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.
Escaping the Matrix
Down the rabbit hole and out of the Matrix
The audience gets their first look at Neo, passed out on his desk in a dingy apartment, surrounded by computer screens trawling through the web, looking for a man named Morpheus. Suddenly the screen goes dark and Neo awakes with text on the screen telling him to “follow the white rabbit.” A knock on his door reveals a group of ravers. After exchanging money for the illegal software Neo made for them, they invite him to join them at the club. Noticing that one of them has a tattoo of a white rabbit, he decides to follow.
Neo is introduced to the audience in a way that sets him apart from other members of society. In keeping odd hours, hacking and stealing software, and associating with ravers, it is evident that his value systems differ from normative ones, closely aligned with marriage and starting a family. The club, a setting straight out of Jack Halberstam’s dark nightclub and conscious“turning away from narrative coherence” is full of leather, flashing lights, and writhing bodies tucked into dark corners (“Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion” 182). Its inhabitants would seem to be those that Halberstam would consider “queer subjects” like “ravers, club kids…sex workers, drug dealers, [and] the unemployed” (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives 10). Here in the dark, on the margins of society, is where Neo meets Trinity and his journey truly begins.
Neo’s first scenes exemplify notions of queer temporality in multiple forms. Thomas Anderson’s route to queer culture took place at night, in secret, under the identity of Neo. This is not a novel narrative within queer communities, especially with the advent of the internet. Online communities can provide “multilayered spaces of self-representation...and belonging,” as well as narratives that run counter to those of the State and other forces in power (Driver 230). As a hacker, Neo already has experience with anti-establishment groups, navigating the spaces of the web, and avoiding disciplinary forces. He maneuvers between these spaces, effectively straddling between two different worlds; Neo in clubs and scrolling the web at night, and Thomas Anderson with the benign programming job during the day. Neo’s ability to move between these two spaces and have a full life on the fringes of society demonstrate his capacity to navigate and integrate into “a queer temporality that is at once indefinite and virtual but also forceful, resilient, and undeniable” (In a Queer Time and Place 11). This ability to find and explore this alternate temporality, courtesy of the web is because of Neo’s skill and ability with machines.
 Queer Temporality Aboard the Nebuchadnezzar |
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 Building a Queer Body |
 Back to the Matrix Entrance Page |