Department of English, Writing, and Cultural Studies

Link: https://twentytwo.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-158-tits-or-gtfo-the-logics-of-misogyny-on-4chans-random-b/

The decentralised, anonymous imageboard 4chan is decried for its discursive construction of gender, particularly on its Random - /b/ board. However, /b/’s misogyny demonstrably results from an internal moral panic about cultural exclusivity. New users unbalance 4chan’s anti-normative, anti-celebrity, and anti-leader ethic by posting self-photographs primarily featuring women. These users are strategically targeted and trolled based on their exposed identity aspects. While this practice is untenable offsite, viewing misogynistic discourse as a strategic, regenerative practice onsite is necessary as /b/ occupies an extreme point on the genealogical continuum bridging the transgressive cultures of bulletin-board systems, shock sites, and hacker culture.

Link: https://www.enculturation.net/attaining-the-ninth-square

To become a valuable user, 4chan Anons must maintain a consistent presence, peruse vast amounts of content, and develop a discerning eye for valuable cultural capital representative of 4chan’s history, politics of duplicity, and implicit social rules. Where relevant information is lacking, 4channers must seek out paratextual evidence, link to other boards, or delve into their personal archives to make information institutionally significant. These properties, intrinsic to 4chan’s discourse, suggest that 4chan is best read as what Aarseth termed a cybertext, where active engagement is pivotal to literary exchange and the manufacture of meaning4 (1). This interaction transpires largely around trolling and memetic activity. It also occurs around the negotiation between ludus—rule-governed systems with a predesigned goal, ending with a clear triumph or defeat—and paidia, objectiveless, freeform, explorative play founded on the pleasure of the player’s mental and physical exertions (Frasca). This lusory behavior galvanizes permutative, combinatorial, and transformative discursive play. 4chan’s cybertextual and lusory qualities are thus imbricated in its production and preservation of institutional memory in a uniquely transient setting. Users’ ontological encounters with synchronicity, anonymity, and ephemerality engender distinct discursive processes that lay down principles for future communal practices and archive maintenance.

Overlooking its famously nonlinear structure, incorporation of multiple genres and unremitting examination of comics culture, print media and television, Alan Moore’s Watchmen is superficially conducive to Hollywood with regards to spectacle. In that respect, Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation of the same name doesn’t disappoint. Perhaps the most lauded aspect of his version is its overly faithful frame-by-frame recreation of Moore’s graphic novel, often directly reproducing whole chapters or panel sequences image for image, and sometimes word for word. While this literalistic translation succeeded in staving off criticism from most of Moore’s fan-base, Snyder’s Watchmen fails to account for the juxtapositions and evolutions of multiple meanings in comic art, where the arrangement and combined effect of image and text operate through a design idiom Moore terms “under-language”: the interplay between words and pictures that gives rise to a language “that is neither the ‘visuals’ nor the ‘verbals’ but a unique effect caused by a combination of the two” (Moulthrop 2). It is the omission of this under-language in Snyder’s Watchmen that leads to the film’s attenuation of fundamental signifiers and semiotics in the original material, and this absence is only underscored by his obsessive devotion to the visual components of Moore’s graphic novel. In a sense, it is precisely because of Snyder’s assumption that the comic and film genres can be interchanged without loss of meaning that the full emotional import of the narrative is inevitably compromised.

The anime Gurren Lagann, known for its comedy, depicts a genuine sense of trauma following the combat death of Kamina. The contradictory messages encapsulated in imagery and dialogue simulate the loss of psychological integrity inherent to traumatic experience. In my article, I focus on the protagonist Simon's false assertion of recovery and self-validation through dialogue and the depiction of authentic posttraumatic experience through imagery. Ultimately, the series attests to the persistence and permanence of posttrauma and reconfigures the trauma paradigm to exclude combat loss.

