Caroline and I were both interested in exploring “Queer TV” further after last semester’s seminar with Dr. Fackler. “Queer media” is far more complex than simple representations of queer characters and Caroline and I, originally, were interested in focusing our project on reception of shows by queer audiences. When first brainstorming, Caroline and I were specifically interested in looking at the show Euphoria on HBO. However, I recently came across the phenomenon of Lil Miquela- a queer, popstar robot, and Caroline and I might be interested in changing our project to look at this complex figure.
Ultimately, I am interested in looking at Lil Miquela because I want to research how she is being coded to be “queer” and how audiences are reacting to “queer AI.” The research of our project would be heavily grounded in queer and feminist theory, specifically Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and related texts. To this end, I really love the idea of an online zine like the “Thresholds” project. I think this would be a perfect form to make dense theory more accessible and I love the idea of a zine as not a particularly high tech (or even online) format to interrogate the height of tech right now- artificial intelligence and robots. In terms of tools, I think a community discussion board, or a robust commenting system, would be a given as we are so interested in audience reception. I would also love to learn how to use a text analysis tool for Lil Miquela’s instagram posts to see if there are any significant patterns in how she is performing queerness.
Questions:
- How to “make an argument” within a website? Or is that as important? I understand anything is going to be slanted but how do we move away from just a compilation of research
- I am SUPER interested in doing a large analysis of her posting and seeing if we can glean anything of significance from that but not sure how to do that with individual posts
- There is a lot of theory I would at least like to look over before going ahead and not sure how to do that with our class? Definitely feeling a little uncomforted because I am so used to be able to do my research and then decide the organization of my paper and it feels a lot different having to think of the design and such at this stage
