This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between...
This dissertation considers how women’s spectatorship—how women are imagined as viewing subjects, and what are defined as feminine ways of watching—is transformed by digital technologies, and what it reveals about the shifting nature of privacy and visibility. It maps the contours of our current configuration of gendered looking relations by...
Through analysis of visual and literary texts, “Relating Sideways: Visual Culture and Women’s Bonds, 1970-2020” constructs a historical narrative that challenges the assumption that women’s lives and relationships naturally bend toward romance and procreation, a normative lifespan that follows the function capitalism has needed women to perform in consumption and...
“Pornographic Bodies: Constructing Corporeality in Adult Film” explores how the body is theorized within pornography through issues of materiality, spacing, form, libidinal organization, and subject/object relations. This dissertation challenges the way existing porn studies scholarship has taken body to be a self-evident vessel containing the psychosexual dynamics of the performers...
From the 1990s through the 2000s, gross-out comedy – in the broadest terms, the style of physical comedy that emphasizes bodily functions and fluids, transgressive imagery and behavior, and shock value and disgust – triumphed as a subgenre of popular narrative film and television comedy. Gross-out comedy first emerged as...
Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, & Participatory Culture explores, like its title suggests, what we mean when we talk about “having an experience” in today’s media culture. Traveling to an expanded network of sites where media fans are actively called to go out and “have an experience” in the...
Yugoslav wartime television news often conformed to the demands of the political regimes. Informed by this knowledge, scholars have argued that TV as a medium incited and legitimized the wars by fostering ethnonationalist ideologies. Using archival and textual analysis, this project examines how television reacted to the political constraints imposed...
Within scholarship on mid-century Hollywood musicals, celebrity, glamour, and spectacle are commonly included in the conversation about the films themselves. Yet, what happened when these films – which privilege visuality – were adapted into purely aural forms, has not been as deeply analyzed. In this project, I track the cross-media...
This dissertation is a cultural history of state-sponsored film in India and Iran. I focus on the 1960s-1980s, a period during which both countries enacted sweeping development agendas, which included industrialization, the expansion of higher education, and social reforms. I engage in a comparative analysis of each state’s pedagogies of...