Dissertation

Graduate Program in English

2014
Dissertation Committee:

Jared Gardner, Advisor

Sean O’Sullivan

Robyn Warhol

Copyright by

Alexandra Mary Jenkins

2014

Abstract
Feminist activism in the United States and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s harnessed radical social thought and used innovative expressive forms in order to disrupt the “grand perspective” espoused by men in every field (Adorno 206). Feminist student activists often put their own female bodies on display to disrupt the disembodied “objective” thinking that still seemed to dominate the academy. The philosopher Theodor Adorno responded to one such action, the “bared breasts incident,” carried out by his radical students in Germany in 1969, in an essay, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis.” In that essay, he defends himself against the students’ claim that he proved his lack of relevance to contemporary students when he failed to respond to the spectacle of their liberated bodies. He acknowledged that the protest movements seemed to offer thoughtful people a way “out of their self-isolation,” but ultimately, to replace philosophy with bodily spectacle would mean to miss the “infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis” (259, 266). Lisa Yun Lee argues that this separation continues to animate contemporary feminist debates, and that it is worth returning to Adorno’s reasoning, if we wish to understand women’s particular modes of theoretical insight in conversation with “grand perspectives” on cultural theory in the Twenty-First Century. I argue that the separation between theory and praxis becomes visible in the history of women’s experimental autobiography across media, in which the boundary between self and subculture can be delineated.

In this project, I look at a contemporary transmedia storyworld that animates this conversation. In Felicia Day’s comedy Web series The Guild, six introverted gamers collaboratively navigate both the complex storyworld of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and daily life in suburban Los Angeles. The Web series is complemented by a series of comic books, which transform the forward-moving, third-person storytelling of the show into open-ended first-person accounts of life as a member of the guild. I argue that these comics represent the characters’ capacity for theoretical insight, and, following Adorno’s concept of the sedimented history embedded in contemporary art, I read The Guild comics as a series of invitations into the history of women’s writing since the 1960s. By excavating this history, I find a range of women writers who enact what Adorno calls “think[ing] bodily” without succumbing to the fallacies of essentialism (Lee 7).

In my first chapter, I place underground comix legend Aline Kominsky-Crumb in conversation with The Guild: Codex, which uses the logic of autobiographical comics to offer an experimental künstlerroman for the digital era.

In my second chapter, I place Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in conversation with The Guild: Tink, which shows how a woman of color uses her in-game avatar to behave as a pop-culture savvy trickster in a complex media landscape.

In my third chapter, I place Alison Bechdel’s 2012 graphic memoir Are You My Mother? in conversation with The Guild: Zaboo in order to examine the contemporary genre of the “boutique bildungsroman.”

Acknowledgments

Others in the Ohio State English Department have given me crucial guidance and support, as well, especially Brenda Brueggemann, Joe Ponce, Ethan Knapp, Koritha Mitchell, Galey Modan and Frederick Aldama. Leila Ben Nasr deserves recognition for her absolute selflessness and commitment to her fellow graduate students’ successes, especially mine. Anne Langendorfer and Anne Jansen have shared their wisdom with me at crucial points during the dissertation writing process. As anyone who knows her will testify, Kathleen Griffin is the woman who makes all Ohio State English dissertations possible, and mine is no exception.

I am also indebted to academic mentors from previous institutions, especially Marco Abel. In many ways, this dissertation is a direct result of my first popular culture studies course, which I took with him at Penn State in the summer of 2002. It is because of him that I have been reading Adorno for twelve years, and I cannot imagine a better anchor for my critical archive. The late Nicholas P. Spencer was instrumental in historicizing my Adorno obsession, and connecting it with a long genealogy of Marxist, anarchist and utopian thought. Barbara DiBernard and Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes introduced me to lesbian critical paradigms articulated by writers like Emma Pérez and Adrienne Rich, who changed my thinking indelibly.

