“Fandom, Embodied Nostalgia, and Animated GIFS.” Jessica Hautsch, Stony Brook University.
In this presentation, I interrogate animated gifs and embodiment by considering the way that the fan collectives that form around romantic character ships isolate, repeat, and rehearse character interactions by posting gif sets created from films and television shows to platforms like Tumblr, thereby enacting a communal nostalgic experience of them. The giffed scenes are often important to the fan community, evidence that these characters are, in fact, in love—despite what the canon of the source text might insist. As we look at these animated gifs, we draw on our phenomenological and social experiences of bodily interactions to determine that character exchanges feel romantic rather than familial or platonic. I argue that theories of embodied cognition can help us to explain how we understand the subtext between characters, how we make sense of characters’ bodies and actors’ performances as demonstrating what these characters are really feeling and why it has such a powerful effect on us.
Through animated gifs, fans actively engage with the bodies present in the source text, we use them to create counternarratives by recontextualizing and reframing characters and their relationships and interactions, thereby creating, sharing, reiterating, and reinforcing counternaratives. These stories are reaffirmed by the repeated engagement of the community but become counterfactuals when they aren’t actualized in the canon text. When these counternarratives don’t become canon, animated gifs function as a way for fans to manage grief by nostalgically repeating and reliving the stories that they desired, but that never came to pass. For shippers, this nostalgia is not for the story they actually got, but the story they collectively generated through their embodied, emotional, and social reception of the text.
“When a Black Man’s Blue: HBO’s Watchmen and the Draw of the Alternate History Genre.” Sarah Myers, Stony Brook University.
Dating back to the infamous 1915 film Birth of a Nation, the American psyche has proven to be phenomenally susceptible and responsive to alternate histories. Americans have remained engrossed in the genre, evidenced by the binge-worthy rate at which dramas such as Man in the High Castle (2015-2019) and Handmaid’s Tale (2016-) are being consumed. When a Black Man’s Blue: HBO’s Watchmen and the Draw of the Alternate History Genre considers the iconographic potency of the Watchmen series in the current political landscape of the United States. To consider how Watchmen adapts the dual traditions of the superhero and alternate history genre through the lens of racism in America, this paper utilizes theories of black iconicity and decolonial methodologies of justice. Critical race theory provides a framework for assessing the role of violence in Watchmen as representing black power dialectically. The series begins with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre as a nexus point from which to reimagine the development of the justice system in the United States. Watchmen uses the superhero figure–traditionally archetypes of white morality–to apply pressure to hegemonic perceptions of policing and violence. Taking cues from a long history of Afrofuturism and a shorter history of the black superhero, Watchmen utilizes the tools of science fiction to practice a form of liberation by imagining a future where black power dominates white supremacy. Consumers of these alternate history television series are engaging in a thought experiment that fictionalizes and narrativizes elemental questions regarding justice, power, and law. Within the context of the recent centennial of the Tulsa Massacre, the rise of alt-right vigilantism, the January 6th Insurrection, and the popularization of the Defund the Police.
Sarah Myers is an art historian and curator, currently pursuing her PhD in Art History at Stony Brook University. Her scholarship focuses on global contemporary art and American art since the 1980s. Her research interests include the role of historiography in visual art practices, alternative modes of curation and display, frameworks of utopia and dystopia in American culture, the use of speculative fiction and alternate history in contemporary art, and the intersection of politics and aesthetics. She utilizes critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and media studies in her writing. She is currently researching New York-based art collectives of the ‘80s and ‘90s and their methods of (re)envisioning history and the shaping of time at the turn of the century. Most recently, she co-curated Printing Solidarity: Tricontinental Graphics from Cuba, an exhibition of global printed matter published in the 1960s-70s by the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) at the Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook University.
“The Limits of Memory: Husserl, Levinas, and the Immemorial.” Charles Driker-Ohren, Stony Brook University
This paper seeks to clarify Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the “immemorial” as both the limit of personal, biographical memory and as the commencement of responsibility for others. First, I sketch out Edmund Husserl’s analysis of time, which centers on a description of temporal modes of consciousness (past, present, and future). In Husserl’s framework, one’s consciousness of the past is subordinated to consciousness of the present, which itself rests upon a coinciding of consciousness with itself. I argue that this view privileges sameness over temporal difference. In contrast, Levinas describes time as an encounter with a past that was never one’s own past-present. This “immemorial” past is disclosed through my relationship with another person. Time thus takes place between or across an original separation, which Levinas calls “diachrony.” Next, I trace three modes of diachronic temporality that underlie our experience of others. These are vulnerability, proximity, and patience. Together, these compose structures of an ethical temporality, one that is radically opposed to Husserlian time-consciousness. If my access to the Other’s past depends on an ethical response rather than a representation or transmission of their experience, then responsibility begins where first-person memory ceases. To conclude, I raise some implications of this claim for how we experience collective or historical pasts.
Charles R. Driker-Ohren is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of specialization are phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, and 19th century German philosophy. He conducts research at the intersection of ethics, time, and memory, with a special focus on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
