UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation, “Digital Disidentifications: Affective Circuits of Meme Exchange, Viral Counterpublics, and Queer Ironic Consumption” confronts obstacles and contentions in contemporary feminist praxis that arise in digital spaces such as racial appropriation, whitewashing, political activism, and call out culture. My research demonstrates how online discourse and the circulation of internet memes provide unique objects of analysis in cultural theory, namely affective circuits of digital exchange and queer models of media consumption and reception. I analyze digital meme-scapes that disrupt understandings of contemporary gender and race relationships. I employ a theoretical frame of “digital disidentifications” drawing on José Esteban Muñoz (1999) and apply the multiple uses of Muñoz’s heuristic to digital counterpublics, the analysis of new “archives,” questions of representational correctness, and humor as a resistance strategy within online spaces. Considering how queer digital communities coalesce through racialized and gendered imagery and online media, I argue that application of Muñoz’s analysis of subcultural performance can be adapted to fit the events I define as constituting digital disidentificatory practice. I take new media theories and rework them through an intersectional feminist lens specifically to highlight the creation and movement of memes in my dissertation. The theoretical frames I use in my research position contemporary memes within larger contextual frames and media genealogies such as studies of popular culture, music, film, and television studies. In these ways, my dissertation participates in an ongoing conversation about viewership, spectatorship, race, and gender, while applying new media theories to objects that have not yet been analyzed.