Animal-Woman journey(s): posthuman embodiment of zoomorphic folk tales

Diverse folktales passed down across the generations in different languages tell of Seal Women, Selkies, Mermaids, Dove Girls, She-Wolves, Swan Women: all zoomorphic or semi-zoomorphic beings able to remove their animal coats or skins and take on human shape. Liminal creatures capable of transformation, they embrace the wild and the civilized, animal and human, aquatic, aerial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, archetypal and individual. They have the ability to move between worlds. Across a vast range of stories, these creaturely women are deprived of their animal skin; losing their integrity and ability to transform, they are doomed to incompleteness, foreignness, otherness and longing. They get “stuck” in human form and are forced to function according to imposed human rules. They are trapped somewhere between subject and object, “I” and “Other”, between their body and its image. Such tales offer rich territory for performative exploration of the normalized processes of oppression underpinning both human exceptionalism and the environmental crises associated with the Anthropocene, as well as compelling alternative formulations of our relational co-existence with non-human others and “othered” humans. This thesis re-imagines these tales, in and through processes of carefully researched and documented performance practice, not as warnings to instruct women to behave, but as sites of remembrance, mourning and even liberatory enactment of other ways of being. Adopting a broadly eco-critical perspective sensitive to place, resilience and relatedness, this thesis attends to post-human-animality through a process of literal and figurative interrogation of skin and language, translating these stories of Animal-Woman transformations as markers of otherness and vehicles of change. Alongside careful attention to the ethno-linguistic, socio-cultural and environmental specificity of these tales, the core of this thesis explores performative research modes capable of weaving an alternative post-humanistic discourse into embodied practice. It employs an original iterative methodology, deployed across each of the tales and their psychic, social and environmental territories in a spiral journey that interweaves reading, theoretical reflection and different forms of artistic research and performance practice. In the process my/the performer’s body becomes both a potent site of multiple identities and an experimental laboratory for exploring affective, relational and political processes of othering, introducing polyvocality through interdisciplinary arts practice, and traversing bodily, linguistic, cultural and geopolitical borders.

Grantor dc:publisher

University College Cork

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Niewadzisz, Roksana

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Buffery, Helena
• O'Gorman, Roisin

• Performative arts
• Video installations
• Folk tales
• Posthumanism
• Multilingualism
• Migration
• Skin
• Anthropocene
• New materialism
• Video art
• Ecofeminism
• Translation
• Translaguaging
• Animality
• Somatic practice
• Jinen Butoh
• Actors training
• Eco-somatics
• Feminism
• Gender
• Violence
• Animal-Woman

Statement dc:rights

• © 2024, Roksana Niewadzisz.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10468/17415

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:cora.ucc.ie:10468/17415