Zach Rivers

Zach Rivers received a BA in English Literature from Georgia State University in 2009 and an MA in Gender Studies from Central University in 2012 with a thesis entitled “Subjectivity Without Return” before coming to NYU in 2013. His dissertation at NYU studies iterations of weaving in Ancient Greek literature and philosophy – mostly of the 4th and 5th Century BCE – as indissociable from sexual difference in order to approach such divergent topics of embodiment, the materiality of language, cultural inheritance, and cultural obliteration. Weaving gathers a poikilotic array of significations that shuttles the spectrum from denigrated feminine activity to valorized masculine metaphor. By reading for embodied feminine weavers that exceed patriarchy’s dream of autopoesis, this dissertation attempts to unravel disavowed yet existing threads of material subjects and objects made unintelligible by the discursive frameworks that structure and allocate social and material positioning. Indeed, the woven veils, shrouds, words, and robes that populate philosophy’s most renowned metaphors helped to murder husbands, form social bonds, give voice to the tongueless, and keep menacing suitors at bay. His dissertation enacts an embodied, situated knowledge approach and affirms deconstructive feminisms as always already imbricated with intransigent yet volatile Ancient inheritances.