thirteen Cents. In terms of method, this project thinks alongside Herbert Marcuse, who writes that “art is perhaps the most visible ‘return of the repressed.’” It interrogates the shift in the literary figuration of the poor from holy mendicant to homeless subject, reading the genre slant—like a picaro—and against its function as moral fable of capital, in order to reveal a rich lumpen imaginary overflowing with other ways of being and living. Finally, in imagining a time before and after the long picaresque, I sketch out the contours of a radical psychoanalysis grounded in the urgency of working through the deadening effects of the philosophy of productiveness and the pain of private property.

This dissertation addresses and hopes to complicate the reception history of modernist literary productions as wholly positive reactions to Freudian psychoanalysis. Through close readings of fictional, poetic, epistolary, and expository texts, historical analysis, and an examination of the iterative development of psychoanalytic and other critical theories, these chapters expose a much more complicated counter-narrative of mutual resistance and ambivalence between the discourses of psychoanalysis and Anglo-American literary modernism. This dissertation presents a methodological intervention into the use of the concept of transference outside of the clinical scene in literary criticism, followed by a theoretical history of the figure of resistance in the elaboration of psychoanalytic epistemology in the first chapter. The four subsequent chapters present a series of modernist case-histories of resistance to psychoanalysis, examining respectively the discursive encounters of Otto Gross, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Mina Loy with psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, which produced textual mode of address that this project refers to as obloquies of resistance. The dissertation also tracks an alternative history of clinical practice by foregrounding the relationship of these literary authors to a group of analysts at odds with the burgeoning psychoanalytic institution, including Carl Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, Trigant Burrow, Barbara Low, and Roberto Assagioli. The project closes with the suggestion that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were informed by these modernist interventions, and that the rubric of repudiative obloquy can give new insights into the poststructural and postcolonial projects that criticize psychoanalysis.