I, Curtis

Category: Academic

  • Thesis: Outline for a Literature Review

    My central question for my thesis still eludes me, but I have at least assembled an outline of the technical part of the literature review:

    • An Introduction to the Domain Naming System
      • Reference to initial RFCs
      • Classic gTLDs
      • 2003 Additional TLDs
    • The new gTLD Process
    • Price Differences Between new gTLDs and classic gTLDs
    • Price Differences Within the new gTLD Space
    • Distribution of gTLD Ownership
    • Dot Brand
      • Intellectual Property Defense vs. Corporate Use
      • No Dotless Domains
    • Community Representation for Specialized gTLDs
    • Stakeholders: Registrants and Consumers
    • New gTLDs with Similar or Related Strings
    • Change in Types of Internet Use Since 1985

    There is still a lot to do, including pulling in sociology of culture materials and gradually fleshing out the sociology of the Internet stuff, but this at least puts me on track to begin writing about the topic and thinking about it sociologically.

  • Identity-based Ethics in Culture/Subculture Boundaries

    Ethics, no mater how grounded in some mythical “virtue”, are culturally agreed upon. Call it a social contract if you like or just “common sense”, but either way, ethics are at their root an agreement. Some ethical agreements exist in a culture and all derivative sub-cultures. In Western culture this may be represented through norms regarding murder and suicide. Human life (because Western culture is a human-supremacist club) is considered to have some special intrinsic value, no mater how poorly lived the life or how much harm preserving the life could cause. Subcultures have variations in what is valued and what is considered ethical.

    How do the ethical variations between a subculture and its parent culture interact? Is there a specific boundary-space where there is room for some form of mutual respect for ethical differences? Are the ethical desires of the parent culture to be imposed on the subculture despite their different values? Under what circumstances does a subculture gain enough legitimacy to have its ethical code respected? Is the cultural legitimacy of a subculture a requirement?

    Beyond these questions of the interaction between culture and subculture I wonder about what creates a cultural authority that will permit the enforcement of an ethical code? Is it just a general agreement? If majority wins for the agreement, where does that leave the minority?

  • PHIL 6320: 220-507-1-PB

    To summarize succinctly Shaviro’s argument in this week’s reading: Modern digital video is different from historical analog cinematography.

    This analysis might be an over-simplification of the argument, but at a basic level it holds. The issue is what that difference means for the ability of video (general term to catch “film”, cinema and related time-spanning visual media) to be an accurate representation of the artist’s intent. There seems to also be a struggle between the agency of the subject and the liberty of the artist to “create” with the image of the subject.  The move to digital manipulation gives the artist god-like power to do whatever it can imagine with the image of the subject (and at a symbolic level, to the subject itself).

    The Grace Jones video displays a subject in flux, almost fluid in lack of conformance to a single state. No context is given to suggest whether the subject consented to the fluid state or if the fluid state is an adaption to some type of need (or force) to conform. The images could be read as calm transition between states, escaping a monolithic form, to seek a fluid existence between concrete spaces or as a subject forced to be fluid and unable to retain a desired or true form. Through the use of digital manipulation like is used in this video, it is impossible to determine as the form is so distorted that the image is helpless to represent itself in any way resembling a full embodiment. It is as though the body/subject is a puppet being pulled with digital strings wherever it is directed. At first I wanted to construct the fluidity of the form to something resembling the queer idea of fluidity, but it is unclear as to the willingness of the form to accept the various distortions that are placed upon it. How can the agency of the body be determined? Shaviro implies that it is a willful dissociation from identity, but I do not feel compelled to agree so easily. If the video was recorded in one form and the changed to something else, then at what point is the consent of the body considered?

    I have a lot of questions, but not many answers.

     

    Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.

  • PHIL 6320: Interactions Between Paraphilic Sexual Identity and The Gender Binary

    Potential Paper Topic: Interactions Between Paraphilic Sexual Identity and The Gender Binary

     

    The social construction of gender is filled with symbols. Some symbols are performative and some symbols are material. Paraphilic sexuality emphasizes the use of gendered symbols and makes them central to sexuality. Normative repetitions of sexuality utilize the biological manifestations of sex as their link to gender. Paraphilia are less centered on genitalia despite engaging gender more strongly at the social level.

    I propose to construct an academic paper, resembling a sociological literature review, which will overview the current literature regarding the use of gendered symbols in paraphilic sexualities and analyze that literature with methods consistent with feminist theory. My primary theoretical tools for this will be Butler’s performativity and Burke and Stets’ social identity theory. I will also consider the potential applications of queer theory for deconstructing the sexual discourse of paraphilia. One such exercise will utilize Lugone’s “world traveling” perspective with a wider scope, to allow “gender traveling”.

    One area of interest I would like to give specific attention to is the difference between “traveling” in different intensities of the gender to which one identifies compared with trying on a gender identity at the opposite end of the spectrum. My initial reaction to this particular area is that the restriction on such an exploration of gender is inhibited only by social norms.