Pain, considered an unsharable, interior experience despite its external expressions, is a phenomenon of the visual tradition and tends to be medically assessed visually. Western biomedicine favors brain scans, facial cues, and palpation signals to configure " authentic " pain as visually locatable, confirmable, and eradicable through targeted treatment. However, these ocularcentric medical techniques account only for acute pain, which is temporary and curable, and not chronic pain syndromes like fibromyalgia, an incurable, non-progressive disorder of unknown etiology. The fibromyalgic subject experiences pain everywhere, constantly, such that pain is normalized, infrequently noticed or made noticeable, excepting unpredictable but anticipated flare-ups that are as interruptive and visible as acute pain. Both contradicting and aligning with the biomedical model of acute pain, the fibromyalgic subject obfuscates the medical gaze and is suspected of hypochondria, malingering, or drug addiction. To receive treatment, she must employ a multisensory peripheral cunning to intuit sensory expectations of how pain should appear and, accordingly, believably, perform the authentic experience of pain she stands accused of faking. Relying on mētis and kairós to deploy new modes of perceiving, knowing, affecting, and being-affected, she must strategically occupy positions that demand the medical gaze embrace multisensory perception over the solidified distance of image-based instrumental mediation outside of the body.

Fibromyalgia is chronic pain of unknown etiology, attended by fatigue and affective dysfunction. Unapparent to the unpracticed eye or diagnostic image, it is denied the status of ''real'' suffering given to visually confirmable disorders. It is my customary mode of existence: a contingent landscape of swinging bridges that may or may not give way, everything a potential threat or deprivation. I don't express it within the framework of acute pain, but I am evaluated by traditional biomedical standards anyway. Ultimately, the diagnostic image of pain, and the medical and academic discourse used to interpret it, determines my functionality. Such a stance dismisses bodily senses and alternate ways of knowing in pursuit of the ocularcentric objectivity promised by digital health technologies, whose vision remains chained to the interpretive, discursive strategies of human operators and interpreters. A new poetics of pain is critical not only for rewriting the dominant metaphors that construct and delimit our imaginings of pain but also for rewiring the use and reading of digital technologies, wherein the digital image becomes the new site of the hermeneutic exercise, even when the suffering body lies in plain view. This facilitates a failure to listen and touch in patient care, and the imposition of a narrative based on visual evidence, translated into sanitized language, at the cost of intercorporeality. If pain strips sufferers of a voice, my body and its affects should be allowed to speak.

Since his Bronze Age revision, the Joker has consistently served as an archetypal trickster, alternating between clever, nonviolent whimsy and vicious malice. Like Trickster, he is well-versed in social engineering and stagecraft, practical jokes, and idiomatic verbal humor, employing each to maximize his sense of schadenfreude. This behavior, which typifies the Joker ethos, is generally misconstrued as sociopathic but actually prizes cleverness, inventiveness, and Dadaist absurdity as much as the destabilization of social and emotional expectations. This convoluted dynamic is principled on the ludic rationality and anomic subversiveness that govern the monomania for which the Joker is best known. As the Joker evolves from prankster to psychopath to anomos personified, his character continually embodies the disrupter culture intrinsic to both trickster mythology and contemporary phenomena such as hacker culture and trolling. The success of modern disrupter culture is measured in " lulz, " most simply characterized as pleasure derived from disturbing another's emotional equilibrium (Schwartz, 2008, para. 8). As the central organizing logic of the Random-/b/ board of the imageboard 4chan 1 , " doing it for the lulz " mirrors the Joker ethos: it too seeks to transcend conventional rules of engagement, interrogate restrictive order, create social disjuncture, and above all take pleasure in provocation. Like Trickster, /b/ users expose the arbitrariness of social structures and perpetuate online culture in doing so; like Joker, these users don't require a motive or catalyst for their actions or for the acquisition of lulz. The Joker ethos is thus an especially applicable paradigm for understanding the 4channer as trickster-troll, especially on /b/, where trolling 1 The website 4chan, located at http://www.4chan.org, is a bulletin-board system for discussion and image-sharing. It is divided into approximately fifty themed discussion boards designated by letters within backslashes, such as Anime-/a/, Comics-/co/, and Random-/b/, where subject matter is literally random (" 4chan FAQ, " n.d.)

