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Transmediations - Queer Literature, Media Technology, and the Archive3.14 MB
Embargoed Access, Embargo ends: 07/01/2026
Dissertation
Transmediations: queer literature, media technology, and the archive
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Spring 2024
DOI: 10.25820/etd.007325
Abstract
This project assembles a subset of 20th century LGBT-identified authors – Christopher Isherwood, John Rechy, Audre Lorde, Harvey Fierstein, and Tony Kushner – and examines the influence of media technologies like the telephone, gramophone, radio, and television on the metaphors, logics, and forms of their literature. Queer engagement with the media emerges in these texts as an oppositional practice, as a way for queer subjects to articulate and play with their identities, to pursue sexual pleasure, and to imagine a better world. Each chapter advances a media materialist approach to literary analysis that draws on insights from the field of media archaeology, which seeks to uncover the aesthetic, cultural, and political resonances of the media. Through their detailed representations of media technologies and their related networks and procedures, these authors stress the ecological, bodily, and material consequences that undergird the production and use of a given medium – often to the detriment of marginalized queer populations the world over – at the same time as they gesture toward the liberatory possibilities of certain mediums.
Furthermore, in their dual role as cultural producer and archivist, these authors envision literature as a means to store and transmit their visions of social transformation and queer collectivity into the future. Their texts are best understood as dynamic media assemblages, or queer archives, capable of reinventing themselves into new models of storage and transmission in response to the contours of queer life. As a contribution to the archival turn in the humanities and social sciences, an additional aim of this study is to palpate the transhistorical and transmedial reverberations of the queer archive as a storytelling technology, as site where queer histories and identities are negotiated and sometimes consolidated, but never fully fixed.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Transmediations: queer literature, media technology, and the archive
- Creators
- Matthew Helm
- Contributors
- Harilaos Stecopoulos (Advisor)Garrett Stewart (Committee Member)Doris Witt (Committee Member)Loren Glass (Committee Member)Paula Amad (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Spring 2024
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.007325
- Number of pages
- x, 306pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2024 Matthew Helm
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 04/23/2024
- Description illustrations
- illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 286-306).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
- In an emblematic scene from John Rechy’s City of Night, a transgender drag queen lipsyncs along to the gramophone and – for a moment – the woman’s voice on the record fulfills her desired gender expression. The desire for queer expression begets queer uses of media technology, and in turn, media technology constitutes queer subjects. This project embeds literature by LGBT-identified authors within a history of media evolutions and concurrent queer revolutions, examining the central role of media technology in the making of queerness and the affordance of queer socialization, activism, and community from the 1930s to the present day. For the assembled authors – Christopher Isherwood, John Rechy, Audre Lorde, Harvey Fierstein, and Tony Kushner – queer media practices serve as the raw material for the media metaphors in their literature. Through the mobilization of the term “transmediations,” which describes the translation between or across multiple media, I trace how the selected authors interface between an array of seemingly incompatible media (telephone calls, vinyl records, and radio and television broadcasts) within textual genres like the novel, poetry, and drama. I argue that these queer writers occupy the dual role of author and archivist, creating literature that documents queer media ephemera, disrupts linear accounts of history, and puts forward a more literary model of the queer past. Adopting a transhistorical perspective, I demonstrate how their texts reinvent themselves into new models of storage and transmission as podcasts, video games, and multimedia performances that reflect on the interrelationship between queerness, media technology, and the archive.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984647645702771
Metrics
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