On 10 March, Ida Hansen will defend their thesis ‘Being Through Loss: A Queer Performative Reckoning With Grief’. Hansen presents a queer performative framework for ‘being through loss’ that contributes to contemporary debates on grief and scholarship on loss and death via engagement with contemporary texts that depict the loss of a loved one.
This dissertation presents a queer performative framework for ‘being through loss’ that contributes to contemporary debates on grief and scholarship on loss and death via engagement with contemporary texts that depict the loss of a loved one. ‘Being through loss’ reconfigures the conditions of engagement with grief by identifying the “ontogeny” that subtends and locks contemporary debates in questions of grief’s right and wrong definitions. Through close readings of texts that occupy prominent positions in contemporary debate in Denmark and the US specifically, and in Western Europe and North America at large, this dissertation illustrates how an experienced sense of being in the world takes and alters shape through loss. Upon investigating the biomedical research literature on grief as psychiatric diagnosis, the dissertation moves to autobiographical accounts of loss by first engaging with When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book by Danish author and poet Naja Marie Aidt and then with American author and journalist Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
Taken together, this dissertation’s chapters foreground the relevance of feminist poststructuralist and queer uptakes of psychoanalysis for contemporary research on mourning, and they contribute in particular to the newly emerging field of queer death studies. In unfolding its queer performative framework for ‘being through loss’ through sustained engagement with contemporary grief literature, this dissertation not only reframes our understanding of the phenomenon of grief. It also provides us with a poetic sense of the organic and entangled qualities of the world and an experienced sense of being in it.
Details PhD Defense
Date: Friday 10 March 2023
Time: 10.15 hrs.
Location: Online via this link and at the Utrecht University Hall for invited quests
Title: Being Through Loss: A Queer Performative Reckoning With Grief
Supervisors: Dr. Kathrin Thiele and Prof. Rosemarie Buikema
