Between H.D. and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Mediumship, Mediation and Queer Kinship

This project inaugurates a conversation between two multi-dimensional artists, Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), who, though separated by time, geography, and critical tradition, converge in their sustained attention to mediumship as both aesthetic method and ontological stance. Performing relationality across different scales, dimensions and mediums, while emphasizing embodiment and agency, both figures resist conventional generic boundaries and singular authorial identity. Instead they cultivate an aesthetics of mediumship, in which the work of art is not a static product but a charged site of invocation: an opening between dimensions, voices, and bodies. Adopting a multi-lateral approach that combines biography, archival correspondence, and close readings of works of film, visual art and literature with theories of queer kinship and erotohistoriography, this dissertation responds in kind to what I identify as their shared manifesto against reductive reading, and performatively constructs queer kinship between them.