Melde Rutledge

Melde Rutledge, II is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black Psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon memorial work on Black Skin, White Mask, phenomenology as examined by Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, structural anthropologists Francisco Varela, Fernando Flores, Hilary Lawson and Humberto R. Maturana and speech-act theory (particularly the work of John Searle) in his understanding of the “performativity” of our identities. All of these theories explore the ways that social reality is not a given, but is continually created and open and it is we who close it through our stories “through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social signs.”