@article{OrientingPleasures:IdentityandLanguage:7513,
      recid = {7513},
      author = {Kim, Tae Ho},
      title = {Orienting Pleasures: Identity and Language, 1900/2000},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-08},
      pages = {204},
      abstract = {This dissertation is a historical study of pleasure as a  form of relational thought. The interest of the project is  historical, formal, and theoretical: How did sexuality come  to signify the subject’s fraught relation to identities as  units of intelligibility in historically critical moments?  How have literary and non-literary forms of language  represented and reacted to this modern sense of  contingency? And what kinds of structural specificity in  erotic pleasure have made such problematization possible  then and now? 	With an analysis of literary and discursive  writings around 1900 and around 2000, I show how the logic  of sexuality has been conceived as that of paradox, where  the boundaries of identities are drawn and dissolved at  once. It is the ambivalent contemporaneity of congealment  and dissipation in sexual pleasure, I contend, that made it  possible for it to serve as the master metaphor for  modernity and its antagonism between the real and the  possible. I demonstrate how the conflicts between the  representational paradigms of mimesis and poiesis as well  as between the theoretical notions of identity and  queerness are spectacles staged by this framework of  thinking modernity.
	The dissertation will relativize the  antagonism in such views by revealing its status a  contingent mode of historicizing modernity. I will offer an  alternative way of understanding identity and its  linguistic representation with a reading of writers and  thinkers who resisted such binarizations in their  reflection on sexuality. Rather than deeming identity and  language as normative homogeneity that must be abolished or  uncontrollable heterogeneity that must be regimented, they  regarded them as orientation devices that render the world  anew by making it intelligible. Pleasure is the name for  this transformative experience.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7513},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7513},
}