Panel Preview

Presider: Steven Losco (@godislobster)

Hashmod: Chris Dancy (@servicesphere)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled The New Flesh: Bodies and Biopolitics

Leigh-Anne Goins (@kathryn_leigh) Theorizing PostRacial Conversations: #QuvenzhanéWallis #Oscars2013
Discourses surrounding Black femininity and Black women’s bodies often rely on historical narratives and intersectional ideologies –interwoven beliefs specific to groups, but not essentialized– creating particular and controlled narratives. Historically and contemporarily, ideologies surrounding Black women’s bodies and Black femininities are hypercritical. Within media, judgments fall upon Black women’s bodies through public out cry to images whether mediated presentations of actual women or fictitious characters. Racist and sexist narratives, whether interpersonally or through media produce exclusionary discourses that have distinctly negative effects: they restrict the opportunity for Black women to be seen as ‘moral equals’ worthy of equitable social recognition, and thus restrict access to social citizenship. In addition to Somers’ (2008) discussion of social citizenship, I draw from the work of Harris-Perry (2011), specifically the crooked room. Because my research of social exclusion surrounds online spaces, which are mobile, fluid, and diffuse, I extend the crooked room, to crooked spaces.

Contemporarily, discussions of Black women’s bodies and representations have the potential for increased negative judgments due to the prominence of, and increasing trends in social media usage (i.e. Facebook) and the Internet generally (news sites, blogs). When engaging in online spaces individuals are able to participate in multiple and simultaneous conversations, post comments and create images that veil racist and sexist beliefs. I argue, when Black women engage in online spaces that engage covert and/or overt racist and sexist language, it increases the negative effects of racism and sexism, as it provides the possibility for unremitting narratives of exclusion, restricting access to social citizenship and increasing feelings of imbalance. It is therefore important to theorize and interrogate how racist and sexist discourses in online spaces provide increased opportunities to exclude and control certain bodies.

This paper theorizes the potential discursive impacts racist and sexist discourses have on constructions of Black femininities and social exclusion through the case of Quvenzhané Wallis and the #Oscars2013 tweet. Engaging a Black feminist lens that incorporates theoretical frameworks surrounding social citizenship, (new) media, and critical discourse analysis, I examined 1500 comments, paying increased attention to post-racial discourses (overtly sexist but subtly racist, or subtly sexist and racist), resulted in in-depth analysis of 300 comments. Findings demonstrated that individuals relying on overtly sexist but subtly racist comments argued this was not about race, but gender often arguing the comment would have occurred had Quvenzhané’s body been white. Those arguing that the comment was neither racist nor sexist claimed individual played the ‘race card,’ or that Black women, their bodies, and femininities due to pathological constructions caused comments and jokes like this.
Whether comments engage explicitly with sexism, denying racism, or deny the effects of racism and sexism they maintain a discourse where Black women’s bodies do not belong, where Black femininities are not worthy of outrage or study. The effects of these disembodied discourses require further study and new frameworks that take account of socio-historical processes of oppression and the hyper-speed rate of the Internet.

Deanna Day (@deannaday) Unpacking Cyborg Fertility: Natural Family Planning and the Quantified Self
Personal medical care in the twenty-first century is increasingly organized around the principle of quantified self-surveillance; the standard biomedicalization narrative describes how a technologically-implicated tracking impulse moves from the domain of professionals into the hands of lay users as tools become cheaper, smaller, and more accessible. Often conceptualized as part of the “quantified self” movement, communities of these practitioners are increasingly organizing online to share their data, their methods, and their analysis. This paper historicizes this trend and argues that both the technological and epistemological origins of this movement can be found in the practices of an unexpected group of women: natural family planners who have used physiological charting to determine their fertility since the early twentieth century.

Despite its name, natural family planning requires an intellectual, social, and material infrastructure to implement. Practitioners quantify, chart, and statistically interpret their temperature on a daily basis in order to pinpoint the moment of their ovulation. The first specifically-branded fertility thermometers were produced in the 1940s under the brand name Ovulindex, and female users relied upon an elaborate system of temperature-taking, charting, and mathematics to interpret their “safe period.” Performing this technological work upon the body enabled practitioners to understand temperature charting as a holistic and natural approach to health care, while at the same time describing their bodies as “walking biological computer[s].” In the early twenty-first century, they continue this work using computerized thermometers, online communities, and smartphone apps.

These similarities notwithstanding, there remains a deep discontinuity between the masculinized community of contemporary quantified self-ers and women who identify as natural family planners. In this paper, I argue that maintaining this discontinuity has continuing political ramifications. First, it exceptionalizes fertility, placing it apart from larger discussions of health and making it a separate sphere of concern only to women, or — more exactly — only of concern to some women: the particular demographic of women for whom conceiving a child is their fundamental concern. It takes one component of women’s biology and reifies its connection to one particular social role.