One of the central ideas of contemporary philosophy is friendship in thought, and, in that spirit, I must thank those who have offered me no more and no less than their genuine friendship. To Chris Lewis, Jenn and Piper Russ, Emily Strouse, Andrea Crow, Didi Ray, and Michael LaBant, I offer my sincerest gratitude. I should also thank my circle of virtual friends, who offer me stability and a sense of belonging. For sharing my joy in experimental self-fashioning, and for teaching me so much about critical reading and conscious living, I thank all of you. I am not exaggerating when I say that the Glen Echo Bird Club was instrumental in helping me to finish my dissertation. The gift of connecting with the most beautiful features of one’s local environment is precious, and the generosity and knowledge the club represents to me are unparalleled.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support throughout this long process. My parents have always prioritized my education over everything else, instilling in me the belief that there is no greater gift than free thought. My sister has shared her home, her life, and her friends with me, offering me both beautiful writing retreats in the Berkeley Hills, and invigorating conversations with science geeks. The San Francisco Bay Area is a special place for anyone invested in the intertwined history of counterculture and digital culture, and I feel blessed to have spent my time there feeling at home.

Vita
May 2006……………….…..B.A. in English and German, Pennsylvania State University

May 2008……………………….…M.A. in English from University of Nebraska-Lincoln

2008-2013…Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………v

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………..vi

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: The Afterlife of Counterculture in Women's Autobiography……………..…70

Chapter 2: The Alternative Literary Cultures of the 1980s and 1990s: Black Feminism, Girls’ Lives and Queer Comics…………………………………………………………163

Chapter 3: The Twenty-First Century Boutique Memoir of Intellectual Development..252

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...347

References………………………………………………………………………………361

Introduction

- Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television” (160)

• 
  Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling” (3)
  

When I was a kid, my Mom thought if I got into Dungeons and Dragons I would become a Satanist and commit suicide. She wasn’t even religious. Well finally, in my 20′s, it’s happened. The Dungeons and Dragons part, not the Satanist or suicide.

• 
  Felicia Day, “Oh no, I’m an official nerd now! And I love it!”
  

The visual quality of the Web series increased with every season, and, as The Guild’s audience grew, Day began to expand her vision to include other media, first in 2009, with the widely-circulated music video “(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar,” and then with the comics, which expand The Guild’s storyworld significantly. Whereas “(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar” showcased The Guild cast dressed as their in-game avatars, singing about gaming together, the music video was more of a clever self-parody than an installment in an expanding storyworld. The lyrics to the song joke about the sexism of virtual culture, following the titular line with “she’s hotter than reality by far.” Thus, they poke fun at the male gaze of stereotypical gamers, who expect to experience titillation rather than identification from female avatars.

The second music video, the Bollywood-themed “Game On!” also takes on sexism as the source of its comedy. The plot of the music video is that Codex and Zaboo, played by Sandeep Parikh, are sitting on a bed together, and Codex is worrying that she plays the game too much. Zaboo responds in song, insisting that she play because they’ve got “keyboard chemistry.” Day was inspired to create “Game On!” after seeing the success of “(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar,” which received one million views in two days. “Game On” premiered at Comic Con in 2010, and, like the first video, went number one worldwide (Aronowitz 1). The video captured the spirit of the Western craze for Bollywood movies, which became more widely available given the advent of streaming video technology and the increased presence of South Asians in U.S. and U.K. popular culture. Patrick Colm Hogan describes the appeal of Bollywood to Westerners in his 2008 book, Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination. One aspect of Bollywood’s appeal to Westerners is that, as U.S. popular culture increasingly embraced lewdness and pornography, as we can see in the simple comedy of “(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar,” Bollywood films represent a serious engagement with romance plots that do not foreground sex. And so, Codex and Zaboo, who are not a romantic couple in the series, can enact a courtship scene in this video, but it is a courtship to convince Codex to rejoin the group in the game, rather than one in which sex is situated as the final goal. The goal of this music video is the pleasure of the elaborate scenery, costumes, dancing, and mash-up of musical styles, which come together to represent the world of the game as multicultural, multimedia, and constantly stimulating.

