2022/1 - #Rumors

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  • Article
    Anonymous, QAnon, Tik-tok teens, K-pop fans
    Cho, Michelle (2022)
    This essay examines online rumors concerning K-pop fans’ transitioning group affinity from one of media fandom to one of progressive political organising against white supremacy and police brutality in the US context. Rather than aiming to confirm or debunk these rumors, I instead argue that they are worthy of attention in their own right, as a window into the importance of social media rumor as ‘improvised public opinion’ in today’s media environments. I assert that one particular set of rumors – comparing K-pop fans and Anonymous – promotes timely reflection on anonymity’s affordances for the politics of fandom and processes of knowledge production in transnational media ecosystems. Doing so, I argue, confirms anonymity’s importance toward building solidarity, while also revealing the key epistemological function of rumor on Twitter.
  • Review
    Itineraries of walking and footwear on film
    Ozgen-Tuncer, Asli (2022)
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    The filmmaker as Instagram auteur: A case study on Claire Denis
    Murphy, Cáit (2022)
    In this article I propose further inclusion of auteurs’ Instagram profiles within contemporary auteurism. Examining selected auteur profiles, I trace aesthetic and commercial tendencies. I compare the forms of film and Instagram, connecting this to Lev Manovich’s research and Timothy Corrigan’s ‘commerce of auteurism’. Instagram’s individualism extends Alexandre Astruc’s caméra-stylo theory. My case study is Claire Denis’ profile. I argue that her posts share aspects with her filmic ‘corpus’, like fragmentation and transience. Her profile has thus far expressed an anti-promotional stance, a distinctive design aesthetic, and the highly autobiographical part of her ‘work’ is indicative of Instagram’s authorial potential for filmmakers.
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    #Rumors: A Roundtable Discussion with Mladen Dolar, Richard Dyer, Alexandra Juhasz, Tavia Nyong’o, Marc Siegel, and Patricia Turner
    Baer, Nicholas W.; Hennefeld, Maggie (2022)
    Unverified beliefs and truth-claims have been topics of enduring fascination for scholars of media and culture, gaining renewed urgency with the viral spread of fake news via social media and the bitter attacks on scientific knowledge amid the Covid pandemic and climate crisis. In this roundtable discussion, we gather six distinguished thinkers to help us understand rumors, gossip, and the broader allure and danger of unsubstantiated information. With their wide-ranging expertise, our six panelists address the ramifications of rumors and gossip for queer underground cinema, political allegory, star and celebrity cultures, AIDS and Covid media activism, racialised belief systems, and the status of truth and logos in our time.
  • Article
    ‘I’m not a racist . . . but’: Conservative media and the plasticities of color-blind racism
    Krzych, Scott (2022)
    This essay examines the role of color-blind racism and rumors in contemporary political media, especially as racial rumors circulate in right-wing political discourse and on the conservative cable news network Fox News. Analysing a variety of examples in which rumors proliferate and contribute to the policing of communities of color, the article surveys Catherine Malabou’s deconstruction of self-sovereignty, treating Malabou’s work as a useful theoretical supplement to relevant critiques of systemic racism as developed by scholars working in Black studies and critical race theory. Ultimately, the article argues that the emphasis on representation alone in media studies is inadequate to the study of race, rumor, and political media.
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    Against the tyranny of the fact: Autofabulation as a queer strategy of resistance
    Loiseau, Benoît (2022)
    Queerness has always had a particularly vexed relationship to evidence. Because the latter has historically served to discipline the former, José Esteban Muñoz suggests that anecdotes can become queer acts of resistance against the ‘potential tyranny of the fact’. Drawing on this argument, this article examines the ways in which American artist, filmmaker, and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz uses autofabulation to destabilise evidential discourses in his performance practice. Specifically, it looks at ‘Some Styles of Masculinity’ (2017-ongoing), a series of anecdotal monologues in which Bordowitz reflects on the formation of his identity as a queer Jewish man living with HIV.
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    Vintage furniture: The significance of the casting couch as industry gossip and rumor
    Fortmueller, Kate (2022)
    Hollywood gossip circulates through both formal publications and informal interpersonal networks. In this article, I argue that both types of gossip and rumor are essential for understanding Hollywood’s business inefficiencies. Focusing primarily on the role of informal gossip, I explore its importance for aspirant networking and, as #MeToo reporting revealed, as a warning mechanism for women who must navigate the predatory men of Hollywood. Tracing the history of casting couch lore as a particular genre of gossip, I show how informal gossip can empower women working in Hollywood yet also retrench gendered hierarchies.
