This research project examines the intersection of race, technology, and embodiment through the lens of Ahmed Best’s motion capture performance as Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage, it focuses on how Best’s work transcends from simply being the blueprint for Jar Jar Binks’ specific movements, challenging the invisibility of racial identity often implicit in digital representations. The analysis extends the discourse presented in Stamatia Portanova’s article “Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of the Disappearing Blackness*” which reflects on the potentialities of motion capture to express and preserve racial identity through movement.

In the case of Best, the machinic assemblage of his performance with the digital rendering of Jar Jar Binks creates a complex interplay between visibility and erasure. While the character’s racial coding has been a point of contention, my project suggests that the motion capture technology used by Best serves as a medium for a post-racial or post-ethnic expression, where the ‘blackness’ of the performance is both present and transcended in the movements of a digital character. This duality echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, where identity is fluid and multiplicitous, and race is reconfigured as a potentiality that exceeds the fixed perceptions of motion-captured characters.

By re-evaluating Ahmed Best’s performance through machinic assemblage theory, this project aims to contribute to the symposium’s dialogue on the mediated bodies and discourses of race in digital media. It calls for a nuanced understanding of the ways in which digital technologies can simultaneously obscure and illuminate the complexities of racial identity in the realm of body representation. Thereby I argue that the motion capture performance of Ahmed Best in Star Wars, and by extension of the principle also contemporary visual filters on social media, serve to conceive a body which is multiple, breaking up dichotomies of identity and race through virtual embodiment.

Short bio:

Richard Aude earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Digital Humanities at Leipzig University in 2021 and continued to study for a Master of Arts degree in American Studies at Leipzig University the same year. Richard is a scholar with a diverse set of interests ranging from software development to cultural studies. He is currently writing his Master thesis, which deals with manifestations of post-capitalism in popular culture. After university, Richard hopes to be someone who gets paid to think about the future, which could possibly include doing a PhD.

Portrayals of artificial intelligence in literature reveal a shift towards disembodiment. Once depicted as physically constructed beings (see also Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an early precursor in the 19th century, or Asimov’s I, Robot in the 20th century), AI has evolved into abstract entities residing in servers and virtual spaces (see Gibson’s Neuromancer or Stephenson’s Snow Crash). This transformation mirrors broader societal trends, where the emphasis on the physicality of AI has diminished, aligning more with a digital and software-driven culture. The rise of self-tracking devices further reinforces this focus, suggesting that bodies can be measured, controlled, and translated into data.

However, literary works provide a nuanced understanding of the body, infusing it with a sense of agency and power. This paper focuses on multisensory readings of AI texts, shedding light on the materiality of the digital realm. Rather than focusing on “consciousness” or the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems, the focus here is on the physical embodiment of AI. It contends that AI bodies are also excluded bodies, necessitating attention to enrich ethical discussions surrounding them and to capture the interconnectedness of technology and humanity.

For example, in Neuromancer, Gibson describes the digital landscape as a pulsating, immersive experience where Case perceives the AI’s influence through the hum of data streams and the electric charge that reverberates through his senses. In Snow Crash, the narrative similarly incorporates auditory elements, likening the sound of the virus to a relentless, dissonant hum. In both cases, the texts engage readers in a multisensory exploration of AI, challenging the sole focus on algorithms.

Short bio:

Loredana Filip recently completed her doctoral degree at Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich where she was a fellow of the Collaborative Research Cluster “Cultures of Vigilance.” She has authored book chapters, journal articles, and blog entries. Her upcoming book, Self-Help in the Digital Age: TED Talks, Speculative Fiction, and the Role of Reading, is forthcoming in 2024 with DeGruyter. Currently, her postdoc project explores nonhuman narratives in literature. In addition to her academic pursuits, Filip curates narratives about plants online, maintains a blog on her website loredanafilip.com, and indulges in fiction writing, including her self-published collection of short stories, Voices of Nature.

Contemporary forms of embodiment in the digital realm evoke much controversy. For some, there is any reason for acute anxiety, while others cherish the possibilities with intense enthusiasm. In any case, the reactions seem to evolve around the (seemingly) novel possibilities of shaping, designing, presenting, in short: making the / oneself through practices of active embodiment.