By contrast to the music videos, the comics represent a different kind of expansion into a new medium. In my interpretation, the comics are where The Guild shifts from poking fun at the false promises of virtual life, to an exploration of contemporary contemplation, that is, a reflection on the inner lives of the characters, and the personal archives of material and bodily knowledge they bring to the virtual social world of the game. The comics translate the creative experiment of the Web series into print, shift the focus from the group to the individual, and shift the spreadability of the music videos to a focus on telling highly “drillable” backstories about each of the main characters. Henry Jenkins describes spreadability as “the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth” (Jenkins 1). The Guild comics, by contrast, demonstrate drillability, that is, in Jason Mittell’s terms, they “create magnets for engagement” and invite “a vertical descent into a text’s complexities” (qtd in Jenkins 1).

The first comic, which was the first installment of the three-part backstory of the character Codex, was released in March 2010. The comics were available digitally and in print, and were designed to promote a slower serial reading practice than the endlessly rewatchable music videos. The first comic sets up the story of Cyd Sherman’s life before she creates Codex and becomes a gamer; she is depressed, bored, and lonely in a bad relationship. Because the Codex we know from the Web series is completely committed to gaming, and to her set of in-game friends, it is alienating to see her try to “make it” in the real world. The next two issues of her backstory were released in April and May of that year, and the three were compiled into a volume, to be sold as a graphic novel. In 2011, a one-shot backstory comic was released for each of the five other members of the Knights of Good guild, all authored by Day, with the help of an incredibly diverse set of collaborators, including a few of her fellow cast members. None of the others depict the character’s initial decision to enter the game, but rather, they focus on a variety of social and intellectual concerns that inform each character’s behavior and personality. The final comic, which offers the story of rival guild leader Fawkes, played by geeky celebrity Wil Wheaton, who also co-authored the comic, was released in May 2012. The Guild: Fawkes serves as a fitting ending to The Guild comics because, as Andrew Harrison notes,

If you had to choose the dominant political symbol of the 21st century – a single ideogram to rank alongside the hammer and sickle, the CND peace sign or the anarchist circled A – you’d probably opt for the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask. (1)

In the comic, the male anarchist falls in love with healer Codex, forging an alliance between the masculine and feminine creative energies that animate the contemporary digital landscape.

My task in this dissertation is to guide the reader through the gendered landscape of contemporary popular culture, using the transmedia storyworld of The Guild as an entry point. Drawing inspiration from Adorno’s concept of “sedimented history,” that is, an aesthetic and political historiography that can be drawn out from contemporary artworks, I traverse the terrain mapped by The Guild, asking its inhabitants to show me what to look for, and how to play. Examining their self-fashioning practices, depicted in The Guild comics, I find that their ability to thrive in contemporary culture is intimately related to their ability to manage the archive of popular culture texts they have assembled since childhood as a set of tools. Their reading practices are their greatest asset. In order to progress in game and in life, they must creatively, if not always consciously, combine skills acquired in previous worlds, and older media landscapes to face new challenges in the present. A character may be aware that, since the days of Tetris, computer games have calmed her anxiety, but she may be less aware that, by using new technologies to engage in self-reflection, she is taking part in a long tradition of women’s experimental autobiography across media. Another is well aware that she appropriates emotionally powerful scenes from classic literature in order to capture the attention of her friends, but she may be less conscious, and, for the time being, less interested in the history of the racialized female trickster, in which she is taking part. By forging connections between The Guild comics and a variety of works of women’s experimental autobiography across media, from the 1960s to the present, I model a contemporary feminist reading practice that forges novel, queer connections between women living in different worlds.

Thus, in order to analyze The Guild in this project, one must take on the position of the Knights of Good, and situate oneself in a position to encounter cultural figures like Stan Lee, when they should appear, without bending to their status as masters. Instead, one must actively reimagine their ongoing role in contemporary culture, and take stock of what their works mean now. The mid-century thinker Theodor Adorno offers some guidance here. Although he is routinely misunderstood as a despiser of popular culture and its relation to infantile subjectivity, he is actually the thinker who most rigorously theorized the relationship between past and present as it emerges in the sustained criticism of contemporary works of art. In Aesthetic Theory, he argues: