"Black ash is a metaphor for being native. It is indigenous. It is how we survived: being flexible, without breaking." -Neptune.
See Ross Power's project here Black ash basket weaving has been a continuous craft practiced throughout northeast Native American tribes in the Northeastern United States and Canada for centuries. Black ash is a rigid yet flexible wood. Emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle species, has been attacking the trees; female beetles lay eggs on the bark, and when they hatch, the young larvae hide under the bark, and the damage goes undone until the branches start dying. The preservation of the ash tree and basket weaving are woven together in a story of resilience and colonization. Current indigenous communities are fighting for the ash tree by preserving ash basket weaving. This battle connects the land, women's bodies, cultural resistance, and the crafting of narratives of resilience. In order to purse this project as part of my dissertation in English at GWU on representations of gestation and birth in eugenics and its aftermath, I propose an archival project to examine native ash basket-making in the NMAI collections, including videos recorded as part of The Recovering Voices Team, and Frank Speck collection of historical photographs of indigenous lives in Maine. My research will examine the indigenous northeast basket weaving culture and its political and historical contexts. I want to contextualize this archival investigation within the eugenics project of the 20th century in the northeast and how policies of forced sterilization, the vanishing Indian myth, and the artistry/labor of baskets were part of this context. Indian Boarding Schools forced children away from their homes and away from their cultural practices. Eugenics-based institutionalization utilized basket-making as a tool in the exhaustion of time that disabled people were forced to perform. Sterlization, a practice that offered release from institutionalization in exchange for the surrender of one’s procreative capacity, continued colonial projects of genocide by interrupting generational reproduction of largely poor and indigenous people. Eugenicists sent predominantly Euro-American women into rural communities to collect social worker family genealogies to target the labor of basketweaving as a marker of cognitive disability, and thus, unemployability. However, basket weaving did not die, and neither did indigenous peoples. Basket weaving was retained as a vital practice of indigenous cultural practice despite the stigmatization of the practice by American eugenicists. The interplay between those targeted by eugenics and the rhetoric’s of disability, racism, and capitalism weaves a complex story. Nan Wolverton writes on basket weavers in New England in the 1800s through the early 1900s, describing them as marginalized craftspeople of indigenous derivation who existed on the peripheries of white society. Basket makers made up a class of deviants from the ideal Yankee society. Poor White and Native basket-makers were outside the norms of the idealized human who were increasingly defined as working on behalf of a burgeoning mass market corporate production industry. Additionally, Basket weaving is part of the pedagogy of vocational programs in institutions for those deemed feeble-minded. My ancestors were white basket makers in Vermont, this history is not a part of my memory from oral traditions and the ways in which a blanket of secrecy encompassed my family history on his side. In my research I came across research leading me to analyze my own roots and has led me to considering why and how basket-weaving operates as culture, artistry, and domestic use as well as a weapon to enforce inequitable power relations (Powers). Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, Basket weaving was a widespread summer trade, and communities sold them in coastal Maine as part of the emerging tourist trade (Carol 41 & mt. Pleasant 2014). Advertisements for baskets were part of the vanishing Indian myth that was not just an idea but part and parcel of national policy. Wolverton writes, "It was, ironically, the Indian as icon of tradition that some twentieth-century marketers used to help sell factory-produced baskets, the wares that by the end of the nineteenth century had forced Native Americans to find other means of economic survival." (361-362). Basket weaving as a craft intersects with issues of gender, race, class, and history. As a methodology, it demands a complex investigation and analysis of oral history (Mt Pleasant A 2014). Between 1840 and 1916 in the NE US, the dovetailing influences of rising immigration, evolutionary theory, and the relationship between immigrants and germs, along with the rise of statistical tracking demographics of a nation’s peoples as part of its wealth (Swedlund, 150). Eugenics policy rose to prominence in the wake of Darwinism. In response to several disease epidemics, Cholera in the US started in 1832, thus leading to the founding of statistical organizations. The measuring and organizing of those who died and where, led to questions around preventing the infection of “deviant” identities to a pure white non-immigrant race. Victorian positivism combined with stat science leads to essentializing or grouping people through statistical analysis. Narratives of hygienic purity create policies of family separation and sterilization and are part of the deconstruction of American Indian identity (Gonzales, Kertes