English

In reading Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, I enter into a dialogue
with two recent publications that consider her cinema in light
of contemporary discussions on ecology and economy: Laura
McMahon’s work on the ‘ecological impulse’ at play in Denis’s films
and Rosalind Galt’s analysis of the way in which Denis’s ‘default
cinema’ resists contemporary neoliberal formations. I
examine the complex notions of indebtedness that shaped the film
and its production. Moreover, I explore how the idea of nature
in L’Intrus appears as a construct in which economic and ecological
relationships of debt are mediated through imaginaries of place.
Rather than proposing new ecological or economic imaginaries, I
argue that L’Intrus is a significant ecological text precisely because it
makes legible how debt-ridden imaginaries of nature intrude upon
another and affect the experience of places and the policies that
regulate them. Furthermore, L’Intrus’s complementary depiction of
imaginaries of the South Sea islands and the Northern mountain forest
suggests that the imagined relationship to a place that is unknown
and far away is dependent upon an imagined relationship to the
natural environment that is familiar and close by.

This article explores the aesthetic genealogy of the cue card confession social media trope, where producers create a self-portrait or vlog featuring handwritten cards to relate an autobiographical narrative. Returning to Michael Foucault’s theories of self-writing as a confessional discourse of the self that creates a correspondence of ethical perception between the writer and reader by way of contemporary theorizations of the demand for authenticity and consumability in social media, I argue that the cue card confessions constitute an important mode of self-writing that uses the visual spectacle of the body and the discursive demands of confessional discourse to invoke mediated witnessing as a mode of ethical engagement with these modes of self-writing.

This article analyzes the gendered expectations of authenticity in online amateur media performances through a reading of the 2006 vlog series lonelygirl15. Actress Jessica Rose was part of an artistic collective that created the character of Bree, a teenage girl who posted a series of confessional vlogs on YouTube under the screen name lonelygirl15. The vlog quickly went viral due, in part, to the almost immediate suspicion that the series was “fake.” Through a close reading of both the coverage of the sting that revealed Bree's true identity, and the narrative of the series itself, the author illustrates how the series aestheticizes precarity in order to facilitate escalating modes of intimacy with Bree's character. By placing such demands within the longer history of girls’ media production, such as the video work of Sadie Benning and Camgirl websites, this article argues that the reaction to the series makes visible the increasing political significance of the entanglement of economic concerns and identity production within the networked social sphere.

Using the multimedia curation program, Storify, students compose a short writing assignment analyzing an "author's" ethos based on his or her Twitter feed.  This demonstrates the ways in which ethos is cultivated over time and in a variety of different ways.

Students analyze portions of profiles excerpted from the free online dating site, OkCupid, in order to talk about ethos, values, ideology and goodwill.  The exercise, in turn, encourages students to consider their own online presences, their values, and the ways in which rhetoric has “real world” applications.

Following a detailed set of instructions, students use crayons (or other multi-colored writing utensils) to visually distinguish between certain elements of their papers. The result is a colorful paper that visually demarcates areas of text that may require revision.

Using the free digital timeline website, Dipity, students can organize and annotate their sources chronologically.  This enables students to visualize the sequence of events and better address how particular texts interact with or talk past each other.

This was a roundtable presentation for Computers and Writing, 2014. My talk related to live tweeting practices at academic conferences. I displayed the live feed while presenting, and an archive of the panel tweets can be found on the conference website (below).

In his book, Taking it Like a Man, American theater and culture critic David Savran argues that over the past 70 years, “white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim.”  Eastbound and Down exemplifies this problematic representation by following the exploits of Kenny Powers: a misogynistic, xenophobic ex-professional baseball player fallen from grace and glory, who has wound up teaching gym for his hometown middle school. Inverting traditional tragic structure, the show introduces its hero after his career has ended, yet (since the show is a comedy) Powers has learned nothing from his fall, and his hubris remains unchecked. While the show is fairly unanimously hailed as both offensive and hilarious, we must question whether it ironically does not mean what it says, or (un)ironically (and unintentionally) does.

Email me if you'd like to read the paper.

While the terms whiteness and white culture are frequently conflated in scholarly discussions, in her ethnographic study, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic,” sociologist Pamela Perry argues that, in fact, the invisibility of white hegemony is directly tied to the notion that a delineated “white culture” does not exist. Perry insists that, in claiming to be cultureless, whites assert racial superiority because “to be cultureless implies that one is either the ‘norm’ (the standard by which others are judged) or ‘rational’ (developmentally advanced).” As much of the scholarship on whiteness makes clear – it is the pervasive invisibility of whiteness that makes it so difficult to combat.  The question remains: how to make the invisible both visible and contested?  One answer is through humor.

