LoopingThreads: Digital networks, feminism and queer politics
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the sticky fingers of time
I watched Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997) the other day, an independent SF time-travel film that comments on gender, sexuality and racialised issues – and is also fun to watch. There is a good review out there, ‘Ofelia’s Kiss: Racing the Sticky Fingers of Time’, though my interest was on time understood as potential – and how intersting that the film finds this potential in the past. I’m now revising all the cool theory passing through in my thesis (and eating unbelievably huge amounts of brownies and chocolate whilst doing that, there must be some correlation between levels of libido and theory – meanwhile the cat, unaccustomed with having me in the flat for such long hours during the day, is going totally berzerk: now she’s lurking inside a black plastic bag holding a catnip banana and ready to attack my new thesis NEON tabs, £1.99 for 300, thank you very much), but will write about Sticky fingers of time at some other point.
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There is something retro about the concept of ‘storytelling’ and I prefer it to the concept of immersive experience when it comes to new media forms, not least because I find that storytelling has an essence of duration, playfulness and process to it. Of course these are edgy, perhaps for some even superfluous distinctions – after all Henry Jenkings in his Transmedia Storytelling 101 blogpost ultimately thinks of storytelling as the means to an end (an experience):
I continue my explorations these days into pleasurable sci-fi territories I’d forgotten about during my doctoral study (Contrary to what the Thesis whisperer blogger describes as her experience of repression during PhD study, I didn’t binge any trash fiction literature during my study – well, except for a bit of True Blood. I somewhat repressed my feelings not because of academic & research norms – after all I tried to apply feminist and queer ethics in my research, where corporeality and affect are central. My repression was rather due to different cultural understandings of sociality – but that’s another blogpost I guess, one that discusses hues of mediterranean intensity on British planes of decency). And so I watched Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days (1995) – dystopian version of pre-Y2K LA – and also watched the Lawnmower Man (1992) again, and will spend winter holidays probably watching again some VR, time travel and AI classics. Strange Days is interesting because Continue reading
Some eight years ago, in a Yale Medicine article about “smart dust”, the following amazing speculation was 
written
A world that used to be dumb and unconnected now gets connected, and that information gets shared.
In January 2011, the special issue of: GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Rethinking Sex, (Volume: 17, Issue: 1, edited by Ann Cvetkovich, Annamarie Jagose, Heather K. Love) featured my artwork on the cover. I was commissioned to reproduce an image from the 1982 Diary of a Conference on Sexuality which accompanied the conference “Towards a politics of sexuality”, organised by Carole Vance. My photograph tried to be faithful to the original (its beauty and atmosphere) but at the same time bring something of the present into it.
The issue marks the influence of Gayle Rubin’s canonical essay (Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, 1984) on gender and sexuality studies. Heather Love (2011) notes how the debates about porn, S/M, and butch/femme in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the so called ‘sex wars’) connect with queer theory and politics. She suggests that we need to acknowledge the debt of sexuality studies, in its contemporary form, to feminism.
Warren Sack from UC Santa Cruz gave a talk at Sussex on Friday, part of the Digital Humanities series of the Digital theme. His work is exhiting and tries to find new ways (or create these new ways) of bridging narrative and code. He’s done converstation mapping which is interesting to me primarily because I used Issue Crawler to approach (search and visualie) women’s groups online.
I’m just back from Seattle – and jet lagged – after the IR12 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (Aoir).