My paper aims to understand the intensive affective reactions towards self- design in digital media by first taking a closer look at specific practices of ‘face-making’ in Insta-Reels and tik tok-clips, and by then situating these practices in an overall sociological frame. My perspective is to understand practices of contemporary digital embodiment as related to the overall social norm of self-control, self-discipline, and self-optimization. The result is a ‘sculptural’ body, as opposed to e.g. leaky, fuzzy, active, unpredictable bodies. My understanding of this ideal is neither normative nor ‘totalitarian’. Rather, I seek to understand the empirical dynamics of such embodiment practices as always constituted by social conflicts and fears (e.g. of social degradation) and, following e.g. J. Butler and the vast literature on (feminist) phenomenology, to understand how bodies never really embody a norm but rather ‘fail’ (J. Halberstam) to do so in all sorts of ways.

The paper will also take a look at specific media mainstreaming of ‘trans*’- embodiments, in order to discuss the idea that these might be a (problematic) prototype of the ‘sculptural’ ideal, much detached from trans* activism and everyday life.

The concluding argument of the paper is that the ‘sculptural’ ideal of the body includes both the (even critical) acknowledgment of intersectional regimes of embodied social differences and the embodiment of being beyond these differences, i.e. enacting a sovereign self. I also argue that exactly these forms of re-sovereignization via sculptural practices are key in understanding the intense affective dynamics not only of the reactions in the media, but also and especially in authoritarian / populist mobilizations against gender, queer, trans* and racialized populations:

Short bio:

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is professor and chair of general sociology & gender studies at LMU Munich. Her research includes various aspects of contemporary biopolitics (fat studies, food & fitness, cosmetic surgery, dance), gender & care, social theory, and popular culture.

www.gender.soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

In this paper, I explore the concept of a ‘digital structure of feeling’ for making sense of the emotional worlds, structural inequalities, and intimate relationalities that shape our embodied engagements with digital worlds. In doing so, I read the notion of a postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007) as a structure of feeling that is distinctive but not monolithic, where ideology and emotion are entangled; “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought” (Williams, 1997, p.132). These digital feelings, especially those connected to living a ‘good life’, are structured through a politics that is often engaged in doubled movements, appearing on the surface to be something new, while reasserting conventionality and normative power differences, especially at the intersections of gender, sex, nationality, class, sexuality, race, and embodiment.

To develop this conceptual framework, I draw on a number of case studies, including #GRWM make-up tutorials on TikTok, digital fitness social media content on Instagram, and the users’ body as positioned by AI digital therapy chatbots. My analysis of these spaces of digital feeling are shaped by more-than-human interactions between subjectivity and algorithms, devices, hashtags, industries, environments and non-human animals. As well as the way the body emerges and is entangled in these spaces, I am also interested in the way the digital feelings flow from these spaces and connect up to wider emotional discourses that circulate around them, and reach out into the world, intra-acting and shaping how people can act, think, feel and be. That is, the emotion of the digital allows ideology to shape selves and subjectivity, so that these digital feelings have significant material outcomes in the world we live in.

Short bio:

Adrienne Evans is Professor of Gender and Culture at the Center for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Her research has considered notions of the good life, wellbeing, wellness and positivity through digital technology in relation to the vulnerabilities these concepts engender, by seeking to stimulate more inclusive, equitable and feminist-inspired ways of being in the world. She is author of Digital Feeling (2023), Postfeminism and Body Image (2022), Postfeminism and Health (2019) and Technologies of Sexiness (2014).

Short bio:

Rosalind Gill is University Research Leader for Inequalities in Media, Culture and Creative Industries at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, media and culture, creative work, and the affective and psychic life of neoliberalism. Her many internationally renowned publications include Confidence Culture (Duke, 2022), Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism (Bloomsbury, 2022), Aesthetic Labour (Palgrave, 2017); New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (Springer, 2011) and her new book Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media (Polity, 2023).

My paper will explore notions of “body justice” in the larger context of digital feminist activisms fighting for more inclusive beauty standards and body freedom, mostly via calls for diverse representation (see #BodyPositivity). Analogous to conceptions of “reproductive justice”, a term coined by a group of Black women in Chicago in 1994 that “spliced reproductive rights and social justice” (Zavella 2), “body justice engages Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and queer communities who critique not just anti-fatness but all heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, and ableist power structures that circumscribe understandings of beautiful and healthy bodies” (Greene et al. 2022).

While acknowledging social media’s subversive potential for utopian storytelling and “connective action” (Papacharissi 314), I will use META’s recent crackdown on political campaigns and “ads about social issues” (META Transparency Center 2024) to focus on a crucial omission in many of these activisms: the role of platform capitalism and digital worlds defined by data extraction, opaque, biased algorithms, and surveillance. While body justice advocates often put forward structural, intersectional positions and take feminism’s fraught relationship with visibility into account[1], their activisms, I will argue, could profit from going even further by criticizing the capitalist media infrastructures that restrict body ideals as well as expressions of protest.

