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GWST 215 - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “Disidentification is a hermeneutic, often used in fields of queer theory and gender studies, that refers to processes of ‘recycling and rethinking encoded meaning’ in which a minoritized subject, in a strategy of survival and subversion, ‘tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form’” (Muñoz 1999, pp. 31, 32) (Pierce 2022)
      - Taking signs that already exist and making them your own. Instead of abandoning or devaluing things that signify femininity (long hair, pink, caring, nurturing, wearing skirts and dresses) as dominant patriarchal culture does, how can we make those things work for us? How can we recycle and rethink femininity in ways that resist patriarchy?
      - “Disidentificatory subjects take on norms of dominant culture, ‘sign[s] to which [they do] not belong’, in ways that resignify those norms and uncover their ‘universalising and exclusionary machinations’ in the service of empowering marginalized communities (Bulter 2011, p. 219; Muñoz, 1999, p. 31).” (Pierce 2022)
      - Bimbos are people who ‘disidentify’ with dominant expectations of femininity by recycling and rethinking what it means to be feminine. Their gender performance ‘uncovers’ the norms of patriarchy with the aim of empowering women and femmes.
- - - - Short for involuntary celibate- they operate mostly in homosocial online forums- they use “social media to organize a campaign of revenge against women, ‘social justice warriors’, and the ‘alpha males’ who had deprived them of sexual success” (Ging 40). Incels are often angry and sometimes violent towards women, and express their frustration outwards to ‘misandrist’ and ‘woke’ culture.
    - - Alpha males (Chads) are men who are at the top of the social hierarchy and perform traditional, jock-like masculinity. Debbie Ging writes in “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere”, women are “Hardwired to pair with alpha males” (649)
      - Beta males (also sometimes called betafags) are lesser men who perform ‘geek’ or ‘loser’ masculinities. They are still sometimes able to ‘get’ women, but only when those women have to “settle for and financially exploit beta males” (Ging 650) due to the scarcity of alphas. They affirm each other’s non-normative masculinities, while taking their frustration about lack of sexual success on women
  - - - Short for female incels. Whereas incels blame women and society for their feelings of frustration, femcels turn their anger onto themselves. Many femcels are in a perpetual state of self-loathing for not being able to live up to the beauty standards of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. In “Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, femcels, and the gender politics of unfuckability,” Jilly Boyce Kay writes that “if women’s sexual exclusion is understood as a problem at all, it is a problem about which there is nothing to be done” (Kay 2021).
      - Femcel is also considered an aesthetic category. Many of the icons of the femcel aesthetic overlap with or are derived from third wave feminist/riot grrrl movements. White girlhood and ‘feminine rage’ is central, represented by artists like Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple.
    - - The femcel identity is highly contested within incel spaces. This is because, Cummings argues, “while they are deemed ‘ugly’ and ‘unfuckable’, they are not permitted to make a claim on this abject state, as any woman is capable of ensnaring a man, should she really wish to” (Cummings 2021). Under incel logics of scarcity and biological essentialism, men are always already seeking sex from women, and women must manage their innate desire.
- - - - The ‘good fatty’ is a fat person who is apologetic about their fatness, whose fatness can be excused by a medical condition (so that it is ‘not their fault’), or who demonstrates that they are exercising and eating well. In “The ‘good fatty’ is a dancing fatty: Fat subcultures in reality television,” Cameron uses Whitney Way Thore from My Big Fat Fabulous life as an example of a ‘good fatty’. She fits this category because she has PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome)and works as a professional dancer, proving that her fatness is not a result of personal shortcomings, but of conditions out of her control.
    - - “‘The bad body is fat, slack, uncared for: it demonstrates a lazy and undisciplined self.’ A failure to stay in (the correct) shape seems like a rejection of the discipline the rest of us are supposed to be enduring… excess is un-feminine, greedy, and not lady-like” (Palmer 2010 70 in Cameron 2019)
- - - - “I will begin by analyzing Lara [Croft] primarily as an object of representation- a visual spectacle- and then move on, considering the ways in which the act of playing Tomb Raider as Lara disrupts the relationship between spectator and “spectacle”
    - - “In this analysis, I examine how militarized masculinity is constructed within the single-player campaigns of Call of Duty, how this construction reinforces the default conflation between military and masculine ideals, and how traditionally entrenched aspects of masculinity are in turn reinforced and challenged throughout the series” (Blackburn 2018)
    - - This article argues that “by tapping into queer and feminist narrative theory, we can broaden what gaming is and what it can be” (Chess 2016)
  - - - Michel Foucault is a French poststructuralist philosopher who, among many other important contributions to political analysis/vocabulary, coined the term ‘biopower’. Esmonde and Jette write that “Biopower, ‘the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’, is exercised so as to encourage the citizenry to take up dominant beliefs about the ‘right’ ways to life one’s life and manage oneself” (2020).
      - Sociomaterialist scholarship argues that “the role of the material– the non-human– in social life must be considered” (Esmonde and Jette 2020). The concept of assemblage is a sociomaterialist concept. An assemblage/assemblages can be defined as “a web of relationships between ‘humans, nonhumans, practices, ideas, and discourses’ (Lupton 2016 40 in Esmonde and Jette 2020), or as “‘desiring machines’ where desire is a productive and affective force that connects, entangles, and is always becoming” (Esmonde and Jette 2020).
    - - A key part of biopower (and neoliberalism) is self-surveillance. Subjects are taught how to regulate themselves and their bodies to best fit within desiring machines and white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Technologies like the Fitbit are self-surveillance technologies as they monitor subjects’ behaviours
- - - - Woman are the target audience for a lot of photoshopping apps
      - Self-tracking and monitoring is being promoted through these sites
      - Beauty apps sell solutions to problems they create
      - They work according to dominant beauty standards
  - - - women are choosing to maximize their "authenticity" (both in terms of their physical selves, & also their personalities) by engaging with these technologies of gender
    - - contemporary pop culture both shapes & is shaped by new media technologies
- - - - pleasurable mode of technical management
      - grassroots model for innovation and entrepreneurism
      - form of resistance to mainstream culture
    - - supports the creative and professional pursuits of women and other marginalized
      - attempts to decolonize current understandings of hacking and coding
      - deconstructivist feminist theory
      - reframes activities not usually associated with technical work
      - focuses on collaboration and building community
      - rooted in DIY culture
      - architecture or layout of the space is important