jeanne.hamming |
|
dissertation. In Second Natures: Media, Masculinity and the Natural World in Twentieth-century American Literature and Film, examines the complex relationship between masculine identity and nature, as it is mediated by American technoculture. I argue that this relationship is marked by a discernible cultural malaise--a sense of profound dislocation in the midst of technological hypermediations of self and reality. My dissertation works historically to map two competing notions of man's relation to nature: the idea that masculinity is defined in opposition to nature, which is characteristically figured as feminine, and that true or essential masculinity can be only found in nature. In this double-logic of the gender-nature relations, masculine identity is constituted through an impossible technological transcendence of nature and a simultaneous illusion of unmediated access to nature. multimedia. I am currently collaborating on a book with Helen Burgess (U of Maryland, Baltimore County) exploring the role that scholarly multimedia plays within the academy. By situating the institutional tensions between traditional scholarly practice and new media within larger theoretical and disciplinary contexts, this book demonstrates how new media challenges the ways in which the traditional humanities scholar has been imagined as having a secure and stable position within institutionalized hierarchies of knowledge production. Furthermore, we consider how scholarly multimedia threatens the very coherence of humanities scholarship by insisting on the re-embodiment of scholarly praxis. In this respect we hope to bring critiques of techno-scientific epistemologies coming out of science studies to bear on humanities scholarship in order to follow through on Donna Haraway's call for interventions into all forms of knowledge production: "Knowledge-making technologies, including crafting subject positions and ways of inhabiting such positions, must be made relentlessly visible and open to critical intervention" (236). As part of this intervention, we reveal the ways in which the production of scholarly multimedia has been hampered by traditional definitions of humanities scholarship, as well as by a narrow understanding of what the "materiality" of new media can actually come to mean. In the end, we seek to complicate the traditional understanding of humanities scholarship and engage in a more nuanced understanding of the material and intellectual potentialities revealed by scholarly multimedia within the humanities. environment. I am working on several projects related to literature of the environment, all of which (hopefully) will become part of a larger book project about masculinity in the age of environmental calamity. My article, "The Feminine 'Nature' of Masculine Desire in the Age of Cinematic Techno-Transcendence," in the Winter issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, examines key films from the millennium's end: The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), Fight Club (1999), and 12 Monkeys (1995). While these films cover the gamut in terms of genre from science fiction to cyberpunk to urban drama, they all converge on anxieties of identity that result from technological hypermediations of self and reality. These cinematic lamentations for a secure and stable masculinity lost in the wake of post-industrial capitalist society mark a reversal in the fantasy constructions of nature. Played out in these films is the shift from a masculinity constituted through transcendence from the Natural/Maternal realm into the Cultural/Social realm, to a masculinity constituted through (the illusion of) unmediated access to the Natural/Maternal. This shift, ironically imagined as being achieved through the technological transcendence of metropolitan configurations of masculine identity, points to an increasing anxiety over the disappearance of, and a desire to (re)connect with, the natural world. I am currently writing an article on global warming as it is represented in science fiction novels and film tentatively titled "Manhood at the End: Global Warming and Transcendent Masculinities in the novels Michael Crichton and Kim Stanley Robinson." |
|
|copyright © Jeanne Hamming 2003 all rights reserved| |
|
