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Privacy & Pockets

The final set of readings for this semester create an interesting overview of historical perspectives on privacy and how historiographic narratives often imbue contemporary sensibilities onto these historical practices. For example, Barbara Burman's essay on the gendered nature of pockets illustrates many ways that they serve as artifacts of daily life and speak to larger societal narratives around gender. She illustrates how the dominant narrative of changes in pocket design occuring alongside more restrictive understandings of feminity were resisted by many women who continued to wear tie-pockets under their clothing long after they were deemed unfashionable. "A tie pocket’s embodiment of ‘the authority of the past’ was itself counter to fashion’s focus on present and future," she argues, going so far as to contend that it "may be explained not only by their sheer capacity but also by their more robust embodiment of women’s work, and as investment in the material domestic world..." In this way, Burman complicates notions of historical trends. By identifying these examples of resistance to the ever changing tides of fashion, Burman unearths a tradition of women who viewed their privacy and ability to carry goods as too essential to give up even in the midst of changing societal expectations.

Ilana Gershon is also interested in changing societal notions of privacy, though her research is focused on interpersonal communication and the end of romantic realtionships. In her essay Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Gershon examines how college students migrate the changing social mores of multimedia communication during the ending stages of romantic relationships. Much like Burman, she finds that some of her interview subjects are more swept up by new trends than others. Gershon examines the medium-specific practices and pressures, otherwise known as media ideologies, which students have developed around various new media including text messaging, email and social networking. In establishing the media ideologies each student believes in, Gershon is able to identify moments when break-up conversations disintegrate due to competing ideologies. The different interpersonal weight given to each medium, Gershon argues, creates complications for the fast-paced ever evolving teleogical notions of technological progress which we are typically presented in discussions of mediated interactions among young people.

Finally, William Leap provides a method for conducting audience reception research on viewers of pornography which attempts to respect individual privacy and bring the viewer's voice into what has traditionally been a textual analysis focused field. Leap is particularly intersted in how audiences understand the non-erotic messages which frame some pornographic films, including those featuring racial and ethnic minorities. He attempts to study audience reception within web forums, chat rooms and other online spaces, but finds that these discussions often lack the focus required for analysis of a particular text. In the inverse, he argues that focus group data is in many ways too specifically guided and is also heavily biased by the snowball sampling methods typically used when gathering participants for such sensitive topics. Thus, he argues for a data based approach, based on corpus linguistics, which allows him to review anonymous viewer comments and reviews. This blend of quantitiative and qualitiative data gathering may be a productive method of conducting ethnographic research, but in prioritizing privacy it does deprive the reader of context, proving that any method will have its weakness as a means of passing information down through history.

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Queerly Making Do

In Alexander Doty's introduction to "Making Things Perfectly Queer," he introduces a framework for queerness in mass culture that develops in three ways:

(1) influences during the production of texts; (2) historically specific cultural readings and uses of texts by self-identified gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers; and (3) adopting reception positions that can be considered "queer" in some way...

This framework allows discussions of queer media (and by extension queer media historiographies) to move beyond texts that feature visibly queer characters in order to consider a broader queer corpus. This becomes especially important the further back into history we are studying, as queerness was coded at best and often completely suppressed for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even Doty's definition of queerness is expansive, encompassing "any expression that can be marked as contra-, non, or anti-straight." This expansive definition and the inclusion of texts used by queer peoples allows Doty and others to explore the queerness lurking beneath the surface of even the most pedestrian mass media texts.

Eve Ng picks up this expansive definition of queerness and queer media and adds theories about paratexts and cultural context in order to evaluate instances of so-called "queer baiting." Ng argues that the cultural context within which a text is viewed and the official paratexts created by its producers are just important to dicussions of queerbaiting as diegetic text and its corresponding fan reactions. She coins the term queer contextually to refer to "how both the current and previous landscapes of LGBT media narratives informevaluations of particular texts." She contrasts the queer context surrounding shows from different eras, such as fan acceptance of coy sexuality in Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) as compared to accusations of queerbaiting in Rizzoli & Isles (2010-2016). Producer paratexts are just as important to identifying queerbaiting as the social context of the era, according to Ng: "...while being dissonant with actual episodes, these paratexts are nods to fan wishes in teasing what canon could in theory look like."

