My research explores the entanglements of technologies and bodies in today’s convergent media landscape. I engage with scholars invested in media technologies and infrastructures, audience studies, digital rhetoric, and feminist, queer, and critical race theories. My work across these contexts is unified by attention to the ways that particular lived, embodied histories shape media’s meanings and politics.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
“Toxic Regulation: From TV’s code of practices to ‘#BuryYourGays.’ Toxic Fan Practices, themed section in Participations, vol. 15, no. 1, 2018. Available upon request.
“Constructing Queer Female Cyberspace: The L Word Fandom and Autostraddle.com.” Queer Female Fandom, special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 24, 2017. Available here.
DISSERTATION
My dissertation, “The Matter of Identity: Digital Media, Television, and Embodied Difference,” develops a corporeal theory of media networks, drawing out how the material lives of bodies drive community formation in the digital age. Scholars have begun attending to the physical stuff that grounds contemporary media: data centers, cables, metals and plastics. I build on this work, extending its interest in materiality while critiquing its tendency to sever technology from the people who use it. From touch screens that can’t feel cold fingers to webcams that don’t see dark skin, breakdowns in human-machine relations remind us that media interface with particular bodies. However, discussions of digital media too often equate the material with the technological, imagining that user embodiment is irrelevant or one-size-fits-all (and patterned on straight white men). In chapters on Black Lives Matter activists, Latino transmedia storytelling collectives, and communities of queer female TV fans, I develop a methodology for tracing the entanglements of people, images, and technologies in digital networks. In so doing, I argue that we need to move beyond blanket assumptions of audience activity or passivity; emerging audience practices demand careful analysis of where and how responses to media reach the threshold of political action.