About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
Glossary of Terms
Affect:
Biopower:
Body without Organs:
Disinformation:
Hegemony:
Hyperreal:
Intersex:
Mise-en-scène:
Misinformation:
Neoliberalism:
Panopticon:
Queer:
Simulacrum (plural: simulacra) :
A fleeting emotion or feeling, that can’t fully be explained because of its impermanence. It exists at the moment of consumption or contact and exists in non-verbal sign systems. Closely tied to feeling and emotion.
Coined by Michel Foucault, is the way that the State regulates, manages and disciplines bodies, ensuring that they stay under control and behave in a way that serves the dominant structures. Over time, these methods of discipline become ingrained into social behavior as well.
Theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is a concept that pushes for the societal destructuring of the body. As this deconstruction can never be fully achieved, Deleuze and Guattari assert that the BwO is an unattainable limit.
The creation of false reports, articles, or news with the express intent to mislead public opinion. Disinformation often targets minority groups to create scapegoats and breed public dissent.
The domination or influence of one group over another.
Taken from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), hyperreal refers to a reality where distinguishing between the real and the imaginary is fruitless, due to the imaginary being reproduced so many times that it now has the same value as the real.
A broad term that refers to physical bodies that fall outside of normative understandings of the male/female binary. This can manifest in genitalia, gonads, and chromosome patterns deemed “abnormal.”
The setting of a scene. In film, it is everything that is onscreen and occurring during a scene or shot.
The inadvertent sharing of false information.
Economic ideas and beliefs that prioritize privatization and deregulation. Neoliberalism symbolically shifts economic responsibility from the public to the private sector.
Envisioned by Jeremy Bentham in (1785), the panopticon is a model of a prison with one guard who, due to the way the cells are constructed, can see every inmate, while the inmates cannot see him. In this way, inmates never know if they are being watched or not. Therefore, the inmates will change their behavior, acting as if they are always being watched. The panoptic model is a classic way to theorize surveillance. However, scholarship is starting to do away with confining modern surveillance to the panoptic model as it lacks fluidity and nuance. Counter-surveillance methods are just as vital to discuss as surveillance methods.
A term that denaturalizes categories like man/woman, gay/straight, as well as notions of family, community, and time. It recognizes that these categories (as a few examples) are social and historical constructions used to make people conform to the dominant structures. Like the BwO, queerness is ultimately unattainable—queerness is a process and a utopic horizon.
In reference to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), a simulacrum is an image without a reference or origin. Simply put, it’s an image that isn’t based on anything, but is taken for the real. An example of a simulacrum is Mickey Mouse as there is no original Mickey Mouse. It was something purely imagined, now made real. Another example would be the stock market/stocks.
Visual Haptics:
Theorized by Laura Marks, visual haptics refers to the way that the feeling of touch can be created by sight. Haptic visuality constructs the internal sense of being touched from sight. Always erotic (in that visual haptics encourage an embodied response to the image on screen), haptic images demand that the viewer construct themself within the image on screen. There is a lack of mastery in the images, which are frequently unfixed and blurry, thus forcing more attentive engagement from viewers. Images that are portrayed in a way so that one feels it, but it is only felt because it has been seen.