Brennan sees queerbaiting in general, and slash fiction in particular, as a space for potential "play" within the textual canon for queer fans, a sort of making do that also falls within the second category of Doty's framework. "...For many slash fans," he writes, "any suggestiveness in mainstream texts often serves as fodder for queer, artistic works...and in fact helps define a series as ‘slashable.’" Rather than viewing instances of quashed queer potentiality as baiting, Brennan argues that these moments provide openings for enterprising fan creators to insert their own fantasies into the text. "Further, such conceptualisation of the active viewing process behind the term encourages reconsideration of ‘queerbaiting’ and the more recent shift toward a ‘harm’ view of texts that employ it...These texts, producer intentionality aside, invite viewers to see queerly."

However, in order for the viewer to see queerly, they must have at least some space within the text to read queer desire. Rachel Charlene Lewis has noted multiple examples of queer female content being removed from specific releases of certain texts or played as grotesque jokes in others. She points, in particular, to Delta Air Lines' decision to remove a lesbian sex scene from the film Booksmart, which severly impacts the viewers' understanding of one of the film's two main charcaters. This instance, and others identified by Lewis, contribute to a continuing scaracity of queer representation that reads as honest and uncensored without being a joke. "Whenever I watch a queer film," she writes, "I am simultaneously thrilled at the prospect of ingesting the good queer film I’ve been waiting for, and holding out hope, as many have failed me. So often it feels like to criticize something queer is to indict it..."

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Digital Fandom; Pure Moods & Vibes

Coyne's introduction to his book on mood and social media has really helped me put into words a vague thought that I've had for a while now. He proposes that we, the networked public, "receive, modify, intensify, and transmit moods via [digital and social] media. [Such that,] device-equipped travelers participate in a kind of shared digital mood modification." This makes intiuitive sense to me, here in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 U.S. election, as I've watched moods spread organically through the social internet in seemingly fluid ways. "Moods have complex agency," Coyne writes, "They circulate with indirect influence from and through online media and devices. We are not jsut passive receivers of moods that are foisted upon us: We are complicit in the making of moods." So how then do we document mood making and create meaningful historiographies of intensely emotional cultural moments such as elections in the social media epoch?

As if it weren't hard enough to pin down these moods on their own, Jouhki et. al. have documented Facebook's infamous emotional contagion experiment and note that it creates a challenge to many potential research methods that one might employ. They point out that "Reaching any ethical consensus about the Facebook experiment is further impeded by disagreements over the definition of key concepts such as the “harm” done to human subjects, and their “informed consent”." The emotional contagion experiement was one of the first to generate public discussion around the ethical dilemmas of big data research and caused considerable outcry from privacy advocates online. This not only creates an ethical dilemma for quantitative researchers, but qualitiative ethnographers as well, who will now all have to reckon with shifting definitions of privacy and the ever-changing landscape of public opinion and mood.

Busse (2017) addresses the issues of ethnography head on in an extensive article that outlines the issues of implied consent, potential harm and online privacy which arise when studying digital fandoms. The potential for emotional harm inflicted by the publication of what might otherwise be private acts of personal expression make for a particularly salient argument here. "...Meanwhile, citing a fan story and directly linking to its author’s site may expose that fan to unwanted scrutiny — they may have revealing details in other posts on their blog that they don't expect more than a handful of people to read..." With nearly everything on the web being constantly indexed by search engines and other data mining software, the privacy of fan spaces is being rapidly eroded and with that erosion comes the potential for real harm to research subjects.

These issues and others are addressed in the InFocus series edited by Busse, wherein various authors address their concerns about the changing nature of fan studies. Karen Hellekson's contribution to this volume stood out to me in particular, as it provides key context for how fandoms have navigated fraught publishing landscapes such as these in the past. Her theory of fan production is premised on the idea "making use of," where in fans knowingly adapt their practices to inadequate or hostile circumstances. Hellekson tracks grey market fan activity from under-the-table VHS tape sales to private Tumblr blogs to argue for a view of fandom which remains rooted in "gift culture." In order for that culture to be maintained and for the mood of fandom to remain positive, she argues "Attempts to monetize fan labor must grow organically from within the community to be legitimate." Whether that hope is realistic in the 2020's remains to be seen.

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A Few Brief Histories of Fans

In "Fandom before 'Fan'" Cavicchi seeks out examples of what we would now call fannish behavior that exist before the coining of the phrase "fan." After briefly exploring the etymology of the term and its connections to other forms of cultural obsession he opts for an approach that focuses on behavioral patterns. The pattern he outlines includes "First a sustained intereste in sensation...a new emphasis on celebrity and selfhood...and [contesting] the expected limits of consumption." Cavicchi uses musical concert attendees of the middle 19th century to demonstrate this pattern. He finds, through journals, newspaper articles and other contemporary documents, that music lovers of the period voraciously consumed any live performance they could attend. Numerous accounts mention spending beyond their means to achieve new musical sensations and witness star performers on multiple occasions. He also notes that "most music lovers...mentioned keeping up with the the latest news of European [and musical] cultural life, especially through magazines." This focus on interest-specific publications deepens as fannish practices become more developed and widespread in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hansen brings the discussion of fannish consumption into the 20th century with her discussion of Rudolph Valentino and the female spectators who flocked to his films in the 1920s and '30s. Hansen contextualizes the market conditions that allowed for these films as follows:

"The orientation of the market towards a female spectator/consumer opened up a potential gap between traditional patriarchal ideology on the one hand and the recognition of female experience...on the other..."

