This thesis examines the fissures and intersections between feminist digital media, queer theory, and Mad and disability studies. Moving across social media platforms, hashtag data, and digital gaming, this project argues for the subversive and creative potential within Mad/crip/queer digital identity performances. My theorizing of the avatar as an automedial figure in this project is attentive to the politics of the face as a site of encounter, to digital bodies and movement, to identification and community-building, and to embodiment and affects that move between on- and off-screen lives.
This thesis follows the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad digital identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Claiming the bad avatar as a deliberate identity position is an act of claiming the label of “bad,” which here has multiple meanings: Mad queer bodies—physical and digital—are bad citizens because we break the heteronormative patriarchal rules. We’re troublemakers—we make trouble for power systems and those who embody power. We can be bad workers, unproductive and fatigued. We can be bad for capitalism and bad for nationalist morale. We also experience feelings that become pathologized and policed. As despair, panic, melancholy, and angst stick to our bodies our bodies themselves become framed as bad: sick, broken, wrong, a problem in need of fixing or eradication. Reclaiming “bad” is both a celebration of the willful subject (Ahmed 2014) and a challenge to the binary of “good/bad” that is used to oppress Mad and disabled bodies. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis theorizes the digital avatar as an automedial figure, a mode of virtual embodiment and a site of encounter. I use “avatar” to draw a connecting line between widely varied digital identity acts that occur across social media platforms and video games. This thesis examines the “bad avatar,” a collection of Mad/crip/disabled faces, bodies, and identity practices that interrupt, disrupt, and transgress the normalizing and normative digital spaces of North American settler capitalist culture. Mad/crip digital identity play offers avenues for enacting modes of resistance through the politics of representation and the processes of identity performance and community-building.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/25995 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Jerreat-Poole, Adan |
| Contributors | Brophy, Sarah, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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