It is already a busy semester, with Student Association, Symposium Planning, Teaching, Research, Writing, attempting to have a social life, looking for jobs and funding in the coming months, applying for conferences and awards. I’m sure I could go on.

But, we endure and persist.

A blog, really?

I decided to set up a blog both as a way to reflect on my weekly dissertation progress with a little flexibility (there is great wisdom in the exhortation to “just write, anything”, though I will attempt to avoid self-indulgent poetics on this blog), and because it is a simple way to collect documentation of making processes for discussion in the dissertation later.

This week’s work

In addition to setting up this basic blog interface (which required more back and forth with IT than one might guess), I’ve been working on a revised version of my paper on chastity devices for submission to an essay competition at SCMS due this Sunday (2/15).

Due to of the evolving and ever-revised nature of the dissertation project, I don’t know that this iteration of the paper will quite fit into the larger diss. But is that problem? Indeed, writing with different orientations to the same object or phenomena can help inform both (or a multiplicity of) approaches…

Reading Theory

Following on the previous prospectus meeting, I’ve been looking for cooks to kick out of the kitchen.

Relevant video:

So, of course, I’ve been diving back into Barad’s writing about intra-action, agential realism, and techno-science—an emphasizing of the role of Feminist Criticism and Queer Theory to my research interests.

In their 2003 article “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter”, Barad outlines the central arguments of the then forthcoming text “Meeting this Universe Halfway”. The “cut”, to use Barad’s term, is incorrectly located in semiotics or representationalism. Instead, Barad locates the meaningful cut between human perceptual capacity and physical understanding of the material arrangements of the universe. That is to say, Barad argues that the distinction between a physical horse and language-concepts about a horse is a false one. Rather, the symbols we associate with a horse, the chemical structures used to store and transmit those symbols (intra or extra somatically), and the specific living organisms scattered through space-time, are all part of a material complex engaged in a constant and continual becoming.

How does this serve a study of sex toys and the internet? Well, if we accept Barad’s assertions about the hazy, ambiguous edges of the body and the reality of mutually constitutued becomings then my dissertation project takes on a distinctly cyborgian flavor (relevant to my teaching project this semester!). Communication, mediation and interface become about a variety of material intra-actions occuring at multiple valences to co-manifest instances of being. Rhetoric becomes an examination of the flow of power and agency between nodes or elements of these systems.

So, rather than thinking in terms of lock, locker, locked (or sign, signifier, signified) we must account for the various elements of the complex system: locked body (inluding mind), unique cage, media representations, observing bodies and minds, conceptual understandings, gender and performativity, social, political, and economic systems, raw resources, code and interface. Understnading chastity in this way provides vital insight to understanding how the internet is an active participant in the changing orientations to gendered bodies. The chastity device (and all of the attendant technologies and systems listed above) is a tool through which a variety of gendered bodies are produced, through which they come to matter at all.