She highlights how particular attention was paid to Valentino's body and a feminization of his persona, which was often figured as an erotic object in a manner uncommon for male stars of the period. "Valentino's appeal depends," she writes, "on the manner in which he combines masculine control of the look with the feminine quality of 'too-be-looked-at-ness.'" And though it is difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly how many women were looking at Valentino's body, and in what way, Hansen points out that "Hollywood publicity persisntly advertised the state of bliss in store for the woman who would be discovered by his magical gaze." The specificity of this appeal, to women infatuated with Valentino, can be seen as an early example of fan service or narrowcasting to a specifically fannish audience.

In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins explores how fans in the 20th century developed "interpretive practices" through which they bend their chosen texts to fit their own cultural needs. "Fans' resistance to the cultural hierarchy goes beyond simply the inappropriateness of of their textual selections," he writes, "and often cuts to the very logic by which fans make sense of cultural experiences." In defining their cultural experiences through the lens of their chosen text(s), fan communities create their own hierarchy of "sanctioned" culture, which is often policed by members whose tastes comply with the fandom's internal value structure. Jenkins is particularly interested in fans who create their own paratexts, such as fan fiction, that exist in the diegetic universe of mainstream texts and explore progressive and transgressive themes. This "poaching" of intellectual property to fulfill "othered" needs and desires becomes a site of conflict between corporate franchise owners (i.e. Lucasfilm) and fan creators (i.e. X-rated Star Wars fan-fic authors).

This conflict around narratives and themes between fans and corporate authors is not limited to film franchises of the 20th century though. Razlagova traces these communications back to fans of radio serials in the 1920s. She finds letters written by listeners to sponsors, writers and even fictional characters associated with popular radio serials of the period. These letters often contained feedback on plots and character development both sanctioned and not. Some fans even went as far as to visit the sites of fictional events portrayed in their favorite serials. Razlagova's breakthrough discovery though is that listener correspondence actually impacted the corporate bureaucracy of early radio. "The new commercial network system incorporated analysis of letters into its bureaucracy," she writes, "...because listeners advised the characters directly how to act, teh writer could create and resolve situations based on this advice." These examples, Razlagova argues, point to a history of radio that was far less monolithic than traditional accounts and which points to a media environment that has valued fan input more than accepted histories, including Jenkins', have previously expressed.

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Who owns the hashtag?

In her essay, "Is Twitter a Stage?," Abigail De Kosnik examines Goffman and McLuhan's theorizations of identity, performance and the social impacts of the internet. She finds that for Goffman identity lies "not in what is performed, but the fact that performance takes place, and how performance works in social interaction." This focus on a "stagecraft" of personality, she argues, can be seen in the discourse around online persona(e) that has arisen with the advent of multifarious social networking sites. And of course, form McLuhan, De Kosnik takes the notion of medium specificity, but also his concept of "new journalism." For McLuhan, "new journalism...consists of 'immersion in situations which involve many people simultaneously.'" This immersion, according to De Kosnik, is exactly what occurs on social networking sites, particularly in the instance of viral hashtags. De Kosnik uses #Ferguson, the tag arising from the protests following the police shooting of Michael Brown, as an illustrative example of both theories in action. First, De Kosnik shows how users posting with the #Ferguson construct and perform politicizied identities based on their "side" in the debate. Then, she demonstrates how much of the most virally popular content on the tag included videos and photos taken from the limited yet immersive perspective protestors and bystanders on the street. Their immersion, she argues, fits hand-in-hand with their construction of identity to create an emotionally and politically salient account of the events which perfectly suits the engagement motive of social media such as Twitter.

