Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9516968
A. Lehner
This article explores potentialities for experiencing trans joy via creative praxis, which the author coins “trans failure.” As the author defines it, trans failure builds on examples set by queer failure, such as casting off limiting cultural norms (like binary gender and oppressive framings of what identities should look like), and incorporates new strategies such as deploying play as a means of self-articulating beyond the bounds of what is currently available. Trans failure's use of play has a utopian impulse often achieved via alternating strategies of theatricality, pleasure, collaboration, and experimentation in a mode of enacting alternative worlds and experiencing joy. The article discusses how play, a strategic mode of trans failure, is used to intervene in consumer culture and to work toward self-articulation and the procurement of joy. First, an explanation of gender as we understand it today is sketched out. Then, issues around representations of trans constituencies are discussed as problematically informed by dominant conceptions of gender and perpetuated in mainstream consumer culture. Then two distinct contemporary projects that disrupt the space of consumer culture are analyzed, deploying what the author names a praxis of trans failure in search of creating joy.
{"title":"Trans Failure","authors":"A. Lehner","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9516968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9516968","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores potentialities for experiencing trans joy via creative praxis, which the author coins “trans failure.” As the author defines it, trans failure builds on examples set by queer failure, such as casting off limiting cultural norms (like binary gender and oppressive framings of what identities should look like), and incorporates new strategies such as deploying play as a means of self-articulating beyond the bounds of what is currently available. Trans failure's use of play has a utopian impulse often achieved via alternating strategies of theatricality, pleasure, collaboration, and experimentation in a mode of enacting alternative worlds and experiencing joy. The article discusses how play, a strategic mode of trans failure, is used to intervene in consumer culture and to work toward self-articulation and the procurement of joy. First, an explanation of gender as we understand it today is sketched out. Then, issues around representations of trans constituencies are discussed as problematically informed by dominant conceptions of gender and perpetuated in mainstream consumer culture. Then two distinct contemporary projects that disrupt the space of consumer culture are analyzed, deploying what the author names a praxis of trans failure in search of creating joy.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89347631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9516911
Beatriz Polivanov, Fernanda Carrera
The quest for the so-called perfect body has been an issue in Brazilian society for a long time, especially for women. A number of “digital influencers” perform a fitness lifestyle, producing subjectivities entangled with an idea of success and “well managing oneself.” However, as happiness is constructed as a mandatory “individual engineering project,” more recently, female influencers have emerged who go against standards of beauty taken as oppressive. They embrace other physiques as forms of self-expression and finding joy, mostly the “big” body. Both forms of self-construction are appropriated by consumer culture and are perceived as authentic, reinforcing individualistic agency in a neoliberal context. But what happens when a fitness influencer accidently leaks the information that she underwent a liposuction procedure? Or when a “body positive” model is criticized for appropriating a plus-size agenda and not having a “true” plus-size body? Based on two Brazilian cases and literature review, this article proposes the notion of “gendered ruptures of performances,” which reveal expressive incoherence in the “narratives of the self,” thus breaking ideals of authenticity. It is argued that little attention has been paid to female self-presentation dynamics that do not occur as expected. Moreover, since their bodies are constantly subjected to the scrutiny of others, they are more susceptible to having their performances invalidated online.