  • PHIL 6320: Identity Augmentation and Deviation in Performance of Gender

    Potential Paper Topic: Identity Augmentation and Deviation in Performance of Gender

     

    Gender performance is dictated through social norms and expectations. Judith Butler calls this enacting of a specified gender role “performativity”. Various social science perspectives on deviations from the gender binary predict that non-conforming identities will be disciplined and either corrected or rendered as stigmatized. Research and theoretical efforts tend to support this conclusion for outward identity deviations. There is minimal research regarding a deviation between a person’s accepted gender identity and their perception of the quality of their performance of that identity, except in cases of ego-dystonia.

    Are there behaviors that are linked to gender that are performed to correct, augment or strengthen a person’s internalized gender identity that are not linked to an external assessment of gender identity? In terms of the gender binary, for this type of behavior to exist, masculinity would have to be constructed as a more vulnerable identity than only “relentless repudiation of femininity “ (Levine 13). Theorizing this type of behavior problematizes concepts of a purely social gender identity, however, it does not necessarily advocate for gender as an essence either.

    One site of behaviors that can augment the gender identity or potentially change the meaning of the identity is power-exchange relationships. Such relationships often exhibit roles that are contrary to standard gender norms, but yet do not encourage acceptance of alternative gender roles. What is the impact to the internalized identity of the participants in these types of relationships?

  • Thinking about feminist theory paper topics again

    I am very much not satisfied with the paper topics I considered last week. They just aren’t me. I could write them, but that’s not who I am academically. While I still don’t feel comfortable being my usual deviant self, I am just going to have to push through that and be myself.

    I have been thinking about the topics for a little while and I do have a few topics I feel I could work with.

    1. Stresses of Gender Performance (or the Stresses of Gender Policing) – basically considering the methods through which men have to control their outward identity. While identity may be fluid in gender-variant and sexually open settings, there is a lot of stress on men who are not in those situations. There is a constant risk of not being masculine enough given the context, always that risk of the anti-masculine shaming. Do men take certain actions do reinforce their own feeling of masculinity? What about gay men who embrace their identity in sadomasochistic settings? Do they use pain (maso.) and control (sado.) to reinforce their gender?
    2. Role of sexual subcultures on the identity of their participants – My perspective on sexual subcultures is that their seem to have an “always-on” libido or at least identity inside the culture. Is this really the case? Is the in-group identity only performed so that the emotional resources of the community are always available to them or is the subcultural identity a component of their primary identity?
    3. What happens when you integrate sociology’s identity theory (or affect control theory) with Butler’s performativity?

  • Sonic Corporeality, Gendered Vocal Embodiment

    The two readings for this week, Milla Tiainen’s Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations and Anne Carson’s Gender of Sound discus the status of gendered sound and the role of sound in sexuality. This is a particularly interesting question for me because my interests center on cultural elements that are constructed (or ascribed) as being erotic. In research for my many papers on the topic including those involving fetishes, sadomasochism and pornography I have never run across any literature regarding the erotics of sound. I have seen numerous articles involving fetishes of materials (leather, latex, lycra, etc), of sensation (pain, tickling) and of imagery (nudity, various implementations of the gaze). For sound, nothing. One topic I was particularly interested in was the presentation of masculinity in queercore music, but that still wasn’t about sound, it became about imagery, sensation and a lyrical content analysis. There is a focus on the visual for western philosophy and feminism.

    So what about sound? Why is it important? From the readings over the course of the previous weeks I have gathered a sense that voice matters because there is a lot of power in a voice, and as with most things of power it is typically regulated to favor males in hegemonic systems, although Taininen claims voices are “less codified by power than visual practices.” Perhaps the disparity between the feeling of importance and hegemonic regulation that I perceive in the articles and Taininen’s claim can be resolved through considering how it is that the visual has been given preference. If voice and sound are less codified, perhaps this is due to the treatment of sound by the hegemon is of a feminized modality which is disempowered by that lack of codification. I think back to some of Focault’s arguments regarding language and think that perhaps it is the lack of codification, the lack of language to discuss sound, that confines it to the space of a secondary sense.

    The visual modality is restricted by the physical. To be made intelligible visually there must be some link or resemblance to material that is in the world, perhaps to something that the viewer has seen before or would have a sensory awareness of. Sound is not confined in such a way because it does not have to be “understood” as a whole to be meaningful. I have difficulty following the entire argument of either of the articles, but I recognize the distinction between visual materiality and the materiality of sound. To me it seems as though sound has the potential to be more material than visual stimuli because it retains more of its original corporeal properties. The vibrations set in motion are more “real” than the bouncing of photons. Sound has more in common with tactile senses than it does with anything visual.

    Tiainen’s idea of micro-sexes bothers me. To sex an individual by an expressed corporeality whether it is vocal or genital is equally precarious. Biology may matter and corporeality may matter to some degree but I do not feel that it has any place in feminist literature. The body is oppressive due to the social abstraction of the body. I see no reason to feed another potential site of oppression back into the social system. Until the harshly guarded relationship between sex an gender is dissolved I cannot appreciate any reconceptualization of sex. More work must be done on gender, specifically in the area of fluidity.