Paige Johnson follows on De Kosnik's general theorization of identity performance via hashtags with her in-depth examination of the viral hashtag #YouOkSis. Johnson discusses how the tag's creator, Feminista Jones, originally intended to create a space for sharing stories of street harassment, but was quickly drowned out by users with other intentions. The (as of October 2020) still ongoing disocurse around sexual politics and street harassment has created ebbs and flows of activity on the tag, according to Johnson, with many users appropriating for humorous purposes or outright rejections of its original intention. However, Johnson notes that #YouOkSis has managed to remain relevant for much longer than other related hashtags from the early days of #MeToo and related movements. #YouOkSis has also allowed some users to "collapse the boundary between the digital and 'actual' worlds" as well, pointing out instances of both virtual and IRL harassment. Johnson concludes her examination by encouraging an approach to hashtags that focuses on their longevity, adaptability and collective authorship rather than pointing to a tag as the identity expression of a singular authoring user.

In a collaborative commentary, Moya Bailey and Trudy counter this line of thinking by arguing that a collectivized understanding erases the labor of authorship. In particular, Bailey and Trudy point to their co-authoring of the phrase Misogynoir to describe racialized misogyny directed at black women and how the erasure of their authorship is an example of the term in action. The same argument could be made for the erasure of Feminista Jones in discussions of #YouOkSis. Bailey and Trudy are particularly perturbed by the expansion of the term to alternate meanings rather than the specific racialized context in which it was coined. This echoes the examples Johnson displays of #YouOkSis being co-opted for sexist humor and outright dismissal of sexual harassment claims. Trudy attempts to delineate between well-meaning users and media producers who misues or misattribute the phrase from the the "punitive plagiarists" who attempt to "punish" the pair for coining a controversial phrase. However, in the context-less sea of content it is difficult to suss out these motives and identity performances on the fly.

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Shifting Historiographies and Imperialism

In the chapter "Surplus Bodies, Vanishing Women," Beckman examines trends in stage magic at the turn of the 20th century within the context of British Imperialism. This analysis of seemingly disparate cultural elements yields a unique lens through which to view the anxieties of the British people, particularly their fears of colonial uprising and overpopulation. Orientalist representations of Indian subjects as "otherworldly," "magical," or "devious," abound of course. However, Beckman points out that after a series of colonial revolts in India the Indian on-stage began receding into background roles or being portrayed as impotent antagonists. Similarly, concerns around overpopulation on the British Isles and the rising proportion of women who were agitating for suffrage and other rights led to their replacing Indians (and white men in brown-face) as disappearing magicians' assistants. The literal disappearing and conjuring of women, according to Backman "offers [the dominant society] a strategy of defiant resistance to the problematic paradigms of female visibility, a model of being that does not involve spectacular visibility."

Nakamura explores the similar employment of strategic resistance in representations of Navajo women as ideal workers during the early era of electronics manufacturing in the United States. In an analysis of the marketing materials surrounding the opening and operation of a semiconductor plant on a Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico Nakamura finds that essentialized imagery was used to associate these workers with "specific 'mental and physical characteristics' such as docility, manual dexterity...[through a] visual rhetoric that described their unique aptititudefor the work [drawing] heavily on existing ideas of Indians as creative cultural handworkers." Just as the Indian magicians' assistants fell out of favor due to political events at the turn of the previous century, decreasing costs of international labor and shipping lead to depictions of Navajo workers shifting toward the end of the 20th century. Manufacturing jobs were moved overseas, with corporations reversing their rhetoric, claiming there were "militant groups" and "unstable labor environments" within native communities when workers there began advocating for unionization and equal pay.

The problem of shifting historiographies and their impact on colonized or otherwise subjugated peoples is further explored by Brown, who writes about the complicated relationship between the secretive Hopi tribes and the western anthropologists and "musems" attempting to "preserve" their culture. In particular, Brown is interested in Henry R. Voth, whose photographs of certain Hopi rituals have been decried by some tribal officials as an invasion of privacy. Brown explores this notion of collective/cultural privacy as well as the NAGPRA legislation in the United States in order to determine the most ethical path forward with regard to tribal artifacts and photographs which were taken and exhibited without permission. "From the perspective of anthropology," Brown writes, "cultural privacy flirts with self-contradiction. The salient features of culture are, by definition shared and therefore public. Yet the collective nature of culture does not mean that its elements are uniformly distributed...We are left with interweaving and to some extent paradoxical visions of culture: as shared yet differentiated, as segmented yet intrinsically free-flowing, as something that exists unto itself yet which is also defined by opposition."

