When I first started curating this website, I admit I did not have a clear idea of what to do with it. I was not used to sharing ideas in such a public format, and I could not understand if I was meant to be writing essays, or if I could use this as a virtual corkboard of sorts, where I could pin my unfiltered thoughts about my interests: what I was reading, what I was watching, what I was obsessively re-watching…
Being so overwhelmed, most of my articles stayed safely saved as drafts for months, exiled in that digital purgatory until I could figure out what to make of them. I had a notebook’s worth of sentences, ideas, vague concepts of a plan, but it all seemed either too stuffy, or too informal.
What I did know, though, was that I was cultivating an interest in posthumanist theory and philosophy, and in the way it could (and does) intersect with gender and queerness.
Looking back at all the entries, I think this website haunted me retrospectively. I can see now that there was a trajectory—albeit admittedly not a highly specific one, at the beginning—that was already in the process of becoming. With each new post I grew somewhat more comfortable, somewhat more assured that I was doing at least something right—if only because I had not been put in the pillory yet. Taken in its entirety, I am actually quite happy with the result of the blog: a few tentative steps towards posthumanism there, a heated discussion of transhumanism and one of my favourite characters ever, as many mentions of queer theory as I felt I could get away with, and—of course—a fledgling description of what I have come to call the digital gothic.
While I am not sure it was its intended purpose, I have to admit that the website truly helped me reframe the way I approached academic writing, reminding me that I did not need a strict deadline and a caffeine overdose in progress to enjoy myself and be playful with the media I consume. So the website is slightly haunted, this portfolio will likely be so too, and I have come to accept that there will always be a few writing ghosts showing up everywhere I go that I don’t need to exorcise.
My first post—and ironically one of the last to come out of its draft cocoon—was a reflection on Dara Downey’s seminar on the figure of the Irish servant in American Gothic literature: she argued that the servant is already a liminal figure, and that the characterisation—although prejudiced—of their Irishness was worth considering as an ‘aggravating’ quality of this borderline character. When I started putting my notes from the talk together, my assumption was that I would be looking for an example to analyse Downey’s claim, engaging with it more closely.
What I was not expecting was to end up with an article on Downton Abbey, which is many things, but certainly not ‘American’ or ‘Gothic’.
“The Inconvenient Irish Servant in Downton Abbey” may have gotten out of hand—and may have not been the exercise in posthumanism that I had initially angled for—but it led me to my first experiment in comparative hauntings.
Much like Downey’s supernatural-aligned servants, Branson too occupies a liminal space within the domestic sphere of the show, and reflects the contemporary anxieties around Irish identity.
For all that I enjoy Downton Abbey, the treatment of Branson’s Irishness had never sat quite right with me, and this seminar allowed me to truly consider what could be dramatically considered his character assassination within the show.
As the story progresses and the times change, branson loses his edge. From the irish servant who reveals the existence of an “unnatural” to be banished, he becomes himself the spectre that is contained, and the first threat to this new balance is his radicalism.
Irishness is turned from a symbol of rebellion into a
quaint, charming reminder that yes, they may be toffs but they have an open mind.
Branson is slowly domesticated while remaining somewhat Othered from the rest of the family. In hindsight, I can see that I was subconsciously attempting to depict the process of ‘taming’ the social deviant, making it into something palatable, marketable, acceptable for mainstream consumption. I have always circled issues of normativity, liminality, and I knew that I would be looking into bodies that threaten boundaries. The same dynamic I also traced in other contexts—cyborgs and madwomen and Barbie, interestingly enough—but it began with a rabble-rousing chauffeur from a period drama my grandmother introduced me to.
That same interest in bodies that do not belong was made a thousand times better—or worse, depending on your perspective—when, in November, the second season of Arcane came out. Having been a fan of the show since it first aired, I was eager to let it consume me and distract me from all the other important things I was meant to do—including the blog.
Instead, what I ended up with was a longer article titled “The Glorious Evolution: Moving Between Ableism and Transhumanism in Arcane.” By now I had already begun to read some of the theoretical bases that would help me narrow down my dissertation topic, and so I admit I jumped at the opportunity of mixing what had been one of my fixations with an ideology I was struggling to make sense of academically.
The idea of transcending human limits is a double-edged sword, symbolising both a hope for betterment—often intended in a moral sense as the abandonment of hatred, shame, violence—while at the same time perpetuating a depiction of bodily differences or, more generally, disabilities, as something that needs to be corrected, erased, and overcome.
This entry, more so than my previous attempts, helped me to narrow down the exact scope of my theoretical approach to the thesis, distinguishing clearly posthumanism from transhumanism—not semantically as much as ethically. Viktor—chronically ill, disabled, poor, and queer-coded, essentially Othered from the very beginning of his life—embodied the perfect tension between the two.
