Sites of Sociality: Performances of Dyke Identifications Through Social Networking

This dissertation analyses the dyke body as a site of social networking. I use the term social network to refer to both virtual and real spaces. I do not employ social network as always meaning community; social network refers to affiliations, communal and the collective as well as connections made across and through media. The term dyke is used to push against the notion of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics. The purpose of theorizing dyke as opposed to lesbian or queer has to do with an historic investment in the singularity of dyke and the territory of dyke as other, resistant, and not feminine. This project draws from multiple theoretical lenses including performance studies, visual culture, sociality, ethnographic research, and archival research in order to place a study of a subculture of dyke into a discourse on performance, sexuality and networks. By looking across a multifarious archive of subcultural artifacts, the dyke body emerges as integral to LGBT politics and to the dissemination of the culture of the dyke locally and globally. Comic books, photography, video art, performance art, theater, legal proceedings, brand identity and the web have certainly been the objects of extensive studies, but collectively relating and reading these objects through the theory of social networking introduces a different concept of dyke – a connected, hyper/crosstextual, crossvisual, transindividual body. Collectivizing and group formation have been central to LGBT social and political protest in the U.S. This project aims to identify and register some of the alternate ways that dyke bodies have organized underneath and outside of typical LGBT frameworks. This dissertation specifically focuses on the group San Francisco Dykes on Bikes®, however, it also examines other forms of dyke connections in an effort to consider counter-strategies to collectivizing. Sites of Sociality: Performances of Dyke Identifications Through Social Networking looks at familiar and lesser-known cultural production of dyke and lesbian-focused artists as both an epistemological shift in thinking about agential power outside of normative bodies and a tracing of where that power might reside inside and outside of community