Currently, I am caught in the throes of a frigid Chicago winter (which I have dubbed “Frosty McHateMe”), and still riding the incredible high of successfully completing my dissertation defense earlier this week. So this seems like exactly the right time to begin my new blog. I mentioned to the All-Star fan scholar Nina Busse my wish to migrate from LiveJournal to another hosting site, and she recommended WordPress, so (shout out to Nina!) here I am.
My two-fold mission for this site is to share news of my work (scholarly, artistic, and political projects) and to post short essays about various issues (scholarly, artistic, and political), some of which may turn into longer, more formal pieces. So this is intended as both an archive and a workshop.
2008 is still a young year, and my job this year is to grow the body of my scholarship. My list of academic to-dos for the next 4 months or so includes:
- Writing an essay called “License to Remix” for SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) in early March.
- Finding a publisher for Search for Soaps’ Tomorrow, the collection of essays and interviews about soap operas in the digital age which I am co-editing with Sam Ford (of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium).
- Writing my contribution to Search, on soap opera fan fiction.
- Editing other contributors’ essays for Search.
- Conducting interviews with the amazing, incredibly revered soap scholars who have agreed to talk to us, and reflect on the historical impact of their landmark works, for Search (I get to interview Robert C. Allen *and* Tania Modleski *and* Louise Spence *and* Nancy Baym *and* Mary Ellen Brown *AND* Robert Scorpio [Tristan Rogers]. THAT’S RIGHT, I said General Hospital’s Robert freakin’ SCORPIO!!).
- Writing the paper I’m presenting at Console-ing Passions (the feminism and media conference) at UC Santa Barbara in late April. I’m part of Greta Niu’s “Most Wired” panel, on Asian/Americans and new technologies, along with Lisa Nakamura. Talk about amazing scholars. What’s great and hilarious and unexpectedly ironic in the best way is that I work so much with Niu and Nakamura’s writing on the concept of Techno-Orientalism, and our panel isn’t even on Techno-Orientalism (although, granted, the theme is related, so it’s not a pure coincidence).
- Writing an essay on the presidential election called “Everything is Fandom” for the new journal Transformative Works and Cultures. I am on the Editorial Review board of TWC, and this piece is for the first issue!
- Writing a commissioned short work on fandom for an upcoming issue of a quite prestigious media studies journal, about which I will post more details when that deadline is a bit nearer.
Most of that is going to take place before 2008’s midpoint.
And yet, that’s not quite enough. I have a number of ideas for additional projects circulating. Perhaps I won’t get to them this year, but I am dwelling on the following:
- Turning my dissertation, “Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture” into a book (with a popular [i.e., mainstream] press, perhaps?).
- Proposing a book called Techno-Orientalism: Asia and Technology in Sci-Fi Film and Television based on two courses I’ve taught, and a number of essays I’ve written, on the subject.
- Writing a book, or potentially a series of essays, called Theories of Appropriation, addressing the ways that artistic borrowings, revisions, adaptations, and re-workings can be thought through using the theories of Plato, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, the Dadaists, Surrealists, Situationists, Pop Artists, postmodernists, and many others.
- Writing extensively about media piracy.
- A media theater play called ” A Fragment of the World,” about the aftermath of world-destroying natural catastrophes related to global warming (or, as Hunter Lovins says, “global weirding.”) I’d need to work with someone who can do extensive work with PowerPoint for this. Lots of graphs, charts, and digital animation.
- A media theater play called “The Uncanny/Sandman” about Freud’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffman’s great short-story, “The Sandman.” A professor lecturing about Freud’s notion of the uncanny (unheimlich) – shown in video – is combined with Freud telling the story of the meaning of Hoffman’s “Sandman” – also in video – while the terrifying children’s story is played out on stage. The Hoffman short story also has a narrative frame, something about people at a party telling each other strange tales, so it would be a thrice-framed plot (Professor discussing Freud analyzing Hoffman’s narrator talking about the Sandman).
- A media theater play that would be a promenade performance of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I’d need a warehouse to do this one justice.
- A media theater play that depicts a future in which socialists and libertarians unite against everyone *not* on one of the political extremes.
- A political/literary zine called Communist Par-taay!!!: Postmodern Metaphysical Marxism for the Masses.
- Making some podcasts and writing some essays in a new genre that I’ll call “Personal Theory,” which combines autobiography with critical theory and philosophy, so that I would, for example, interpret certain aspects or segments of my life from an Althusserian perspective, or a Nietzschean one.
- Writing the script for a movie called Infinite Game (working title). A movie about government assassins as a metaphor for bougie white-collar workers who are trapped in boring office jobs.