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Queer Historiographies

Returning to Karen Hansen's essay on Erotic Friendship between African-American Women after reading it a year ago in the context of Queer Media brought about some interesting reflections on temporality. Hansen spends the early portions of the piece trying to establish the historicity of the physical intimacy between Addie and Rebecca, her two corresponding subjects, and turns in its later pages to the social implications of such a relationship. "While Addie and Rebecca's family and friends did not endorse a same-gender partnership that excluded marriage," she writes "they accepted these women's partnership as similar to a heterosexual one." This emphasis on a clear dichotomy, even when subverted, between same-sex and heterosexual relationships reads at times as by-produce to Hansen's own historical moment, as a writer in 1995. As discused further in later readings, Hansen seems to be interested in exporting this dichotomy from the late 20th century's debates about marriage equality legislation to the 19th century relationship of two erotic friends, for whom marriage was clearly never an option.

Norton's review of the scrapbooks of William Beckford finds early 19th century evidence of physical intimacy between same-sex partners, but unlike the loving correspondence of Hansen's subjects, Norton is intrigued by Beckford's in the legal reprecurssions for discovered and convicted queer peoples. Beckford's anger at the persecution of queer people, according to Norton, "never took a more active form than vexatious rage and vain sighing, but at least he was not ashamed to be homosexual himself and he clearly recognized the prejudice of his society." This recognition in some ways makes him more modern than other subjects discussed in these works. Beckford's scrapbooks and letters seem to abound with lamentations for those unfortuante men who were caught fratrenizing with other males. He also expresses pre-existing knowledge of some of the individuals in questions and the cruising spots they frequented, which provides a unique picture of subcultural practice rather than singular relationships. However, Beckford's bias in selection is apparent as well. Norton shows that he clearly selected some of the most egregious incidents and trials to clip and save, clearly echoing the historiographic selection biases common in queer discourses of triumph over suffering.

Roulston challenges these sorts of temporal exports in an essay on Anne Lister, arguing that Litster gets constructed as "a symbolic confation of past and present. Yet it is specifically Lister's modernity that makes her a codebreaker. It is because of her modernity that we want her to be the key to the past." Throughout the essay, Roulston presents examples of incidents and themes recounted in Lister's diaries which were edited out and subsequently re-added to various published accounts after her death. These omissions and additions, he argues, serve the dominant historiographic discourse of each of their respective eras. And, as was the case in Hansen's work, accounts of same-sex attraction and romantic activity are introduced into the discourse during moments of widespread debate and discussion around LGBGTQ+ issues. As for Lister herself, she emerges from these accounts as a mythical rebellious figure, whose very past-ness allows her to become a vessel of a "tantalizing modernity [which] becomes integlligble only through an acknowledgement of her resistance to the modern..."

This tension between Lister's modernity and resistance thereto is clearly evident in the BBC series Gentleman Jack, which was based loosely on the diaries Roulston discusses. Throughout the series Lister is presented as a rebellious androgyne dressed in black from head-to-toe disrupting the quaint sensibilities of the townspeople and nobles of Halifax. Her demeanor is intense even in her most reserved and romantic encounters. And that intensity is not reserved for diegetic characters. Passages from her diary are read aloud by lead actress Suranne Jones in fourth-wall breaking direct address a la Phoebe Waller Bridge's Fleabag (released via BBC Three to widespread acclaim two years prior). These clearly anachronistic and confrontational moments force the viewer to reckon with how the series enforces 21st century modernity onto fictionalized versions of 19th century subjects, causing temporal confusion and discomfort that feels novel in a high budget costume drama from an established entity such as the BBC.

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Material Culture & the Archive

In his seminal essay Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida argues that the nature of a given archive is co-determined by its founding authorities/institutions and the objects being archived. In this way, he argues "every archive...is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional...it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion..." His chosen example, the archive of Freudian psychoanalysis, is thus determined both by the filial relationships inherent to psychoanalysis, e.g. the Freudian geneology, and the textual nature of the correspondence that dominates the psychoanalytic corpus. As an illustrative aside, Derrida poses the question of how both the archive and our subsequent understanding of psychoanalysis would be altered if Freud's correspondence took place over e-mail. By focusing on a direct digital surrogate for letter writing, Derrida is in some ways guilty of the same short-sightedeness as Freud, whom he criticizes for ignoring how other media of the day (phonographs, cinema, etc.) shape memory, the mind and the archive.

This criticism is fleshed out by Prown, who argues that physical objects, aka artifacts, and the study of material culture constitute "unconscious representations of hidden mind, of belief, like dreams..." In this way, the historical incorporation of material objects into everyday life, and the understanding we can attain by studying their use allow historians to gather information about the assumptions and generalized practices of a historical people or society. Prown is particularly interested in deviations of style within comparable sets of objects, which he argues "should allow an analyst to reverse the process: to consider the beliefs, the patterns of mind, materialized in [the artifact]" and how this evolves as cultures change. His illustrative examples of household objects created before and after the American and French Revolutions clearly delineate how subtle stylistic deviations in objects such as chairs and teapots speak volumes about the aspirations of a given society.

