The Power of the Fangirl: Reconfiguring Shame in Popular Music Fandom

This project looks at three fandom case studies to examine how fans rework affects of shame attached to the figure of the fangirl, using qualitative interviews and observations of digital fandom practices.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann | Co-supervisor: Dr Joshua Pocius

Articulations of Gender, Class and Feminism in Post-socialist China: Women’s Affective-discursive Constructions of Surgical Beautification on RED (XiaoHongShu)

This project explores Chinese women’s discussions of surgical beautification on leading e-commerce and lifestyle platform in China, RED (XiaoHongShu). The aim of this project is to investigate how Chinese women navigate beauty norms and issues relating to cosmetic surgery on social media.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann | Co-supervisor: Dr Fran Martin

“I Myself Don’t Have Many Words”: Nonbinary Life-Writing or a Theory of the Nonbinary Through Confusion, Discomfort and Affective Imaginaries

This project attempts to theorise gender nonbinary through a close reading of contemporary nonbinary life-writing. This project questions nonbinary relationality and asks how nonbinary people make sense of their gender, their lived experiences, and relations as explored in their memoirs. Further, it investigates what kind of language(s) and imagination(s) the nonbinary authors put towards expressing their gender(s).

Principal Supervisor: Dr CQ Quinan | Co-supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann

The Role of Sexual Desirability in Sexual Minority Men's Body Image

This project examines the influence of sexual desirability on body image and appearance discrimination in queer men. This project is concerned with who does and does not get to feel sexy, how these inequities connect to systems of power, dominance and discrimination, and what these systems look like in day-to-day life through a mixed methods approach, drawing upon a sexual fields framework, and queer and feminist theory.

Principal Supervisor: Scott Griffiths | Co-supervisors: Emily Harris, Hannah McCann and Elise Kalokerinos

Analysing Fatness: How Fatness is Perceived in Different Western Contexts

This project looks at constructions of fatness in different Western contexts. This research employs the concept of fatness as a tool in order to critically examine the modern Greek national identity, and to use modern Greek culture in order to de-stabilize the idea that the experience and perception of fatness is uniform across the perceived ‘West’.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Anja Schwarz | Co-supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann

Soft Cosmology in the Work of Lisa Robertson, Annette Messager and Rei Kawakubo

This thesis examines the relationship between experimental aesthetics and the gendered body in the work of three practitioners across different artistic mediums: Annette Messager (visual arts), Rei Kawakubo (fashion design) and Lisa Robertson (literature). Although working across different artistic modalities, the practitioners are united in their commitment to challenge and move beyond limiting traditions and orthodoxies. This thesis is designed to function as a network of threads (Robertson’s “textile thatching”) that attends to the relationships, contradictions and tensions that emerge when the practitioners’ works are placed into a fruitful dialogue.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Natalya Lusty | Co-supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann

To an End: Death as a Queer Theory of Dance

Drawing on the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which contends that political and symbolic associations between queer people and death might inform understandings of normativity, this project contrasts death with 'vital normativity' to propose a queer theory of dance. (Under examination).

Graduated in 2023

Principal Supervisor: Dr Sandra Parker | Co-supervisors: Dr Philipa Rothfield and Dr Hannah McCann

‘Queer nightlife and the potentiality of heterotopic space’

This project navigates the tumultuous geography of Melbourne’s queer nightlife, proposing heterotopia as a method for encapsulating its contradictory nature and surging affects. Informed by interviews with nightlife creators, as well as his own involvement as patron, performer, DJ, and promoter, the spatial experiments of clubs, bars, and warehouses are experienced as unstable performative zones generative of different modes of being.

Graduated in 2023

Principal Supervisor: Dr Alyson Campbell | Co-supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann

What if Safety Becomes Permanent? Architecture and Music as a Site of Transing

This project is about the rights, safety, and experiences of gender-nonconforming people in relation to architecture and public space. Within the context of the global discourse on transgender civil rights, where cisnormative institutions often determine the parameters of the discussion, this work centres on the lived testimony of trans and gender diverse people. By exploring gender nonconformity through personal narrative at the intersection of architecture, music and transness, this thesis offers pragmatic thinking to engage in a discourse of trans visibility in architecture that is accessible.

Graduated in 2022

Winner of the Dean’s John Grice Research Award, Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning

Winner of the Chancellor’s Prize 2023

Principal Supervisor: Dr Karen Burns | Co-supervisor: Dr Hannah McCann