Dylan Rowen
PhD
Screen and Cultural Studies
Dylan Rowen is a writer and researcher from Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide, now living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land/Melbourne. They are a joint PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and at the University of Potsdam, researching representations of homosexual, queer, and trans identities and subjectivities in modernist and avant-garde literature and film. They have presented their research at a number of academic conferences, including the Modernist Studies Association and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. In 2024, they were a Critics Campus participant at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Their writing can be found in Rough Cut, Senses of Cinema, The Modernist Review, The Guardian, Cinema Reborn, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Contact:
Thesis
A Language of Flowers: Emergent Queer and Trans Vernacular in Modernist and Avant-Garde Literature and Film
This doctoral dissertation traces the literary, cultural, and cinematic representations of homosexual, trans, and queer identities in the early to mid-twentieth century. My project uncovers a nascent queer and trans embodied vernacular — which I term a "language of flowers" — as it emerges in a close reading of texts by modernists such as Djuna Barnes, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, and Jean Genet, in pulp novels by little-known or anonymous writers including William Talsman and Robert Scully, and in the avant-garde and experimental films of Japanese director and film critic Toshio Matsumoto and American underground performance artist Jack Smith. This PhD thesis sheds light on how the fairy, pansy, and queenly subjects as represented in this archive express femininity and nonbinary gender(s) through their performance of an embodied gestural language. Challenging their conventional relegation as a small footnote in the development of a gay male canon, I contend that these overlooked figures contain a uniquely trans and queer capacity through their expansive and dynamic relations to gender, sexuality, and sociality.
Research interests
- Modernist studies
- Queer and homosexual literature
- Avant-garde and experimental art
- Trans studies
- Gender and sexuality studies
Supervisors
The University of Melbourne:
The University of Potsdam: