Amy Meleca

Notes on an Eternal Return: Photographic Self-Portraiture and the Spectral Subject

Focusing on the characteristics of ghostliness and haunting, my MA thesis project considers spectrality as a lens to rethink representations of otherness in photographic self-portraiture. Spectrality, a metaphor within the humanities, and now applied to visual art, foregrounds the presence of what is absent and testifies to the invisible aspects of our socially constructed subjectivities. I question how photographic self-portraiture initiates a dissociative transformation for the subject, and apply this line of questioning to an analysis of works by Claude Cahun, Suzy Lake, Eleanor Antin, and Mona Hatoum. I analyze how these artists present intentionally othered versions of themselves, by exploring and re-performing the intricacies of their identities. I support this research with a body of artistic work, where I embody the self-as-other and present myself as a spectral subject as a means to understand how we can rethink representations of the female body and female subjectivity.