    Also, I must regard any work that references psychoanalysis with skepticism.

  • Concepts for my feminism paper

    This post contains notes. This is not intended to resemble my typical article style.

    Current ideas for topics for my feminism paper…mostly based on my plans to integrate technology into my eventual thesis topic.

    1. Identity considerations with new gTLDs with regard to consumers and producers.
      1. Movement from large structures of society and government (COM, NET, ORG, EDU, MIL, etc) to domains for markets and target populations (.PHOTO, .FISH, .XXX)
      2. No longer about identity of producer, now about the markets.
      3. Does this make the Internet any more queer, or just more compatible with neoliberal ideologies?
    2. Analysis of use and intentions of ccTLDs compared with their gTLD counterparts, giving specific attention to the phenomenon of making generic (as in gTLD) a TLD designated as a ccTLD.
      1. .me = Montenegro OR “Me”
      2. .ws = Western Samoa OR “Website”
      3. .tv = Tuvalu OR “Television”
    3. Gendering of smart phone/tablet platforms. Primarily comparing Android and iOS (because no one cares about Palm, Firefox, Windows phone or whatever the Ubuntu phone thing is called)
      1. Gendering of platforms
        1. Android as “technical” (technical = masculine)
        2. iOS as “pretty” and “easy” (pretty + easy (soft) = feminine)
      2. Policing of what is “safe” in mobile OS land (Smasung KNOX, Kindle Fire limitations, Apple’s walled garden approach)
      3. Cultures surrounding the dominant operating systems (iOS = Instagram culture, Android = rooting, “power users” and gadgets)
      4. Re-masculinization of iOS via iPhone as symbol of privilege/power

     

     

  • The Voice of Ambiguity

    Language is imperfect. It is impossible to convey an exact meaning with words, but yet without words precise transmission of ideas and meaning is even more difficult. Cavarero states this and demonstrates it in “The Devocalization of Logos.” When comparisons are made to the visual I am stuck questioning how it is that visual information is represented as the guarantee of truth. Visual information is a two-dimensional representation (with basic cues for a third dimension) of a three dimensional world. Visual information can tell us a lot about an object in the time span in which it is visible, but very little about the essence of the object. I’m not sure that vocal information can resolve those concerns with any greater accuracy, but there is some comfort in the possibility of interrogative or bi-directional information such as is possible with vocal communication.

    Cavarero brings together many perspectives about voice, some of which are complimentary, whereas others are almost conflicting. It is sometimes difficult to discern whether she is discussing voice as an audible act, a written act or as a component of agency.  In any form, she argues that the voice is regarded as unworthy of attention in philosophy, but I cannot say that I have seen this treatment. The center of academic life (which sadly, is the primary realm in which philosophy has any power) is conversation between the knowledgeable people in the field. Academic conferences (and various Symposia) are the site of knowledge exchange. Voices are often lost in these settings and therefore  I suppose that from that perspective it can be seen as being disregarded by philosophy.

    Cavarero spends more time with the dead guys of Greek philosophy than I care to think about, but she does make some interesting points regarding the position of vocal communication in relation to other ways of perceiving.  I am left feeling as though I would have greater success with understanding her more subtle points if I had a stronger understanding of the work of Plato.

  • New Materialism

    I approach this week’s reading on New Materialism with deep understanding of the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling. As such I feel most comfortable to direct my thoughts to the Samantha Frost chapter “The Implications of the New Materialisms
    for Feminist Epistemology”.

    The introductory paragraphs touch on the interesting history that feminism has had with corporeality.  Many early feminist writers expressed the need to move away from the physical body as the site of gender formation, moving gender into the realm of the social. I do not believe that this movement was ever intended to negate the impact of the biologically sexed world that exists, but to draw attention away from it long enough to introduce the concept of socially constructed gender and non-conforming physical bodies. With ‘New’ Materialism it seems that feminism is providing a space for the corporeal to exist again, but this time it is more than existing, it is granted a “distinctive kind” of agency. Upon first reading of this agency I became concerned that feminism was opening a higher-level philosophical question traditional left in the space of cognitive philosophers, rather than wishing to engage the body in interactions of political empowerment. New materialism expands the previous discourse involving the inscription of social constructs (and meaning) upon the body to include how the body is involved in this process itself. As Frost quotes Elizabeth Grosz, “what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production, that is, to political, cultural, and conceptual evolution.” A question this brings to mind is: what inhibits the bodies from rejecting the inscription of cultural meaning? The primary concept that I draw from the new materialism framework is not allowing feminism to become stuck in the same cultural trap that other disciplines fall into. Why do we have to seek answers as being either cultural or biological? That method of thinking is too simplistic, too narrow to provide productive understanding of the processes which have led to the social problems that feminists seek to solve. At this point many fields have accepted that their simple models with simple explanations are not capable of fully answering questions, so it is reasonable that feminism would accept more possibilities as well. The attributes “complex, recursive and multi-linear” seem more like something that would be discussed in a computer science class than in feminism, but as Frost states, feminists need to retool to continue making useful contributions to theoretical frameworks regarding the construction of the body (and specifically gender).