In a utopian, cyberfeminist scenario, #BodyJustice struggles would not fight for more representation of “non-normative” bodies in a flawed, exploitative system, but embrace Glitch Feminism (Russell 2020), which radically re-imagines on/offline spaces beyond profit interests, binary notions of gender, ableism or body type. In democratic digital worlds, ageing female celebrities like Pamela Anderson would show their make-up free faces, if and when they want to, not because their bare skin is exploitable for clicks and lucrative deals with skin care brands (Vogue 2024).

Works Cited:

Anbouba, Margaux. “Praise Be: Pamela Anderson Has Officially Entered the Beauty Space.” Vogue, 22 January 2024,https://www.vogue.com/article/pamela-anderson-sonsie-brand-interview. Accessed 13 March 2024.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke UP, 2018.

Greene, Amanda K. et al. “’An Immaculate Keeper of My Social Media Feed’: Social Media Usage in Body Justice Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Social Media + Society, 2022, pp. 1-16.

Meta Transparency Center. “Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics.” https://transparency.fb.com/policies/ad-standards/siep-advertising/siep. Accessed 13 March 2024.

Papacharissi, Zizi. “Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling. Sentiment, Events and Mediality.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 19, no. 3, 2016, pp. 307–24.

Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto. Verso, 2020.

Zavella, Patricia. The Movement for Reproductive Justice. Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism. New York UP, 2020.

Short bio:

Elisabeth Lechner is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz, currently working on a habilitation project on feminist food politics. She completed her PhD at the University of Vienna in 2020. Situated at the intersections of literary, cultural and media studies as well as affect & body studies, her research on ‘disgusting’ female bodies, body positivity and digital feminist activisms was published academically and as the German non-fiction book Riot Don’t Diet! Aufstand der widerspenstigen Körper (2021, 3rd edition).

Apart from engaging in various forms of science-public communication and conducting workshops on media literacy, body shaming and lookism over the last few years, more recent publications include “#Feminist – Naming Controversies and Celebrating Points of Connection and Joy in Current Feminisms” (together with Greta Olson) and co-editing the collective volume Caring for Cultural Studies (2022). She is active on social media as @femsista.

[1] “The visible body is also the commodifiable body” (Banet-Weiser 25). 

In this talk, I discuss the effects the use of Ozempic and Wegovy as weight-loss drugs have had on discourses around body positivity and fat acceptance on Instagram. Discussions relating to celebrity weight loss, the so-called Ozempic face and the appropriation of activist language have complicated the perceived body emancipation inspired by body positivity. Ozempic, I argue, has exposed body positivity as a fleeting lifestyle, as exemplified by fat activist Virgie Tovar’s reaction (“I Don’t Want Ozempic”) to being offered the drug for free by influencer marketing companies. The infiltration of body and fat positive online spaces by marketers needs to be read as a symptom of the emerging backlash against body positivity and fat acceptance. As I will suggest, one way to counter this backlash is to become more radical in our call for fat acceptance and body neutrality.

Short bio:

Evangelia Kindinger is Associate Professor for American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the author of Homebound: Diaspora Spaces and Selves in Greek American Return Narratives (Winter, 2015), and co-editor of After the Storm: The Cultural Politics of Hurricane Katrina (transcript, 2016), The Intersections of Whiteness (Routledge, 2019), and Fat Studies. Ein Glossar (transcript, 2022), the first glossary on Fat Studies to ever be published, yet so far, only available in German. Her Fat Studies research looks at figurations of fatness and the ways it intersects with gender, class and place. She has published on fatness in reality television and satire; on body positivity and fat-positive self-help literature. She is currently co-editing a Special Issue for the Journal of Fat Studies dedicated to Fat Studies across Europe.

This paper explores contemporary approaches to authorship that challenge Eurocentric and patriarchal restrictions on female authorship of colour. These approaches, creating fluid authorial “subject forms” (Kyora) through the authorial subjectivation practice bodying, will be exemplified by Chimamanda N. Adichie’s and Bernadine Evaristo’s use of their bodies on digital media – particularly their social media profiles. The analysis is centred on critical examinations of (social) media postings of their bodies, exploring the conveyed, frequently activist, messages formed through the strategy of ‘showing and informing’ (i.e., the strategic integration of transmedia and intermedial narratives and the formation of socio-political standpoints based on the presentation of their bodies). Consequently, the postings are examined in relation to established gazes (e.g., decolonial gazes forming ‘oppositional aesthetics’), cultural and political contexts of creation, and their interplay with other forms of authorial production such as online essays, activist work/projects or even advertisements, as well as audience and spectatorship.