Auslander continues the discussion of style, focusing on aesthetic goods that were felt and touched such as clothing and jewelry, which "have special attributes not only because of their contact with the human body," because the embodiedness and mortality of their wearers. "Human beings need things to invidutate, differentiate, and identify [themselves]," Auslander writes, "human beings need things to exress and communicate the unsaid and unsayable...". In the case of Auslander's examples that constitutes memories of material loss and death among Parisian Jews as a result of their forced removal from their homes and posessions during the holocaust. Evaluating the inventories these displaced peoples' created to document and potentially recover their belongings allows Auslander to identify cultural norms, practices and emotional priorities of a peopel whose history might have otherwise been lost.

The same sort of analysis can be conducted, according to Vlach, when it comes to the folklife of Afro-Americans whose homeland and history was similarly removed from them by force. Vlach traces common threads and themes from African folk-art, music and ceremonies through historical and contemporary products of the Afro-American dispora in order to establish how they inform contemporary Black identities. "Black material culture," he writes, "can claim the heritage of a distant past reaching back to Africa and simultaneously a more recent historical source of inspiration—the response to America." The tension between and integration of these two pasts results in a Black creativity "marked by constant, indviduating change," which has allowed Africanisms to persist in Black culture, through continuous improvisation and re-interpretation, to this day.

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Female Creative Labor & Canon

The canonization of female media producers has proceeded in fits and starts based not only upon the gendered standards of quality during their period of activity, but also in the moments of historical reflection when the various canons are created. All of this week's texts examine "forgotten" female auteurs whose contributions were unearthed by feminist historiographies that attempt to break from the masculinist traditions of their various authorial moments within the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Mavor, writing in 1995, seeks to expose her readers to the pioneering portrait photography taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in the late 1800s. She uses Cameron's series of "Madonna" photographs to exmaine maternity and the changing approach to the maternal figure over the 100 years between her experience as a mother and that of the late Cameron. Mavor is particularly interesed in the tactility of the photographs and how the combination of intimate poses and literal fingerprints on the negative create a sense of immediacy to the century old images. "After all," she writes, the maid who posed for Cameron's photographs "is dead and gone; yet she is there before us...all photographs are traces of skin." Cameron's impressionistic ability to convey this intimacy and provoke the emotional tactile response in a period when the dominant discourse on photography was focused on scientific realism is what distinguishes her work for Mavor. And while these distinctions caused Cameron to be mocked in her time, they are revered by Mavor years later and employed as a symbolic referrent for her own maternal bonds.

In her 2017 chapter on aspirational labor, Duffy takes a broader approach and investigates the historical connection between advertising, aspirational consumption and creative labor undertaken by women. She finds direct connections between the unpaid interns and lifestyle bloggers of the social media age and the poorly paid and underrecognized secretaries, copywriters and magazine journalists of early "women's media" at the turn of the 20th century. According to Duffy, “...'Invisible labor,'” wherein women's domestic work is not considered of value except as an engine for consumer demand, "is a recurrent theme in thinking through the productive contributions of women across eras, contexts, and industries." From the electric ranges of the early 20th century to the smart light bulbs of the 21st, household convenience items are continually marketed towards women working towards an aspirational decrease in domestic work. Duffy cites the rise in mommy blogs and other independent domestic lifestyle texts as a possible break in this cycle where women may be able to take control of this narrative, but the rampant product placement in such blogs suggests otherwise.

In Mahar's chapter on female filmmakers, particularly Lois Weber, during the period of "Uplift Cinema" and Pamela B. Green's 2019 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché we return to discussions of specific female creators. Guy-Blaché and Weber, both working in the same period, were hailed as visionaries and moral crusaders whose films were more suited to female audiences than those of their male contemporaries. However, as both Green and Mahar extensively detail, their work was later misattributed in film histories to husbands and assistants or simply removed from the canon entirely. These misattributions and omissions occurred due to both clerical error and masculinist historiography, but it all lead to the same result for both women: obscurity at the end of their life and rediscovery during second and third wave feminist evaluations of film history. Their restoration in the canon, while crucial to media historiography, comes at a time when amplifying minority voices is politically and socially en vogue and restoration has become (in some ways) cheaper and easier than it has ever been, thus it probably would not have been possible any sooner even if the desire for their recognition existed at scale.