  • Article
    Gossip’s ephemeral longevity: Power, circulation, and new media
    Qualls, Bethany E. (2022)
    This essay argues that gossip reveals cultural networks that can support a range of functions, whether celebrity visibility, crowd-sourced anonymity, or anti-colonial revolt. Examining gossip through interdisciplinary scholarship in subaltern studies, psychology, literary criticism, media studies, and history, the essay elaborates its imbrication in these cultural networks along with its role in the creation of new media forms. The first part of the essay traces the semantic permutations of ‘gossip’ alongside related terms, elucidating gossip’s function as a network builder and didactic mode via new media. The second part offers a series of non-exhaustive case studies from the 1600s to the present that demonstrate gossip’s role in creating new connected publics, exerting social pressure, providing protection, and offering resistance against established institutions. This transhistorical perspective for considering gossip in relation to print and digital media brings together eighteenth-century periodicals, the #FreeBritney campaign for Britney Spears, the ‘Shitty Media Men’ spreadsheet, and slave revolts. By examining how ‘ephemeral’ gossip creates material outcomes, the essay shows how gossip works while illuminating its contradictory designations of trivial irrelevance and dangerous power.
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    Le Plaisir: Voices and viewpoints
    Gibbs, John; Pye, Douglas (2022)
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    Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s ‘Undine’
    Nguyen, Mai; Greenhill, Pauline (2022)
    We examine uses of sound in German director Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020), based on the story of a water sprite who marries a human and acquires a soul. We employ the concepts of ‘acousmatic sound’ and ‘the acousmêtre’ to suggest that the film’s uncanny soundscape invites a mode of listening that challenges and transforms habitual perception. While Undine largely adheres to cinematic realism, its sound design evokes intrusion by the preternatural and fantastical. By auditory allusions to the mysterious and uncanny, Undine asserts the significance of fairy tales and storytelling for perceiving and understanding reality and for imagining alternatives.
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    Truth and truths-to-come: Investigating viral rumors in ‘Q: Into the Storm’
    Pastel, Renée; Dalebout, Michael (2022)
    This article interrogates how Q: Into the Storm (HBO, 2021) pursues the conspiratorial thinking of QAnon adherents in two ways: first, as an investigative docuseries into the world of rumors, mapping the phenomenon for a wider audience, and second, as filmmaker Cullen Hoback’s entrance into QAnon as an alternative reality game (ARG), interacting with the sociotechnical network underpinning it. Both modes train viewers to anticipate truths-to-come, key to enjoying both media forms. Taking rumor-tellers seriously, Hoback intervenes in QAnon’s effects while indulging viewers’ prurient interest in the conspiratorial logic the series characterises as socially harmful. Considered in light of Bernard Stiegler’s concerns about the contemporary industrialisation of consciousness, the series fails as a consciousness-raising endeavor. We view Storm ambivalently as both an effective usurpation of such thinking and a reinstantiation of it.
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    Anger management, or the dream of a falsifiable film-historical past
    Anderson, Mark Lynn (2022)
    The so-called ‘historical turn’ in Anglo-American film studies during the 1980s was an attempt to permanently derail what many influential scholars saw as the excesses of unfalsifiable theory. This widespread disciplinary intervention had the additional and relatively successful aim of delegitimising almost all previous published histories of Hollywood as prejudiced, unresearched, and, most damning of all, based on the repetition of popular legends and hearsay. Yet one such history has remained astonishingly useful to the successive iterations of the ‘new film history’, useful to the point of seeming indispensable for various scholarly and popular projects of correcting the historical record: Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. This essay takes Anger’s film-historical practice seriously as an enduring challenge to both historicism and historical positivism because of its queer powers of attraction that have established beyond any doubt that deviance, in its various modes and permutations, is inexorably part of Hollywood’s story. The repeated returns to Anger by present-day film historians, constituting a reception history of Hollywood Babylon, demonstrate how the logics of hetero- and homonormative salvation continue to underwrite our current historiography of early Hollywood.
  • Review
    RIDM 2021: Act local, think global
    Pignato, Justine (2022)