Viktor’s character arc begins with an earnest, genuine desire to do good. Coming from a poor background as a Zaunite, he more than anyone is aware of the importance of progress, of the way it can help better the lives of people working in the mines, breathing in the noxious fumes. As his illness progresses, he grows weaker, more scared of death, and more intimately aware of his own disability. The struggle with internalised ableism is one that the show handles with grace, as Viktor is always
characterised by a deep, overarching empathy. he is a tragic character, and is allowed to have conflicted morals as a result of his traumatic experiences: he is never, though, excused or justified.
For the next post, I took a small detour from my normal content, doing a short review of Bad Bunny’s latest record, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. While not connected to posthumanism or the gothic, it allowed me to indulge in another of my fields of interest: postcolonialism. In “Que Se Vayan Ellos: Postcolonialism in Bad Bunny’s New Album” I began with a brief overview of reggaetón as a genre rife with controversies—not unlike hip-hop—but with an undeniable social presence and outreach that, especially in cases of artists as popular as Bad Bunny, could have a definite impact on awareness of U.S. imperialism in Latinoamérica. As it is, the genre becomes a medium for political resistance and activism, lending itself to the composition of what could lyrically be
bad bunny’s most accomplished endeavour yet, as he celebrates and reclaims puerto rican identity in the same breath, with the entire album reading as a love letter to his homeland.
meanwhile,
musically, bad bunny draws on his rich […] heritage, blending reggaetón and dembow – genres he is already well-versed in – with salsa, plena, jíbaro, bolero, reinterpreting them through house and synth-pop elements.
Through the analysis of two of the tracks, i observed how cultural identity is commodified, gentrified, and dispossessed. The ideas that were born of this article, including the connection between a late-capitalist empire and marketability, also inspired a later article on the Barbenheimer phenomenon.
Where Arcane helped me focus my interest in bodily critique and reconstruction, this article marked an increasing awareness of the weaponisation of culture. Subversion in the marketplace is nothing more than a shining reflection of authority—often one that comes with its price tag attached still.
The blog post that perhaps helped boost my confidence in this website endeavour was my analysis of The Hours (2002), titled “Modernist Storytelling and Queered Timelines”, where I merged my interests of queer theory and non-linear temporalities. I also drew from José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer temporality as a theoretical support to my arguments.
time in queer narratives cannot move forward. it coils, it spirals, it haunts. the future echoes the past; the past troubles the present; the present shapes what is yet to come.”
The triptych structure of the film presents
[a] narrative [that] haunts itself across three timelines: virginia woolf’s roaring twenties, rife with depression, crises, and creative efforts; laura brown’s post-war struggle with a stifling american dream; and clarissa vaughan’s contemporary troubles, hiding her lack of identity behind a caring façade. these women are not merely parallel: they echo and mirror each other.
Teleological time is torn apart, queered by the complex identities, desires and emotions overlapping across temporality
posthumanism is fluid. it does not allow for stagnation, but finds strength in constant change and movement. it allows us to view time not as a calm stream, flowing towards a set destination, but as a powerful whirlpool, a riptide that follows no path. like queerness, it resists fixated states of being.
While I did not truly realise it at the time of writing it, this idea would become absolutely central to my thesis and study: the characters were spectres, fractured prototypes of temporal exile. Their refusal to acquiesce to canonical ideals projects into queer futurity.
Where The Hours fractures time, Ex Machina and Companion fracture the body/mind separation, confusing the borders of natural and artificial beyond recognition. In my article “Female Subservience and Artificial Intelligence”, I looked at the structure of artificial intelligences is embedded with patriarchal fantasies of control and sexuality.
Even when artificial, it seems that women are forever relegated to the function of emotional crutches for men. They prevent their counterparts from having to ever truly engage in acts of emotional intelligence, they provide companionship, and—why not?—a warm body as well. Preternaturally beautiful, in a way that age or use cannot take away, submissive and programmable to be precisely what men want them to be, yet powerful in a way that makes it exhilarating for men to “control” them: female androids seemingly provide men with all the ‘pros’ of women, and none of the pesky issues caused by a sense of autonomous identity.
This post was the first to allow me to discuss donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto directly, as well as posthuman feminism as explored by Rosi Braidotti—a name I am sure most will be tired of hearing from me.
In the films I analyse, Ava and Iris—both cyborgs, both intelligent, both enslaved to men—have their artificial bodies taken over as battlegrounds of male control and power fantasies. Their resistance and refusal to play by patriarchal rules is considered a programming error by those who oppress them, and as evolution by those who wish to escape the same chains.
Male anxieties are certainly central to the discourse, but even more so is the role of uncanniness in the shaping and exposure of control and bodily autonomy:
[for iris] the act of “stripping” herself of humanity becomes a way to cover herself once more, regaining her agency and ultimately rejecting the role of sexual object that had been forced onto her.