In January of 2008, Christian Lander launched a blog titled "Stuff White People Like." Devoted to the investigation (and lampooning) of “things white people like” (such as “Farmer’s Markets,” “Diversity,” and “Having Two Last Names”) Lander’s blog (and subsequent books) re-frame whiteness as a set of cultural values and identifications.

Email me for a copy of the paper.

Accused of “cater[ing] to the most prurient and sadistic elements of the human psyche,” the comedic performances of Sacha Baron Cohen have been largely under-addressed by the academy.  The extant scholarship discusses Cohen’s films and television show (Borat, Da Ali G Show) primarily in terms of content – addressing issues of multiculturalism, otherness, anti-Americanism, and national identity.  While Simon Weaver condemns Cohen’s Ali G character as a form of “postmodern minstrelsy,” such accounts fail to consider the significant structural implications of Cohen’s performances.

Cohen’s various personas and his subversive approach to interviews illustrate the cultural dilemma of our digitally saturated age: though the boundaries between representation and reality, surface and substance, serious and non-serious have always been false binaries, the technologies now available are ushering in a heightened awareness of this instability.  While Cohen’s performances convey some sense of “non-seriousness” to the broader audience (of the show/movie) through the filmic medium, the intrusion of a “fictional” character into the so-called “real world” complicates any potential for dismissing these performances as non-serious, un-real, or purely fictional.

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Philosopher Paul Woodruff defines theater as the art by which human beings make human action worth watching in a measured time and place. Academic conferences are in many ways performances in a theater of ideas, and the incursion of Twitter into our conference panels explodes theatrical notions of presence and liveness: scattering audiences across space and (to a certain extent) time. Twitter's odd ephemerality pushes against more traditional notions of what writing is - our tweets, like our spoken words, eventually fade into the distance. As such, the act of Tweeting falls into an oddly liminal space between writing and speaking, creating “conversations” that cannot be recaptured. Bringing together performance theories and deconstructive approaches to language, this presentation will explore the implications of “live Tweeting,” demonstrating how it functions as a form of participatory theater and challenges the way we think about “writing” on the Internet.

In July of 2012, stand up comedian Daniel Tosh made a(nother) joke about rape.  The following week, the Internet exploded in outrage — inciting heated debate over both Tosh himself and the relationship between humor and rape. Yet, as numerous critics contended, other comedians have successfully joked about rape.  Comedian and actress Sarah Silverman frequently jokes about rape in her stand up routines and remains popular. To cite Silverman’s gender as a source of social permission for joking about sexual abuse is to buy into a host of assumptions (about identity, community, power) that warrant closer examination.

Judith Butler points out in Excitable Speech how utterances that may seem grammatically innocuous become threatening through the body that speaks.  As such, Butler's opening question becomes integral to my analysis of rape-related humor: where does language’s power to injure, to offend, reside?  She argues that threatening speech acts are at once bodily acts – “redoubled in the moment of speech” through the utterance itself (what is said) and the “kind of saying that the bodily ‘instrument’ of the utterance performs.” If jokes by their nature promise nonseriousness, when and how do they shift? How does a joke become serious, injurious, threatening? This paper argues that the threat of these humors stems from both the audience’s perceptions of the target of the joke and the ways in which power is read across the body of the performers.

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Sacha Baron Cohen's performances have been valorized and condemned by popular media and academics alike. While many critiques strive to elaborate on the specific target of his humor or the contents of his films, these readings treat his performances as discrete artifacts rather than an emergent style. In this article, I read Cohen's film and the character, Borat, from a rhetorical perspective, arguing that Cohen's performances illustrate the inherent paradox of attempting to draw distinctions between serious and non-serious uses of language. Using speech act theory and post-structuralist philosophy, I challenge clear-cut genre distinctions (Borat does not fit cleanly into either the mockumentary genre or the documentary genre, but works as a hybrid of the two) and a reliance on context or intention as markers of humorous, non-serious utterances.

“Pleased to Tweet You” is an interactive, personal narrative of Cate’s experiences using Twitter at academic conferences, loosely following the narrative structure of a traditional five act play. The article describes and reenacts the ways in which live-tweeting creates a “participatory theatre” for conference-goers, and Cate argues for an ethics of participation around how Twitter is used in these situations. Although the article focuses on academic conferences, the issues addressed—participation, attention, and performativity—apply equally to any live-tweeting experience, be it political protests, presidential debates, or the Oscars.

Incorporating both real and fabricated tweets related to the ethics of live-tweeting alongside Paul Woodruff and Jacques Rancière’s work on theatre and spectatorship, this webtext not only examines the complexities of audience behavior at conferences and what tweeting does and means, it recreates a live conference and invites readers to themselves tweet—to participate in the conversation.