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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Panel Rationale: "Feminist Media Cultures" centers feminist media in questions of visual storytelling and reenactment. Looking at media cultures such as internet discourse, TikTok, film, television and photography, these combined papers work to raise questions of representation, affect, race, space and gender. This panel features papers that interrogate questions about haunting, memory and gentrification using critical Latinx and Black geography. The panel will also examine subject formation via social media content production and discourse, as well as the “IRL” consequences of such.
“Black Girl Sanctuary: Tending to Black Girls’ Gardens of Living Creativity” by Amoni Thompson-Jones
Abstract: What does it mean to disremember Black girls in death and in living embodiment? “Black Girl Sanctuary: Tending to Black Girls’ Gardens of Living Creativity” thinks through the ways Black girls are often disappeared and made invisible in our cultural memory; whether it is through the erasure of Black girls from their creative traditions or the tendency to recount a history of state and racialized violence against Black people without an inclusion of how such violences have particularly marked their bodies. Through an analysis of photography and digital media art, this paper argues that Black girl visual and aesthetic practices demand a theoretical reimagining of memory, interior, personhood, visuality, and embodiment. It asks: How does aspects of Black girlhood become “visually knowable”[1] through cultural and representational practices?
Candyman’s Haunting: The Violence of Gentrification, Criminalization and Policing by Kimberly Soriano
Abstract: Using Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta this paper explores spaces in the process of gentrification such as Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Los Angeles’ Echo Park with the horror film’s connections to haunting, memory, and racial trauma. I develop what I call layered geographies of racialized classed gender to think about these complex issues of racialization and settler-colonial histories that manifest in the land and to theorize how gentrification re-produces historical legacies of dispossession of minoritized residents that is registered in terms of space, hauntings and embodiment.
Title: #WorkLife: TikTok, Labor, and Digital Counterpublics by AP Pierce
Abstract: A familiar format on the video-sharing app TikTok is that of the reenacted work interaction: a worker (maybe from retail, customer service, or food service) performs in front of the camera, switching roles, recounting how they are treated by customers or managers on the job. Such interactions range anywhere from absurd to abusive. This performance is one example of this subgenre of TikTok user-generated content which, this paper argues, provides a ground for the creation of a specific laboring digital subjectivity and community. Through analyses of these videos, this paper will examine the ways users discuss and define their relationship to work, nonwork, and other workers on TikTok in order to theorize the potential for creation of resistant digital counterpublics--counterpublics characterized by queer embodiment and aesthetic as well as critiques of capitalism and a neoliberal ‘hustling’ mentality.
“Woke-washing” and Millennial Nostalgic Rebooting by Anna Wald
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between online discourse focusing on “wokeness” and social justice, and the recent reboots of media properties aimed at the so-called ‘millennial’ generation of fans and viewers. Interrogating the ways that social media performs as object and subject within these texts, I argue that politics of racial and queer representation are often diluted within the streaming television industry. The politics of representation have become a subject unto itself within various reboot projects. By looking specifically at shows such as HBOMax’s Gossip Girl (2021), and Netflix’s The Babysitter’s Club (2020), I trouble the relationship between “Woke-washing” (Sobande 2019), representation, and nostalgia.
Feminist Media Cultures
Panel Rationale: "Feminist Media Cultures" centers feminist media in questions of visual storytelling and reenactment. Looking at media cultures such as internet discourse, TikTok, film, television and photography, these combined papers work to raise questions of representation, affect, race, space and gender. This panel features papers that interrogate questions about haunting, memory and gentrification using critical Latinx and Black geography. The panel will also examine subject formation via social media content production and discourse, as well as the “IRL” consequences of such.
“Black Girl Sanctuary: Tending to Black Girls’ Gardens of Living Creativity” by Amoni Thompson-Jones
Abstract: What does it mean to disremember Black girls in death and in living embodiment? “Black Girl Sanctuary: Tending to Black Girls’ Gardens of Living Creativity” thinks through the ways Black girls are often disappeared and made invisible in our cultural memory; whether it is through the erasure of Black girls from their creative traditions or the tendency to recount a history of state and racialized violence against Black people without an inclusion of how such violences have particularly marked their bodies. Through an analysis of photography and digital media art, this paper argues that Black girl visual and aesthetic practices demand a theoretical reimagining of memory, interior, personhood, visuality, and embodiment. It asks: How does aspects of Black girlhood become “visually knowable”[1] through cultural and representational practices?
Candyman’s Haunting: The Violence of Gentrification, Criminalization and Policing by Kimberly Soriano
Abstract: Using Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta this paper explores spaces in the process of gentrification such as Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Los Angeles’ Echo Park with the horror film’s connections to haunting, memory, and racial trauma. I develop what I call layered geographies of racialized classed gender to think about these complex issues of racialization and settler-colonial histories that manifest in the land and to theorize how gentrification re-produces historical legacies of dispossession of minoritized residents that is registered in terms of space, hauntings and embodiment.
Title: #WorkLife: TikTok, Labor, and Digital Counterpublics by AP Pierce
Abstract: A familiar format on the video-sharing app TikTok is that of the reenacted work interaction: a worker (maybe from retail, customer service, or food service) performs in front of the camera, switching roles, recounting how they are treated by customers or managers on the job. Such interactions range anywhere from absurd to abusive. This performance is one example of this subgenre of TikTok user-generated content which, this paper argues, provides a ground for the creation of a specific laboring digital subjectivity and community. Through analyses of these videos, this paper will examine the ways users discuss and define their relationship to work, nonwork, and other workers on TikTok in order to theorize the potential for creation of resistant digital counterpublics--counterpublics characterized by queer embodiment and aesthetic as well as critiques of capitalism and a neoliberal ‘hustling’ mentality.
“Woke-washing” and Millennial Nostalgic Rebooting by Anna Wald
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between online discourse focusing on “wokeness” and social justice, and the recent reboots of media properties aimed at the so-called ‘millennial’ generation of fans and viewers. Interrogating the ways that social media performs as object and subject within these texts, I argue that politics of racial and queer representation are often diluted within the streaming television industry. The politics of representation have become a subject unto itself within various reboot projects. By looking specifically at shows such as HBOMax’s Gossip Girl (2021), and Netflix’s The Babysitter’s Club (2020), I trouble the relationship between “Woke-washing” (Sobande 2019), representation, and nostalgia.
Bio
Amoni Thompson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation explores what Black girls’ visual and material cultures might teach us about the value of the interior, self-possession, and Black spatial practices. Her work has been published in The Black Girlhood Studies Collection: Imagining Worlds for Black Girls, becoming undisciplined: an academic zine, and the Journal of Visual Arts Research.
Kimberly Soriano (she/they) is a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Barbara in the department of Feminist Studies. She was raised in Echo Park Los Angeles, California by Southern Mexican immigrant and indigenoius parents. She received her B.A. in Chicana/o Studies and African American Studies from UCLA and received her M.A. from UC Santa Barbara where their Master’s thesis centered gang graffiti as Black and Latinx cultural production disrupting gentrification. Her dissertation currently looks at gentrification and criminalized aesthetics.
Anna Wald (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara in the department of Feminist Studies. Her research focuses on race, gender, and technology, with a specialization in digital culture studies, online discourse analysis, and racialized media.
AP (they/she) is a doctoral candidate in the department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Their research examines the intersections of digital and interactive media, labor and anti-work politics, and the study of affect and aesthetics.