It will be found that Adichie’s and Evaristo’s (social media) postings – and the practices through which they were created – are small performances, which represent momentary accounts of their authorial subject forms. Furthermore, their body provides the medium for these accounts, combining formerly non-combinable subject positions (due to societal accusations of, e.g., ‘selling out’) and creating fascinating forms of authorship (that contribute to the liberation of non-male bodies of colour from the long-standing ‘bodily crisis’ they have endured). Thus, the body functions as a sight where the fusion between authorial presentation and creation (Hashemi Yekani et al.) takes place; this allows for a departure from static and limited notions of (feminist of colour) authorship, and the development of more fluid subject forms through the body.

Works Cited:

Kyora, Sabine. Subjektform Autor: Autorschaftsinszenierungen Als Praktiken Der Subjektivierung. Transcript, 2014.

Yekani, Elahe Haschemi, et al. “Aufführen.” What Can a Body Do? Praktiken und Figurationen des Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Eva Bischoff et al., 1. Aufl., Campus Verlag, 2012, pp. 30–46.

Short bio:

Sarah Back is a doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and works as the PhD coordinator of a doctoral college called “Borders, Border Shifts and Border Crossings in Language, Literature, Media”.

In recent years the social media platform TikTok has allowed transmasculine people to interact with each other in new ways. While always under the influence of a discriminatory algorithm and embedded in a capitalist attention economy, they manage to protest discriminatory community guidelines, make intimate knowledge that the medical complex fails to address accessible to each other, joke about their experiences, attempt to hold each other accountable in their behaviors and much more. One of the concepts transmasculine people started deploying online to creatively express their experiences and desires is called “gender envy”: A negative feeling explicitly capturing a desire for (a) perceived gender(s).

In this talk, I present my analysis of videos by transmasculine people in which they creatively express their gender envy, especially via image slide shows. These images include artworks and photographies that depict fantastical creatures, animals, inanimate objects, nature and more. The images capture genders or gender expressions the video creators long for, they wish to be seen and experienced as and that they experience as being inaccessible to them to a certain degree. I argue that these videos and their publication on TikTok create contact with a trans utopia in which trans people can and do have these genders. I also attest a power to the videos that unfolds in interaction with the viewers and TikTok’s platform affordances through which utopian spaces in the present are created: The videos make it possible for their viewers to experience the video creators’ gender and hence their body in new ways. The trans body gets transformed via the testimony of affect and the creation of affective communities, freeing it from the constraints of beauty norms, the language of psychology and binary-gendered categorizations; and instead opening it up for the fantastic, the magical and powerful, the affective, the queer and the utopian

Short bio:

L. Schneider Reuter holds a Master of Arts in International Gender Studies. His research focusses on trans and affect studies and especially the project of embracing negative feelings as part of trans life and liberation. Recently, he has also worked on questions around trans discrimination in mental health care, epistemic injustice, and trans positive research on de transition.

This paper delves into the landscape of online pornography, a medium dominating internet traffic and serving as a space for exploring societal norms. It examines the portrayal of Black masculinity within interracial porn, focusing on race, sexuality, and power dynamics. Drawing from analyses of pornographic categories and critical perspectives, it scrutinizes satire and agency in reshaping narratives surrounding Black male sexuality.

Central to the discussion is the Blacked brand, exploring how Black performers reclaim sexual agency through satire. By confronting essentialist themes of Black masculinity, they navigate racial dynamics while asserting their narratives of desire.

Insights from digital affordances are incorporated, highlighting the participatory nature of online pornography. Users engage actively through category selection, shaping sexual desires and fantasies. The paper explores how choice and interactivity contribute to the portrayal of Black bodies.

The study investigates how interracial pornography hyper-visualizes Black masculinity in the digital space. It examines the impact of category choices on the perception of Black bodies, considering the semiotic potential of pornography in making claims about reality.

Ultimately, this research sheds light on how digital affordances, satire, and agency influence the negotiation of Black identity within online pornography. By centering the experiences of Black performers, it offers insights into the complexities of representation in the digital age.

Short bio:

Kellen Sharp is a Masters student at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His research examines the complex relationships between race, gender, and sexuality online particularly as these intersections occur in toxic and/or deviant online spaces.