Link: https://visforvali.github.io/bmactp/index.html

This dissertation explores how meanings are made around a queer Eelam Tamil fibromyalgic woman scholar's bodymind in biomedical and academic settings to excavate broader cultural relationships between chronic pain, ocularcentrism and the Euro-Western sensory hierarchy, the myth of objectivity, and submerged decolonial ways of knowing. This research interrogates how we think and talk about pain, how we engage each other about each other's pain, and how language, gesture, academic conventions, biomedicalization, and technological interventions into the body converge to standardize expressions and representations of pain that align with whiteliness and bourgeois civility. Using autoethnography, meta-ethnography, and disability studies approaches, I examine my analysis of my own pain — at critical moments of diagnosis, rejection, interruption, and rupture — as both a patient who is denied expertise and a scholar who is presumed to be an expert, to deindividuate the singular experience of chronic pain and recover what is desirable and resistive about the ontology of chronic pain and fatigue.

Link: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=nysl_oweb&id=GALE|A646530698&v=2.1&it=r&sid=googleScholar&asid=3601c95a

In late November 2018, at the request of the WPA editors, the two of us invited a number of feminists to be part of a symposium on building a twenty-first-century feminist ethos for WPA work. The journal editors envisioned this as the first of a series of spring symposia, with future installments devoted to race, LGBTQ issues, ability/disability, and so on.

This invitation to create an interactive symposium followed a conversation on the WPA-L listserv in which the two of us (editors) and many of the coauthors in this symposium participated; the listserv conversation quickly moved far beyond the listserv onto social media and other platforms, and came to acquire its own hashtag, #wpalistservfeministrevolution. We emphasized in our response to the invitation that we didn't want the symposium to be a rehash or continuation of the listserv discussion, but instead to push forward productive avenues for future work, with attention to two guiding questions:

1. How do we build an intersectional feminist ethos into WPA work?
2. What does "radical inclusion in WPA work" require, look like, inspire, or unfold?

Knoblauch_Bodies_INT_tk.indd 4 Knoblauch_Bodies_INT_tk.indd 4 3/25/22 10:25 AM 3/25/22 10:25 AM * The resulting ghosts banished to the extratextual margins. https:// tinyurl .com/ yx9rd 547. ** You don't have to squint to see the execution taking place. Sick bodies, curable only by death, make sick drafts (Dolphin-Krute, Ghostbodies). The signs are there if you can apprehend them. My body hangs from the running header by bound wrists, striated by Knoblauch_Bodies_INT_tk.indd 183 Knoblauch_Bodies_INT_tk.indd 183 3/25/22 10:25 AM 3/25/22 10:25 AM 2.0 spacing, big toes straining to find the footer of a page that fails to accommodate, legs spread into wishbone. You, trained to be academic inquisitor, cut or stretch me in your procrustean pages to conform into the only kind of corporeality you're willing to admit. † "Because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other-that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two-it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term" (Price, "Bodymind Problem" 269). But if you prefer a Cartesian split (as so many of you do), you know what to do with a wishbone. * Linearity strands me wherever I go, with navigational equipment incompatible to

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In 2017, troll scholars Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer, and Gabriella Coleman published a piece challenging the mass media's narrative about the role of trolls, 4chan, and the alt-right in Trump's election. They contended that "trolling," already overused shorthand for "disruption," doesn't apply to white nationalism; that anonymous and pseudoanonymous communities like 4chan and reddit fluctuate in terms of ideology and demographics; and that the alt-right's visibility depended on journalistic amplification and far-right media outlets' sudden ability to set the narrative agenda for mainstream news (Phillips, Beyer, & Coleman, 2017). They legitimized these challenges by asserting, "We've been studying online communities and subcultures for years," with a "combined total of over thirty years of research experience" (Phillips, Beyer, & Coleman, 2017). As evidence, they're not alone in their research; they link to pieces by other scholars and to Fibreculture's issue on troll theory, which includes my work on 4chan. Their argument is worth making, but the article instigated a thread on 4chan's Politics (/pol/) subforum to document and evaluate the potential value or threat these troll scholars posed to the subculture. The authors' photos were posted, with talk of punitive action. Most of the rhetoric was misogynistic and intellectually belittling, such as "women/scholars: choose," "if anyone is a scholar on memetics, they are on 4chan and 100% not a woman," and a post quoting the authors' credentials and commenting, "MY SIDES," judging the list laughable (Anonymous, 2017a, b). Measuring status and expertise by duration of research isn't uncommon. But a combined total of years of study is a nonsensical metric for substantive merit, and basing prestige on genre and quantity instead of quality of publication is anathema to a subculture that prides itself on its anti-celebrity, meritocratic ethic. This backlash also speaks