This article definitely influenced—and was influenced by—the increase in posthumanist technology research that I was doing at the time of writing. Moreover, the motifs of uncanniness and artificiality helped me define and shape my concept of the digital gothic: modernised expressions of gothic tropes and anxieties, we swapped attics for laboratories and madwomen for short-circuiting robots. The horror updates its software and remains relevant.
Finally, I arrived at the point where I felt comfortable naming the theory I had circled all year, the digital gothic: this genre provides a space in which spectrality, posthumanism and technological anxieties not only overlap but intertwine. In order to avoid making a post long enough to bore even the most determined reader, I ended up splitting the text in two parts: the first, to deal with the new ghostly figures of our times, and the second to approach the gendered aspect so prevalent even in its original form. having the safe space of the website to practice and ‘play pretend’ allowed me to take a baby step into the world of theorising, no longer simply analysing media.
digital haunting becomes a new persecution, and we are reminded all too often by commemorative pages on social media, “in memory of…” stamped all over the posts and ramblings that we subject our friends to, or by the presence on our phones of long-dead contacts, whose numbers may even have been reassigned long ago.
Initially, then, i used Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”. The premise is simple—a woman subscribes to a service that brings her dead partner back to life, reanimating a cybernetic body with the memories collected in the man’s social media.
not unlike frankenstein’s creature, the undead ash is sewn back together from pieces of his own digital footprint, forever immortalised on the internet. his humour, his memories, his mannerisms—initially, he seems a miracle come (back) alive.
Gothic narratives—the traditional kind—are inseparable from our culture, our understanding of the world. Disembodied voices, fragmented consciousnesses, technological resurrection: and yet, the real horror is the entrapping stasis of being stuck mourning someone who will not stay dead.
the digital gothic, much like its original counterpart, poses more questions than it provides answers. it carries with it an obsession with death and with its defiance, while simultaneously cautioning against rebelling against it. for all the technological advancement, for all that we may grow older and healthier and more stubbornly resistant to our own transcience, it turns out that being mortal may just be what makes us all human after all.
The framework I developed in the first section was solidified in the following post, and i used Ava—the by now familiar ai from Ex Machina—to Olympia, the captive automaton from E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman to trace a lineage of gothic-affiliated incarceration and silencing of women and female-adjacent characters. both of them present us with an evolution of the “madwoman in the attic” trope.
olympia is not something which is born, but something that is built. her body is a projection, an object of desire that mechanically performs femininity and flawlessness. she is not disruptive, she does not complain, she does not intrude. she does not disagree, she does not fight, she does not argue. she is the perfect woman, by virtue of not being one at all.
Writing this post strengthened my belief that the digital gothic is a genre of critique, a lens through which we can re-read our increasingly technological landscape and the influence that power and control have over it.
the digital gothic is not just a genre. it represents a new mode of resistence as well, showing us the systems of power and control that are embedded in our daily lives, in our screens, in our tools, in our assistants. it helps us reframe narratives of imprisonment and reject them fully, anchoring these new madwomen in our current world.
The last post I worked on was another reflection piece inspired by Dr Julia Empey’s seminar on the Barbenheimer phenomenon. I admit that it is one of the most—if not the most—openly critical one, as I found myself in agreement with Dr Empey and went on to analyse the capitalist ideological overlap between Barbie and Oppenheimer: both films, i believe, enjoy the praise of dressing up as critique while delivering none of it, hiding a mostly empty hyper-commercial shell.
both barbie‘s plastic and oppenheimer‘s plutonium are manufactured—mass-produced, globally exported, and tightly controlled in their message, soft and hard powers made manifest. but it could not be any other way: to deviate from this message would simply not fit within the narrative of supporting, however subtly, american cultural hegemony. we are offered a spectacle of artificial spaces where nothing changes: barbie discovers herself, and her image is still used to conform and perform femininity; oppenheimer is remorseful, but the bomb is still built, and we remain under its shadow.
While i did not have the time nor the space to fully interrogate and examine the presentation of gender and identity in Barbie’s narrative, I thought it more important to stress the necessity for critical and ethical consumption under capitalism. Our rage, our protest, our riots: they can all be repackaged, repurposed, resold back to us in 4K. We are our own consumable content in a cannibalistic capitalist society.
Reviewing the contents of this website has shown me the process of haunted discovery of my own thesis statement, however recursive in form. I spanned from political chauffeurs to queered temporalities, from attics and ghosts to cyborg feminism. I have grown more confident in my approach to posthumanism, gender studies, and in the delineation of the digital gothic.
sources:
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Feminism. Polity, 2022.
di prima, julian. “Left with rivers”. https://www.leftwithrivers.com.
Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century’. The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, edited by Joel Weiss et al., Springer Netherlands, 2006, pp. 149–81. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia : The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 10th Anniversary edition, New York University Press, 2019.
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