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The Emotional Labor of Flight Attending & Record Collecting

In "Exploring the Managed Heart," Horchschild coins the term "emotional labor" for the efforts conducted by customer service workers to "suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others..." In the specific case of this chapter, Horschild is referring to Delta Air Lines flight attendants and the chipper demeanor they are forced to employ around passengers. As the partner of a flight attendant who is required to enforce air line safety protocols and infectious disease prevention standards during a pandemic, I am acutely aware of the toll this emotional labor takes on a person. Horchschild presciently describes the emotional hurdle-jumping of flight attendants and other service workers as a "transmutation," of the emotional system which is co-opted by their employers in order to provide value in (then new) service-based economy.

Hardt further contextualizes such emotional labor as a form of "immaterial labor," joining information-based office work and the mechanization/automation of factory work, in a form of labor that produces non-material goods. He tracks the evolution of capitalist economies from agricultural to industrial to service-focused markets, the latter of which enable the circumstances for the widespread employment of individuals in immaterial labor. However, Hardt also evaluates how this form of labor was previously housed outside of the capitalist labor market in "kin-work" and other forms of domestic "women's work," which while necessary to the development of capital was largely uncompensated. The continued spread of immaterial labor, he argues, may enable a new forms of liberation for workers who were previously uncompensated or lacked the creative autonomy afforded by many of these new roles.

Writing in 1999, Hardt clearly couldn't forsee the rise of web 2.0 and the devaluation of creative labor that arose from social media. However, Tiziana Terranova, examining fan production in the summer of 2000 clearly exhibits appropriate pessimism. "I am concerned with how...[the offline world] surrounds and connects [the internet] to larger flows of labor, capital and power," she writes, "It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole." This connection is often maintained through the solicitation and monetization of user-generated content and/or volunteer moderators, as Terranova witnesses in early AOL chat rooms. The "free" labor these individuals provide is emotional labor. They are often engaging in fannish practices that promote major media texts, and yet the media producers and the internet service providers offer them no compensation, instead billing them for their own engagement.

De Kosnik, writing in 2012, argues that the historic shaming of fans has resulted in their cultural disregard for being financially compensated for their emotional labor. In many cases, he argues, fans see their lack of compensation as a legitimizing force that separates from the "sell outs" and the "powers that be" who create and/or ruin the objects of their fannish obsession. And so, rather than use their immaterial and emotional labor as a path into creative careers, many fans choose to "customize mass commodities...for themselves and their fans only, not for the marketplace and not for average consumers (i.e., nonfans)."

As a result, the skills and affinities developed through a career of emotional labor, i.e. my partner's flight attending, are often leveraged during leisure time to advance fannish interests. However, the immaterial labor he and other fans conduct on behalf of their fandoms is rarely (if ever) compensated similarly to "traditional" service jobs. No matter how much time and money he spends researching the history of Disney World Records, my partner will never be able to quit his job in the air line industry and become an archivist at the Walt Disney Corporation. Instead he will continue to spend his own time, money and emotional energy to engage with this commercial entity that in return only charges him for more slabs of vinyl and showtunes.

[tolmstead-historiography-f20]

The Ghost of Rock Hudson

My mother, who is in her early 50s, doesn't know much about Ryan Murphy, so when she told me on a recent FaceTime call that she had watched Hollywood I was intrigued. "I really liked it," she said, "I thought it was really accurate until that last episode..." I then had to explain to her that no, it wasn't really accurate but that is kind of the point. When I walked her through which characters were fictional (Jack Costello, Raymond Ainsley, etc.) and which were based on historical figures (Rock Hudson, Henry Wilson, etc.) she started to see the revisionist historical work the show was doing. "Why would he make those changes though?" she asked.

In her own way, my mother was falling into the same assumptions critiqued by Deshpande, who wrote that in early cinema "If historians at all wanted to associate with cinema it was because, as self-appointed masters of historical facts, they were confident of making cinematic history appear more authentic." This obsession with authenticity has led, according to Deshpande, in a heightened emphasis on documentary and obsessively crafted historical fiction which is measured against the historicity of events as accepted by members of the academic historian community. "The capability of a good film to bring [history] alive, figuratively speaking," is undervalued according to Deshpande, despite the ways that filmmakers can represent "various dimensions and details of a social setting simultaneously." The representation of these social dimensions appears to have been Murphy's motivating impulse when creating Hollywood, as the mini-series explores the continuities between racial and sexual relations of early Hollywood and the 21st century. However, his intervention in the series' later episodes, which imagines a more tolerant Hollywood system that pushes against hegemonic American cultural clearly breaks with his initial historicity and was thus jarring to some viewers including my mother who are used to more "authentic" historical media.