That isn’t all. But it’s a start.
For anyone who stumbles across this page and would like to get a closer glimpse at what I’m all about, check out the page of this blog called “About Gail Derecho” and the page called “Samples of Gail’s Work (2005-2007).”
Hey, welcome to WordPress! I hope you’ll like it…
Your plans are marvelous and intimidating. Talk about All Star scholars
I think my favorite (other than the ones you’re writing for *me* !!!) is the Sandman project. I’ve always had a fascination with that Freud essay…I think it connects to my cyborg interest and the basic human/machine question that drives so much scifi?
Thanks, Nina!! Looks like WordPress is working out well so far!
The Sandman story certainly is a cyborg story par excellence. Here is a great excerpt:
“Sigismund plainly perceived his friend’s condition. So he skillfully gave the conversation a turn and, after observing that in love-affairs there was no disputing about the object, added: ‘Nevertheless, it is strange that many of us think much the same about Olympia. To us – pray do not take it ill, brother she appears singularly stiff and soulless. Her shape is well proportioned – so is her face – that is true! She might pass for beautiful if her glance were not so utterly without a ray of life – without the power of vision. Her pace is strangely regular, every movement seems to depend on some wound-up clockwork. Her playing and her singing keep the same unpleasantly correct and spiritless time as a musical box, and the same may be said of her dancing. We find your Olympia quite uncanny, and prefer to have nothing to do with her. She seems to act like a living being, and yet has some strange peculiarity of her own.’
“Nathaniel did not completely yield to the bitter feeling which these words of Sigismund’s roused in him, but mastered his indignation, and merely said with great earnestness, ‘Olympia may appear uncanny to you, cold, prosaic man. Only the poetical mind is sensitive to its like in others. To me alone was the love in her glances revealed, and it has pierced my mind and all my thought; only in the love of Olympia do I discover my real self.’”
(Courtesy of http://www.fln.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e.html).
But I see that the Gertrude Stein Open Lab beat me to a digital representation of the Sandman tale:
http://archives.digitalperformance.org/archives/winter2004/Sandman.htm.
Still, more could be done with it. Adding in the Freud and my character, the Professor. AND/OR, what about combining three early European cyborg tales: Hoffman’s Sandman, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)? I know that R.U.R. is later than the other two by a hundred years, but it matches up so well with them!
Oh, Frankenstein. One of my favorite novels to teach : )
I actually wonder (and Karen would be a better resource on early scifi) how many specifically female versions cyborg there are. I’m thinking of a story Karen sent me, CL Moore’s No Woman Born or one of my favorite Tiptree stories, The Girl who was Plugged in…
Because Freud’s unheimliche is so very clearly gendered! (the womb as home??? which makes the no woman bornness even more unhomely, right?)
And the one thing I’m missing from LJ (other than the flock and the threaded discussions) are the icons and titles, which offer this paratextual layer of commentary…like here I might have a “going OT” title with a sleepy icon…
Because Freud’s unheimliche is so very clearly gendered! (the womb as home??? which makes the no woman bornness even more unhomely, right?)
Right, right! A great point. And thanks for referring me to those two stories (the Moore and the Tiptree), I will look those up. Of course, so many of the truly great cyborgs are female, from Edison’s Eve to Lang’s Metropolis’ Robot Maria to Blade Runner’s Rachael to the main character in Ghost in the Shell. I’m sure about a zillion people have written on this already, but what is going on with male creators/artists/authors/directors’ fascination with women-as-robots, robots-as-women? The terrifying prospect of those most emotional creatures, women, being devoid of emotion and unable to care (for men, for children, for society)? Or is it a way to stage the terrifying nature of women-as-Other, a male suspicion that women are, after all, not human, but completely strange? Or is it a way to reclaim the power of creation for men, to appropriate the power of birthing from women (women make human babies, men make female androids)?
Yes, I was thinking of Rachael too : ) I can email you the Moore (Karen scanned it for me) and if you haven’t read the Tiptree, it’s just great on so many levels (it’s cyberpunk before cyberpunk and already gendered in fascinating ways).
And yes, given how the nineties and cyberculture was everywhere, I’m sure there’s tons of stuff out there, but I think psychoanalysis is not necessarily used as often as a framework.
I think it’s all of those things, don’t you? If I recall my Freud correctly (and it’s been a decade or two : ), the uncanny is in the almost simulacrum, in the close proximity of the familiar, the home and that which mimics it but cannot quite get there. So an utter alienness would be less uncanny, less unsettling and intimidating than that which is off just a little…
I wonder also how much is reflection of fear of the female and how much is aggression, a stepford control of female-associated attributes, curbing out the very thing that threatens women as other?