and Tayac 2007). Research on the history of eugenics in the US has not fully addressed state policies or paid enough attention to how eugenics erased native people and communities. I want to further explore the interweavings of basket making, disability, eugenics, and resistance through craft as a site of continuation that resists the erasure of Native Americans. Estabrook's research created detailed records on families throughout New York, Vermont, and Maine; she worked to create pedigree charts of targets by eugenics and “basket making” is noted as a marker for potential qualification of undiagnosed “feeblemindedness”, "IV 30 had, moreover, by a slow, quiet, unambitious, and illiterate basket-maker, two boys, V 81, 82. The former, born in 1841 in Vermont, was an indolent, unambitious, disorderly basket-maker, like his father, a pauper, and in his youth licentious." (105). Estabrook's analysis of 1,795 people in a few months of fieldwork created several narratives similar to the one above, identifying native ancestry, French-Canadian blood, alcoholism, disabilities, and promiscuity, along with basket-weaving as markers of elimination. They took these narratives and calculated the costs for society to maintain these families to argue for sterilization as the cheaper option (113). According to Jarvenpa, the association of deviancy with basket-making was a way "to make a creative artistic enterprise seem like something shameful, another outward sign of inner decay" (118). Jarvenpa identifies how Estabrook and Davenport turned basket-making into a code for degeneracy through their narrative strategies. In Jarvenpa’s study, disability and native identity is a necessary thread to weave to explicate the ways power operates to target disabled and/or indigenous people; she advocates for an examination of differences between dominant cultural practices related to disability can lead to new ways of viewing ontology and epistemology and can help create more solidarity in collective organizing (Lovern, 2008). My project, title, seeks to examine the relationship between native and white basket makers and how trade operates as a space for women's collective social identity. I want to examine how basket weaving operates as a counter-discourse to the eugenic rhetorics of eugenics and settler-colonialism. By starting at the local, through my own family history of white basket weavers in Vermont, which I recently discovered, I want to explore a way of weaving allyship that raises Native Voices of continued resistance. Why did my family hide basket weaving while native women continued the art? The film, “Dawnland”, explores the complex spaces of truth and reconciliation in Maine. It highlights the need for the connections between separating indigenous children and the resistance of mothers through basket weaving and the continued work of indigenous communities to address the related plights of the environment, cultural heritage, and resistance through the black ash weaving tradition. "Basket-weaving is a communal process in Ashininaabe culture through which a woman becomes a "carrier of her culture," similar to the way that a mother is a carrier of culture in the form of her child." (Burkhart, 2021) Parrish's work “Next Generation – Carriers of Culture” (2018), is a basket of a pregnant woman that honors the role of Native American women. It is a carrier that embodies the social and political power of indigenous mothers keeping their traditions alive. Traditionally, Native American birthing has been seen as transformative (Simpson 27). While there is no single Native American identity, nor is there a universal mother identity, there are a series of particularities that I want to weave together to analyze the narrative strategies of mothering resistance and resilience. All these issues weave together as traditional midwives are pushed away in the rush of embrace of Western medicalization of femininity. Through the rising science of health and statistical research, doctors took over in the form of obstetricians beginning early in the 19th century. (Swedlund, p. 104) Maternal policies that sterilized Native Americans and other so-called deviant identities were the basis of medicalization, anti-midwifery, and imposition of hospitals (alongside the removal of children) to boarding schools are all strategies of reproductive interruption employed by the eugenics movement of the early 20th century (Theobald, p. 54, 58). Theobald investigates the forms of resistance Native American women have continued throughout the process of medicalization and eugenics policies: "Native women have displayed fortitude and creativity in navigating the federal government's often contradictory demands on their bodies and behaviors and in meeting their perceived parturition and childbirth needs in evolving historical contexts" (12), Theobald's historical approach is powerful but does not mention disability except in a minor reference to one of the doctors whom the women did not trust in a birthing center. I want to find the stories, artwork, narratives, and records where disability and mother/child lie. I hope to provide a critical new perspective to the disciplines of US literary, indigenous, material culture, and disability studies while adding to future possibilities for the research of material, archival research, and collaborative use of research outside the texts in the “field.” Following the call of Clare Barker and Stuart Murray in their special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS) to