It wasn't just the ending that jarred her though, some of the key plot points such as the prevelance of prostitution and homosexuality in early cinema were shocking revelations for my mother and other viewers. This fits into Bruno's discussion of Dora Film and how the re-discovery of surpressed voices allows a "reclaiming [of] marginality and difference, an archeology of knowledge [that] effective mined the field of surpressed knowledge to reveal discontinuous, diverse and disqualified areas." Rock Hudson's (and others') homosexuality was clearly considered discontinuous to his star text during his early career and was thus hidden from young women like my mother and her mother who doted on his appearances in film and television.

But what of the late Rock Hudson and the alternate life Murphy envisions for him? At the end of Hollywood, Hudson (as played by Jake Picking) comes out as a gay man by walking down the red carpet hand-in-hand with his (fictional) Black boyfriend Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope). This transgression of the accepted racial and sexual practices of the diegetic 1940s was perhaps the most jarring moment for viewers like my mother who aren't familiar with Murphy's penchant for queer utopianism. And rightfully so, in our non-diegetic timeline Hudson never publicly admitted his sexuality and was one of the first high profile celebrities to die of complications due to AIDS. Murphy's exploration of a different (after)life for Hudson allows viewers to "get to know him" in a manner that they were never able to during his actual life. And as Sconce has pointed out, television and other media promote a sense of "presence" wherein the viewer feels as though they are experiencing the images/audio as manifestations of non-corporeal beings. "Tales of paranormal media are important," he writes, "not as timeless expressions of some undying electronic superstition, but as a peremeable languge in which to express a culture's changing social relationship to a historical sequence of technologies." And perhaps that is what makes Ryan Murphy's Hollywood, so powerful...it allows us to re-visit the ghost of Rock Hudson and express our changing relationship to the tragedy of his historical life.

[tolmstead-historiography-f20]

Debates Around Historicity

"The true picture of the past flits by," writes Benjamin, "The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized...every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear..." According to this view, historiographic works are mired in the conflicts and biases contemporary with their creation. This opens these works to being instrumentalized by ruling classes and dominant powers to manipulate narratives in their own interests.

Rosen uses this conception to create a framework wherein "historiography" is the text written by a historian to construct "history" that is is perceived as recounting or repersenting "real" past events. The relation between the written historiography and the actual history as it occurred is, according to Rosen, the "historicity" of said text. The result of these relations, he writes, is the creation of a teleological continuity which serves to mythologize the past rather than deal with its actualities. "Both the referential aspirations of teh currently dominant canonical form of historiography as well as its production of coherent explanatory meanings," should according to Rosen, "be understood as socially and culturally functional discursive constructs."

Bazin, on the other hand, argues that with the invention and spread of photography humanity was given the "disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration...not, however, by the prestige of art buy the power of an impassive mechanical process..." The mechanistic nature of photography is key for Bazin, who argued that the medium's relative lack of human intervention makes it the most realistic method of documenting a moment for refernce in the future. This focus, on what Rosen might call the historicity of the photograph, removes notions of artistry from the process of photography and by extension cinematography.

Sklar advances this discussion to the mid-20th century and the advent of cinema studies, by documenting the field's fraught relationship with historiography, and argues that the discipline has been overly focused on an Althusserian conception of the moving image as a tool for disseminating dominant ideologies. "...Works by revisionist film historians appear to be fueled by underlying ideological purpose," he writes, "which leads them to significant absences and distoritions in their use of evidence." To combat this tendency Sklar argues that film history should be situated within larger social histories including the history of social contestation within film spectatorship.

The combined histories of ideological theory, social practice and spectator behavior became even more crucial, according to Manovich, as the field approached the 21st century and digitization as well as convergence. "...New Media--graphics, moving images, sounds shapces, space and texts have become computable" he writes, "they comprise simply another set of computer data..." And in this age of unprecedented access and rapid retrieval a collapse of historical context, as decried by Sklar, can be catastrophic to collective understanding.

It is within this historical moment of collapsed context that Sofia Coppola wrote and directed her 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette. And though the film adheres to well regarded biographies of the late French royal written by respected historians, it depicts these historical events in a markedly postmodern fashion. Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dunst, speaks English in an American accent while the rest of the members of the court of Versailles speak in upper-class British accents. The film's soundtrack includes British and American post-punk music from the 1980s through the 2000s, including Gang of Four, Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Strokes. These anachronistic elements are used to provide the film's presumed American audience with reference points for emotional resonance with a French monarch who was executed during the French Revolution in 1793. And while this tactic may be successful in forwarding Coppola's ideological aims of alignment with Antoinette, they pose considerable complications for the film's historicity.