Drag Incorporated: The Homonormative Brand Culture of \u3ci\u3eRuPaul\u27s Drag Race\u3c/i\u3e

This thesis argues RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR, 2009–) positions itself as a homonormative pathway to LGBTQ+ social inclusion through privileging neoliberal selfbranding and commodity activist practices that reify privileged raced, classed, and sexuality identity markers. Utilizing interdisciplinary and intersectional cultural studies methods to conduct a textual analysis, I examine how RPDR produces homonormative LGBTQ+ identities through the commodification and standardization of drag cultures. In conversation with existing RPDR scholars, I critically survey RPDR’s gender biases and prosocial messaging as an example of brand culture’s reification of hegemony and homonormativity within LGBTQ+ communities. This research considers the utility of media representation in identity, community, and political composition while also engaging with how consumption can communicate personal and relational meaning. RPDR proves the homonormative commodification of niche drag cultures perpetuates existing power imbalances, simultaneously benefitting and hindering aspects of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. In effect, RPDR rejects a radical queer politic and commodifies its cultural and iconographic elements, while the brand’s homonormative privileging exacerbates inequalities within LGBTQ+ communities

Out-siders: Auteurs in Place.

Out-Siders: Auteurs in Place, incorporates media authorship theory, cultural geography and ethnographic methods to examine media authorship and its functioning in relationship to place (specific local practices and identities in a given location). More specifically, I focus on filmmakers with distinct and consistent relationships to urban places who have either accepted or self-applied the “auteur” label. By “auteur” I mean a culturally recognized author of a media text. I study authorship through examining the process of making texts, instead of focusing on a singular authorial agency. Studying authorship, then, becomes less about assigning credit to an individual and instead a process of accounting for authorial practices and functions amongst larger production strategies. I argue that auteurs self-identify, manage and sustain their authorial images through relationships to places. All three of the filmmakers examined in case studies use cities, and places within cities, as molding, sustenance and protection for their maverick authorial identities. Chapter 2 looks at the lifelong relationship between John Waters and Baltimore, MD, where he is known as the ultimate hometown hero. Residents throughout the city refer to him as its “true” symbol. Chapter 3 examines Robert Altman’s nomadic yet focused attention to place throughout his career. On location shoots Altman and his team consistently worked with communities instead of just in them, transitioning him from outsider to neighborly friend. Finally, Chapter 4 studies Robert Rodriguez’s private industrial uses of Austin, TX. While he does not represent Austin in his films, his production practices do productively align with the cultural environment that surrounds him. The diverse relationships represented here shows us both the mutability of authorship but also its importance. These three filmmakers all base their careers on negotiating their authorial identity through place in distinct ways. Similarly, the cities all cultivate lively cultural identities in relationship to these filmmakers’ associations with them. Attention to place provides a way to examine how auteurs attempt to control their own author-identity and how this identity becomes accepted, submerged, altered and dismantled by communities. This project utilizes archival research and textual analysis as well as site analysis and ethnographic interviews.PhDScreen Arts and CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113297/1/nkoob_1.pd

Sharing our digital aura through social and physical proximity

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-160).People are quite good at establishing a social style and using it in different communications contexts, but they do less well when the communication is mediated by computer networks. It is hard to control what information is revealed and how one's digital persona will be presented or interpreted. In this thesis, we ameliorate this problem by creating a "Virtual Private Milieu", a "VPM", that allows networked devices to act on our behalf and project a "digital aura" to other people and devices around us in a manner analogous to the way humans naturally interact with one another. The dynamic aggregation of the different auras and facets that the devices expose to one another creates social spheres of interaction between sets of active devices, and consequently between people. We focus on the subset of networking that deals with proximate communication, which we dub Face-to-Face Networking (FtFN). Network interaction in this space is often analogous to human face-to-face interaction, and increasingly, our devices are being used in local situations. We describe a VPM framework, key features of which include the incorporation of trust and context parameters into the discovery and communication process, incorporation of multiple contextunique identities, and also the support for multiple degrees of security and privacy. We also present the "Social Dashboard", a readily usable control for one's aura. Finally, we review "Comm.unity", a software package that allows developers and researchers easy implementation and deployment of local and distant social applications, and present two applications developed over this platform.Nadav Aharony.S.M

Digital auras : towards a poetic of the database

La base de données est un outil omniprésent dans nos vies, qui est impliquée dans un grand nombre de nos activités quotidiennes. Conçue comme système technique destiné à rendre la gastion des informations plus efficace, et comme support de stockage privilégié, la base de données, avec son utilisation dans de multiples contextes, a acquis une importance dont les implications esthétiques et politiques vont au-delà des questions techniques.La recherche à la fois théorique et pratique étudie la base de données comme un moyen expressif et poétique de création, et met en évidence ses caractères spécifiques, notamment la discrédisation des données et leur mise en relation flexible. Le terme d'aura utilisé par Walter Benjamin pour analyser les transformations de l'expérience esthétique engendrées par la rationalité industrielle et la technique à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, est reconsidérée afin de formuler une poétique de la base de données. La partie pratique de notre recherche comporte deux projets interactifs fondés sur les principes poétiques élaborés au cours de cette thèse.Database are ubiquitous in our lives and play an important rôle in many aspects of our daily activities. Conceived as a technical support to facilitate the efficient management of information and as the preferred means of storage, the database has gained a level of importance with aesthetic and political implications that go far beyond purely technical questions.Both theorical and practical in its approach, our research investigates the database as a means of expressive and poetic creation and reveals its specific character, in particular the discretization of data and the establishment of flexible relationships between them. In order to develop a poetics of the database we will reconsider the term « aura », which was utilized by walter Benjamin to analyse the transformations of the nature of aesthetic experience brought about by industrial rationalisation and technology at the end of the nineteenth century. The practical part of our research consists of two interactive projects based on the poetic principles elaborated in context of this dissertation