I also argue that this discontinuity can prevent us from thinking critically about the potential impacts of the quantified self movement. An extensive critical discourse deals with the objectification of women’s bodies, and when we exclude the feminine (and the feminist) from the quantified, we’re at risk of cutting ourselves off from a productive critique of the methodology of the quantified self. What does it mean for a tracker to turn their body, and their mood, and their diet — their whole self — into a graph? What does it mean to make yourself into a quantified work object in an extensive medical labor system? And what does it mean for both women and men to exclude this particular, culturally loaded, physiologically complicated, and socially and politically important component of themselves — their fertile potential — out of that identity?

Nadav Assor (@nadassor) Building a More Perfect Drone
In this talk I would like to address the exploding presence of drone technologies in our culture from three perspectives that are meant to expand from a different direction on the many important voices that are already critiquing the political, social and human rights related aspects of their use. Common to all of my proposed perspectives is that they relate to drones as embodied human extensions, a part of the human corpus.

The first perspective is meant to address the embodied, physical nature of drones by defining the Dronosphere, an ecology of technologies and behaviors, implicating everything from FPV (First Person View) hobbyist culture to military drone operators, from highway commuters to synchronized dancers. The idea behind this outlook is that while drones are evolving to fly, crawl, walk and even swim, partially or completely autonomously, humans are transforming to “meet them halfway”, taking more and more cues and handing more and more control to expert systems that literally choreograph their motions, their gaze, and even their thoughts, thus giving new meaning to the term “Drone operator”.

The second is meant to expound on the spiritual nature of drone technology. I will present a preliminary investigation into the less discussed, mythological and religious background for drones and their deeply symbolic nature, granting everyone from the president to a lowly hobbyist powers of remote seeing once believed to belong only to revered shamans. The only area in which this symbology is readily acknowledged is in the army parlance for many of the most commonly used battlefield drones and their support technologies, covering everything from Norse, to Greek, to Christian mythology. I examine the similarities between what drone technologies offer and what these ancient myths have for so long promised, and (hopefully) present some material from a documentary production in progress about a fervently christian remote control plane hobbyist who explicitly links his ability to see the world from above to the promise of salvation from his broken body.

The third perspective is that of my own creative work, being first and foremost an artist whose work is very much grounded in the creation of my own lo-fi interpretations of military industrial technologies of seeing and moving through spaces, and between bodies. I will describe such projects as “”I Wanna be Your Drone”” , in which I ride my bicycle through a city, producing a subjective, fragmented video-panorama in a manner similar to that of the Google Streetview Van, while being remotely directed by a crowd watching my video feed on the other side of the city, functioning as a “human GPS”. I will also describe the piece “”Cut Stories””, in which I choreograph a crowd of documentarists via commands reminiscent of a smartphone navigation app. Last but not least, I will share details of my current work in progress for an upcoming exhibition, involving Ophan, an installation in which a captured, struggling hexacopter is used to generate chant-like drone sounds in a gallery-come-religious sanctum.

Una Tanović (@unatanovic) The Posthuman Condition in New Media Art and Electronic Literature
The humanities have always been concerned with the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Today—with digital, cybernetic and biomedical technologies beginning to challenge the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the organic and the artificial, (wo)man and machine—this question has taken on new urgency. To address it in a meaningful way in the digital age, we must first reformulate it: “What does it mean to be posthuman?” As N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman (1999), “Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather the question is what kind of posthumans we will be” (246). My paper explores new media art and electronic literature that seeks to answer Hayles’ question.

The central questions addressed in this paper are: What do new media representations of the posthuman reveal about the way we as human beings see ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What do they reveal about the way we see and treat the other? To what extent does the posthuman when envisioned as non-human open the door to inhumanity—to acts of cruelty, violence and a disregard for the pain of others? And how does envisioning the posthuman as an amplified human guard against this? Does the binary code of digital culture reinforce or challenge binaries?

The texts under consideration in this paper provide two competing visions of our posthuman condition—enacting the two kinds of posthumans we can be—as exemplified by two new media artworks: Third Hand by Stelarc and 3rdi by Wafaa Bilal. Although both artists employ technological prosthetics to create a cyberbody (thus agreeing on the physiological circumstances of the posthuman condition), they do so with different ends in mind (thus envisioning radically different psychological and sociological circumstances for the posthuman cyborg). Stelarc’s cyberbody allows him to transcend emotions and abandon human subjectivity (understood here as self-possession and self-mastery), becoming less human. For Bilal, technology amplifies the emotions and allows him to regain a lost subjectivity by countering the inhuman “transit and chaos” of war, becoming in the process more human. These two representations of the posthuman—enacted by Stelarc as transcending the human or becoming POSThuman, and by Bilal as amplifying the human or becoming postHUMAN—are repeated to varying degrees throughout the primary texts under consideration.

New media texts depicting the posthuman as a non-human entity, in the manner of Stelarc, can be read as a continuation of humanist discourse and its binaries. Conversely, texts that amplify the “humanness” of the posthuman, in the manner of Bilal, are posthumanist in their attempt to confuse the boundary between the human and the non-human, thus presenting an implicit critique of humanist discourse. In acknowledging the “human” as a construct, these works see posthumanism as an opportunity to construct it differently: “more justly, especially for those who, because of their gender, race, or other characteristics, have historically fallen outside the ruling paradigms of ‘the human’” (Wolfe “Posthumanities”).