Spectator, 2020

Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 2022

TikTok's 'cottagecore' subculture has been fertile ground for the growth of a new queer rural imaginary. Through performative elements such as food, dress, imagery and Sapphic sentiments, queer women on TikTok curate an idyllic and idealized vision of rural queer life and lay claim to it. Cottagecore as a performative practice allows queer people to revel in a fictional frontier lifestyle for their own enjoyment, without concern for its actualization. This article outlines the way in which queer TikTokers play/pretend the pioneering landscape, which previously has been dominated by hetero voices. By populating these virtual spaces and queer-coding forms of dress and performance, they claim their right to belong in frontier and pioneering narratives and figuratively, if not literally, stake claim to the rural terrain.

2017

Aceves Sepúlveda explores the innovative works of a radical video artist and her utopian feminist-inspired agenda. The author considers Weiss’s unique approach to video as an articulation of a utopian impulse motivated by the desire to contest dominant class, gender, and racial hierarchies as experienced in the streets of Mexico. The essay examines how Weiss not only deconstructed the rigid binary between (male) subject and (female) object by showing how women take pleasure in looking and being looked at, but also believed in video technology’s capacity to create a “cosmic man,” that is, a new sensorial being that would destabilize notions deeply ingrained in Mexican culture. This chapter is a discussion of alterity, alternative media history, and utopian engagement through media.

Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Study, 2021

In traditional applications of queer theory onto the cinematic medium, reading the subtext as a spectator becomes the main way in which queerness can be uncovered within past texts that might at first glance be considered part of the heteronormative sphere. However, I intend to upend this notion by foregrounding the work being done by online video editors to reformulate one of the more traditional culture makers-Disney-through a re-contextualisation of their animated canon to create an exploration of lesbian desire. By analysing the aesthetic concerns of these videos, freely available on YouTube, from their jagged editing seams to their wide-ranging narrative paths, a link will emerge between amateur fan content and the queer spectator as an active participant rather than a passive watcher. I will take this link to its inevitable conclusion, that digital bodies severed from their original context prove fertile grounds for the next steps in the intersection of queer theory and fan studies.

Bulletin / Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ISSN: 0947-6822), 2023

Throughout the last two decades, the fandom of Final Fantasy VII has discussed whether the infamous cross-dressing quest is homophobic or not, and how to adapt it for a possible remake. Queer and video game scholars, however, have not engaged in the discussion surrounding the cross-dressing protagonist Cloud Strife. In this essay, I intend to fill this gap and argue that the remake fails to redeem the complicated legacy of Final Fantasy VII in terms of LGBT representation. The game, I argue, shifted from modes and techniques of heteronormativity to homonormative power in this process. Through the lens of queer game studies, this paper analyzes interviews conducted with YouTube gamers from the US. In conclusion, I argue that the remake is less an emancipatory representation than a tool of a broader civilizing liberal project that deradicalizes queer action by commodifying it in the video game industry. The text shows that the game, though it tolerates and includes queer characters within the world of Final Fantasy, ultimately enacts a particular notion of tolerance with normative and normalizing implications that exclude marginalized queers who do not fit the homonormative status quo.

Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, 2021

Chapter included in Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2019

Alison Bechdel's 2006 autography, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a story about trauma. Yet, stories marked by trauma cannot be remembered, and, as a result, they cannot be easily represented. Indeed, trauma, according to expert in trauma studies Cathy Caruth, can only be accessed indirectly through the stories of other people, and that is precisely what Bechdel does in her graphic memoir: she uses archives that contain the stories of others in order to gain an insight into her own. Notwithstanding the fact that archives are very commonly used in the contemporary graphic novel, Bechdel's peculiar manner of arranging archives and specific events togetherwhat I have called Penelopean aestheticsis idiosyncratic. In this essay, I will, first, explore the sources of trauma in Bechdel's life in order to subsequently work through the reasons that explain her intense urge to represent her father's and her own life stories; then, I will scrutinise the use to which archives are put in Fun Home; eventually, Bechdel's peculiar mode of assembling archives into a complex whole will be studied as well as the manner in which Bechdel's mode of composition proves to be an expression of queer potentiality in its own right.

Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, 2005

VIRTUALLY QUEER is a JGLIE feature that glosses questions concerning the intersection of networked digital technologies 1 and broadly speaking, both theoretical and empirical accounts that pertain to what Buckland (2002) calls, " queer world-making. " This interdisciplinary feature explores contemporary theory, research, and occasionally, specific Internet environments, concerned with (a) the production, performance, and representation of queer world-making, (b) locations and communities where the possibility for the transformation of existing inequitable conditions is prioritized, and (c) the retooling and re/mediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2001) of performances of QLGBTTQI 2 identities and communities. ABSTRACT. This essay explores contemporary accounts of the significance of the Internet and the intersections of these cyberspace narratives with theoretical and material construals of queer identity, agency, and community. The author discusses evidence of the ongoing mediative role of artifacts in the fashioning of identity in community in order to explore the notion that queer is always-already virtual. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH.

Cinema Journal, 2014

Given Pixar's initial standardization of computer-animated feature fi lms, this article examines the studio's relation to digital modernization and to animation's legacy of subversion through an analysis of WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The fi lm exemplifi es themes of modernization and subversion, and it demonstrates how a playful alienation of naturalized norms can distract from the narrative's perpetuation of specifi c cultural values and practices. The narrative of WALL-E gives essentialist status to liberal desire and heterosexuality through robot characters presented in juxtaposition to consumerist, infantile, human characters. The portrayal of these sociocultural norms within the fi ctional space of the fi lm (both on Earth and in outer space) is compounded by the playful space of animation itself. Pixar's computer animation, if represented by WALL-E, presents itself as free for the essence of technology and the human to emerge but simultaneously functions as a space for precise control that is a corollary to the proliferation of programmed, algorithmic media.

transcript Verlag eBooks, 2009