ABD

as of 8pm on March 23, I have officially passed my qualifying exams and advanced to doctoral candidacy!

read my essay (be forewarned that it is exceedingly long and boring)

peruse my field lists (final version, with virtual vs. actual color coding)

here are some questions I wrote for my orals:

I. Public and Private Spheres: Critical Theories of Politics and Subjectivity

1. You've chosen "privacy" as the overarching theme of your written exam; why do you think this concept unifies your concerns in a useful way? Are the different inflections of "privacy" (you explicitly identify three: sexuality/subjectivity, private property, and information security) really commensurate, or are there disjunctures that you're eliding here? Moreover, given the mutually constitutive functions of public and private and the alleged breakdown of their boundary, particularly via new media that allow the private to permeate the public and vice versa, how are you casting privacy as a coherent theoretical object?


2. Your essay invokes the problem of periodization at several points: in its historical account of capitalism, in its related stake in a postmodernism context, in positing a qualitatively new phase of media convergence, and in the status of the "new" in new media more generally. What sort of course are you charting between notions of continuity and radical break (in relation to how other theorists have negotiated this question)?


3. Several vast theoretical topologies (say, Marxist, Foucauldian, and Lacanian heritages) are compressed and even collapsed in your essay. That is, you seem to focus on their similarities and linkages more than their tensions and divergences. Can you (perhaps taking one or two texts as an example) say more about the distinctions and disarticulations between these methodologies (surrounding a theme such as reproduction, for instance)?


4. You ask the concept of "subjectivity" to cover a lot of ground, here, from sex to privacy and beyond. For example, you tend to use it interchangeably with citations of the body. What is subjectivity (in one or several definitions)? How much or when does it actually overlap with embodied experience, and why is the persistence of the body important? How are subjectivity and its dis/embodiment mediated by technology, particularly in so-called virtual spaces?


5. Relatedly, do you hold to the idea that subjectivity relies on some specter of "otherness," and what is the status of "the other" (or "the Other") in your account? Typical categories of analysis in this vein (gender, race, class) are rather submerged in your work: can you explain why you've opted for this set of theoretical priorities?

II. Cyberpublics: Digital Media and Internet Studies

1. The study of digital media is an unfolding field, incorporating several distinguishable but overlapping methodologies. How would you characterize your own object and approach in relation to this emergent tradition?


2. Various theoretical frameworks for discussing media hybridization have been proposed by critics such as Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, Jay David Bolter, William Boddy, and N. Katherine Hayles, including "convergence," "transmedia," "remediation," and "intermediation." What do you think are the advantages and/or disadvantages of these various models, and again, how would you situate yourself within this landscape?


3. You've called this section "Cyberpublics," but your stance on the discursive or political place of cyberpublics (or any publics) remains unclear. Do you believe in actually existing cyberpublics, and how would you distinguish them from ideologies or fantasies about publicity? How are (new) media technologies significant in constituting such publics, as well as such ideologies or fantasies?
   
4. How do you weigh surveillance (a visual paradigm) against capture (an informational paradigm)? How are new technologies intervening in panopticism as a conceptual formation, and how do these changes intersect with power and pleasure? What is the future of surveillance and/or dataveillance in our theoretical and protocological environment?


5. This is another zone where you're merging very different terms (the gaze, the disciplines, the archive) and approaches (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida). Can you unpack these relationships a bit more carefully? Is signification/inscription occupying the same position or doing the same work in these three systems?

III. the Public Eye: Television and Audience Studies

1. Television studies has historically been an unusually interdisciplinary field, spanning critical theory, cultural studies, and sociological methodologies. How do you expect to navigate this sometimes rocky terrain in your work? How would you value and reconcile, for example, textual and ethnographic approaches to reception?


2. You're staking your project on the possibility of generalizing from the example of online fandom. How do you see the larger questions activated in your essay (about privacy, subjectivity, power, desire, capitalism, and mediation, to name a few) being materialized in this instance?


3. You imply that "queerness," as a central trope of your project, can describe the structural and/or political condition of artifacts that aren't specifically homo/sexual (e.g. polysemic texts). How do you define this term, and why have you chosen to generalize it in this way? Do you think any disadvantages or losses go along with rhetorically de-sexualizing "queer" experience?


4. "Resistance" is another unavoidable trope, and its meaning in your essay tends to be slippery, oscillating from Marxist to Foucauldian to psychoanalytic to cultural studies models of this formation. Can you define resistance, or at least situate yourself within this constellation? Where do you locate resistance in the texts you study (and in your own) -- how/where/by who is it possible? Why is resistance desirable, and what are its limitations and/or the limitations of these theories?


5. You hinge your claims about fandom on the idea of a "limit case of capitalism"? What does this mean; what is the difference between a limit and a resistance? Given your appeals to poststructuralism, how do critiques of the idea of "limit" more generally affect your argument here? Alternatively, are there postmodern conceptions of the limit (e.g. "control") in play?