{"title":"Perfect Bodies and Digital Influencers","authors":"Beatriz Polivanov, Fernanda Carrera","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9516911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9516911","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The quest for the so-called perfect body has been an issue in Brazilian society for a long time, especially for women. A number of “digital influencers” perform a fitness lifestyle, producing subjectivities entangled with an idea of success and “well managing oneself.” However, as happiness is constructed as a mandatory “individual engineering project,” more recently, female influencers have emerged who go against standards of beauty taken as oppressive. They embrace other physiques as forms of self-expression and finding joy, mostly the “big” body. Both forms of self-construction are appropriated by consumer culture and are perceived as authentic, reinforcing individualistic agency in a neoliberal context. But what happens when a fitness influencer accidently leaks the information that she underwent a liposuction procedure? Or when a “body positive” model is criticized for appropriating a plus-size agenda and not having a “true” plus-size body? Based on two Brazilian cases and literature review, this article proposes the notion of “gendered ruptures of performances,” which reveal expressive incoherence in the “narratives of the self,” thus breaking ideals of authenticity. It is argued that little attention has been paid to female self-presentation dynamics that do not occur as expected. Moreover, since their bodies are constantly subjected to the scrutiny of others, they are more susceptible to having their performances invalidated online.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77877496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9516926
Rosalind Gill, Shani Orgad
Examining women's magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often consumerist terms. The discussion demonstrates how positivity imperatives operate not only through verbal advice but also through visual, embodied, and affective means and through an emphasis on developing new social practices—from holding one's body differently, to keeping gratitude journals, to cultivating a new virtual persona for online work meetings. The article highlights a profound paradox: in times of a global pandemic that has affected women disproportionally, and when structural injustices and inequalities have been made ever more visible, positivity and individualized self-care interpellations to women flourish, anger is muted, and critiques of structural inequality are largely silenced. Thus seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic work to buttress a neoliberal imaginary and persistent social inequalities.
{"title":"Get Unstuck!","authors":"Rosalind Gill, Shani Orgad","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9516926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9516926","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Examining women's magazines and lifestyle coaching, the article explores how positivity imperatives in contemporary culture call forth a happy, confident, hopeful, and vibrant subject during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows how these positivity imperatives acknowledge stress and difficulty, and at times highlight their gendered impacts, yet nevertheless systematically figure responses and solutions in individual, psychological, and often consumerist terms. The discussion demonstrates how positivity imperatives operate not only through verbal advice but also through visual, embodied, and affective means and through an emphasis on developing new social practices—from holding one's body differently, to keeping gratitude journals, to cultivating a new virtual persona for online work meetings. The article highlights a profound paradox: in times of a global pandemic that has affected women disproportionally, and when structural injustices and inequalities have been made ever more visible, positivity and individualized self-care interpellations to women flourish, anger is muted, and critiques of structural inequality are largely silenced. Thus seemingly benign and often undoubtedly well-meaning messages of confidence, calm, and positivity during the pandemic work to buttress a neoliberal imaginary and persistent social inequalities.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88594772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305338
Joseph Packer, Ethan Stoneman
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.
{"title":"Where We Produce One, We Produce All","authors":"Joseph Packer, Ethan Stoneman","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9305338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305338","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculiarity. Although part of the reason for QAnon's enormous success must reside in widespread conditions of political distrust and epistemological uncertainty, another part consists in its exploitation of a technologically enabled mode of rhetorical hermeneutics. This article focuses on the latter, arguing that there exists a tendency among QAnon followers to read and write esoterically, primarily in relation to President Trump, and to do so via the amateur “produsage” made possible by a serpentine pipeline of digital-cultural interactivity and networked internet platforms. This is not to say, of course, that any QAnon participant is versed in the history of esoteric writing, only that QAnon as a discourse appears to rely heavily on a communicative strategy of encoding and decoding that bears strong resemblance to an esoteric hermeneutic, but one played out across social media.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74073153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305363
A. Aksoy, K. Robins
In this article, the authors explore recent developments in urban regeneration in Istanbul, and specifically in the important historic district of Beyoğlu. In one respect, these developments, which are linked to the promotion of cruise ship tourism, are on the same predictable lines as neoliberal projects in other cities across the world. Significantly, in the Istanbul context, local agency is being sidelined, and projects are being financed and managed through the intervention of the central state. In this Turkish version of urban transformation, however, there is a locally distinctive aspect that merits attention. Istanbul is a city that was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, and the discourse of conquest has remained significant within the urban imaginary. And at the present time, it is being mobilized by the state and its cultural ministry, in the cause of creating a new urban image conforming to its Islamist principles. The key project involves the establishment of what is called the Beyoğlu Cultural Route, which is essentially a touristic itinerary. The authors argue that the state's initiatives, and the route project in particular, involve an erasure—a conquest—of Beyoğlu's legacy of cosmopolitan values. This discussion explores what has been of civic and cultural value in the lifeworld of Beyoğlu, past and present. Resistance to the state's control of resources and institutions, and to its conquest ideology, needs to be grounded in civic principles open to diversity and difference in the city.
{"title":"Cultural Politics and Conquest Culture","authors":"A. Aksoy, K. Robins","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9305363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305363","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, the authors explore recent developments in urban regeneration in Istanbul, and specifically in the important historic district of Beyoğlu. In one respect, these developments, which are linked to the promotion of cruise ship tourism, are on the same predictable lines as neoliberal projects in other cities across the world. Significantly, in the Istanbul context, local agency is being sidelined, and projects are being financed and managed through the intervention of the central state. In this Turkish version of urban transformation, however, there is a locally distinctive aspect that merits attention. Istanbul is a city that was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, and the discourse of conquest has remained significant within the urban imaginary. And at the present time, it is being mobilized by the state and its cultural ministry, in the cause of creating a new urban image conforming to its Islamist principles. The key project involves the establishment of what is called the Beyoğlu Cultural Route, which is essentially a touristic itinerary. The authors argue that the state's initiatives, and the route project in particular, involve an erasure—a conquest—of Beyoğlu's legacy of cosmopolitan values. This discussion explores what has been of civic and cultural value in the lifeworld of Beyoğlu, past and present. Resistance to the state's control of resources and institutions, and to its conquest ideology, needs to be grounded in civic principles open to diversity and difference in the city.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86283986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305419
I. Williams
This article uses the work of brand theorists and New Zealand–based cultural critics to examine the circumstances that created the “Hobbit Law,” a New Zealand law aimed at busting local film industry unions. Branding logics created a struggle for authenticity around the importance of Middle-earth to New Zealand's national identity in the twenty-first century. This hybrid identity was then articulated as something that stood against labor actions by film industry workers, culminating in citizen marches against local labor. It closes by exploring ways that the importance of the brand as sense-making tool under neoliberalism might be reconfigured as something that might bridge the gap between media consumer and creative industry worker.
{"title":"The Scouring of Wellywood","authors":"I. Williams","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9305419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305419","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article uses the work of brand theorists and New Zealand–based cultural critics to examine the circumstances that created the “Hobbit Law,” a New Zealand law aimed at busting local film industry unions. Branding logics created a struggle for authenticity around the importance of Middle-earth to New Zealand's national identity in the twenty-first century. This hybrid identity was then articulated as something that stood against labor actions by film industry workers, culminating in citizen marches against local labor. It closes by exploring ways that the importance of the brand as sense-making tool under neoliberalism might be reconfigured as something that might bridge the gap between media consumer and creative industry worker.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87149497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305391
Corey P. Cribb
In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305433
A. Dewdney
This book wants to view photography as part of the expanded field of image technologies, operating at a planetary scale where data and the algorithm play an increasingly infrastructural hand. The book proposes that the exponential increase in the quantity of photographic images, uploaded, shared, stored in databases, and operationalized in automated computational systems requires a radically new way of thinking about contemporary photography and visual culture. In setting out to address this situation, the editors suggest that the question of scale and the related concepts of measure and quantity are pivotal in reaching new understandings of what images do. The book aims to ground scale in terms of political agency to bring aesthetic discourse into closer dialogue with developments in media and cultural theory. As such, the book is a welcome and timely contribution to current debates across art, media, and cultural studies in considering not only the fate of photography in computational culture but also new methods of framing the image in social, political, and aesthetic terms, The essays have been organized in three sections to consider, broadly, the politics of scale, the aesthetics of scale, and the technical media of scale. For the authors, scale becomes a new register for photography because of the exponential expansion of images in circulation socially, as well as the increasing deployment of computer vision algorithms in information systems. The image is now inseparable from big data, in which the image at scale becomes calculable and statistical. But for Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka, organizing B o o k R e v i e w
本书希望将摄影视为图像技术扩展领域的一部分，在全球范围内操作，其中数据和算法发挥着越来越重要的基础设施作用。这本书提出，摄影图像的数量呈指数级增长，上传、共享、存储在数据库中，并在自动计算系统中进行操作，这需要一种全新的方式来思考当代摄影和视觉文化。在着手解决这种情况时，编辑们建议，尺度问题以及相关的测量和数量概念在对图像的作用达成新的理解方面是关键的。这本书的目的是在政治机构方面接地规模，将美学话语与媒体和文化理论的发展进行更密切的对话。因此，这本书是对当前艺术、媒体和文化研究领域的辩论的一个受欢迎和及时的贡献，它不仅考虑了摄影在计算文化中的命运，而且考虑了在社会、政治和美学方面构建图像的新方法。这些文章被组织成三个部分，广泛地考虑规模的政治、规模的美学和规模的技术媒体。对于作者来说，尺度成为摄影的一个新的寄存器，因为社会上流通的图像呈指数级增长，以及信息系统中计算机视觉算法的增加部署。现在的图像与大数据是分不开的，在大数据中，大规模的图像变得可计算和统计。但对于生田斗真šDvořak和Jussi Parikka组织B o o k R e v i e w
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Pub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9305405
Dan Adleman
Abstract:This article positions David Milch's Deadwood (2004–6) as a narrative universe that merits serious theoretical scrutiny on account of its far-reaching account of the dawn of American technocapitalism. While Kittlerian media-archaeological wisdom situates media modernity's primal scene at the turn of the century (with the emergence of the Edisonian gramophone, film, and typewriter), Deadwood figures the multimedia Big Bang as having taken place a few decades prior, with the advent of telegraphy, photography, and railroads. In the world of Deadwood, this "Discourse Network 1876" condenses in the spectral figure of George Hearst, a tyrannical mining and media magnate who descends on Deadwood to seize and consolidate the area's gold mining rights. When community leaders Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock rise up to resist Hearst, he wields the cybernetic grid of Discourse Network 1876 to run roughshod over the town's fragile social compact. Although this vision of the American Leviathan is a bleak one (and therein resides much of Deadwood's tragic mythos), Milch's Deadwood: The Movie (2019) revisits the town a decade later and rehabilitates the notion that a tightknit community of concerned citizens can, under the right conditions, serve as a viable, but precarious, bulwark against the Hearstian electrical storm.
{"title":"The Advent of Media Modernity Out of Wild Bill's Ashes","authors":"Dan Adleman","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9305405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9305405","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article positions David Milch's Deadwood (2004–6) as a narrative universe that merits serious theoretical scrutiny on account of its far-reaching account of the dawn of American technocapitalism. While Kittlerian media-archaeological wisdom situates media modernity's primal scene at the turn of the century (with the emergence of the Edisonian gramophone, film, and typewriter), Deadwood figures the multimedia Big Bang as having taken place a few decades prior, with the advent of telegraphy, photography, and railroads. In the world of Deadwood, this \"Discourse Network 1876\" condenses in the spectral figure of George Hearst, a tyrannical mining and media magnate who descends on Deadwood to seize and consolidate the area's gold mining rights. When community leaders Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock rise up to resist Hearst, he wields the cybernetic grid of Discourse Network 1876 to run roughshod over the town's fragile social compact. Although this vision of the American Leviathan is a bleak one (and therein resides much of Deadwood's tragic mythos), Milch's Deadwood: The Movie (2019) revisits the town a decade later and rehabilitates the notion that a tightknit community of concerned citizens can, under the right conditions, serve as a viable, but precarious, bulwark against the Hearstian electrical storm.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84447608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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