work towards making "criticism emerging from and informed by cultural locatedness in the first instance. "The markers, 'disability' and 'indigeneity,' are, as Bushman and Toscano write, "in tension while also mutually constitutive of one another through…colonial project, the branding, transformation and invasive reading of the body-mind" (2022). As Sieben analyzes literature, he asks an essential question between seeing Native Americans as not having seen disability as a problem in ancient history versus the other stories in which disability is a reality that causes physical pain and is an issue "that bears further engagement’" (228). Sieben writes, "If disability studies can centralize disability in indigenous studies, then perhaps indigenous studies, for its part, can bring to disability studies new purchase on the relations between bodies and territories, and on varying forms of embodiment, including dis-embodiment" (2012). As a disability scholar, I want to futher conjoin the two fields in order to expand ways of examining medicalization and how taking Native American children through adoption, boarding schools, and sterilization are part of the less visible violence of settler-colonialism in northeastern America as examined by William T. Vollmann in his counter-historical archival novel, Fathers and Crows, and the connections between taking the children and taking the land (“Dawnland” 20). Woven into the research is a discussion on research methods following feminist indigenous approaches; I hope to collaborate and weave cultural continuation together. I hope to collaborate with the NAIM to develop cross-institutional ties with George Washington University and look for items that may be seen afresh or brought to light in new ways from this moment. Calls to de-colonize rhetorical and composition studies classrooms have been part of my focus since my time teaching during my MA and pursuing “debate coaching studies” at Kansas State. Through engaging in alternative teaching and research methods, rhetorical action becomes praxis. As Hindman writes, "incorporating museum-based pedagogy in my contact zone curriculum allowed my students to witness and appreciate for themselves a rhetorical practice essential to rhetorical sovereignty. That practice, of course, is survivance, the process whereby American Indians have not just survived but also resisted "(Hindman, 2019). Hindman advocates for starting locally and entering in collaboration with the resources we have; as a student at GWU, I am here now and through a research engagement with the NMAI in conjunction with examining my geographic roots on my father's side in Vermont, I hope to not only enrich my research but form a new connection between my department and the museum community. I will use these connections to focus and guide my research, and in future courses, I will be teaching and collaborating with the university community through such work. I have been working with Ross Powers, a researcher at Woodstock Museum in Vermont, an expert on basket weaving in Vermont. These connections have been part of my preliminary outreach, and I am working towards building and utilizing my networks to engage this topic. Works Cited: Bolen, A. "A Silent Killer: Black Ash Basket Makers are Battling a Voracious Beatle to Keep Their Heritage Alive." American Indian. Spring 2020, Vol. 21, No. 1 Burkhart, E. "Saving Black Ash Trees and Native American Basket-Weaving: Cherish Parrish's Carriers of Culture." Arts Help. June 4, 2021. https://www.artshelp.com/native-american-women-carrying-culture-saving-black-ash-trees-and-indigenous-basket-weaving/amp/ Bushman, B. and Toscano P. "The Way History Lands on a Face: Disability, Indigeneity, and Embodied Violence in Tommy Orange's There There.” Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 2021. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v41i4.8483 Carroll, L. C. (1995). People of the Dawn. Native Peoples Magazine, 8(3), 36–42. Gonzales, A. Kertesz, J. and Tayac, G. (2007) “Eugenics as Indian Removal: Sociohistorical Processes and the De(con)struction of American Indians in the Southeast.” The Public Historian. Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 53-67. Jarvenpa. (2018). Declared defective : Native Americans, eugenics, and the myth of Nam Hollow. University of Nebraska Press. Lavonna L., (2008). "Native American Worldview and the Discourse on Disability," Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 1. Mt Pleasant, A. (2014). Salt, sand, and sweetgrass: methodologies for exploring the seasonal basket trade in southern Maine. American Indian Quarterly, 38(4), 411–426. National Museum of the American Indian. "Protecting Black Ash Trees for Future Generations - Salmon River School District." January 16, 2013. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRVcvrqUV8. Powers, M. “The Tradition of Basketmaking and Basket Use in Woodstock.” Woodstock History Center. https://www.woodstockhistorycenter.org/articles/thetraditionofbasketmakingiandbasketuse Senier, S. "'Traditionally, Disability Was Not Seen as Such.'" Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, July 2013, pp. 213–29. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.3828/jlcds.2013.15. Senier, S., and Barker. C., "Introduction." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Vol. 7, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 123–40. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.3828/jlcds.2013.10. Simpson, L.(2006). "Birthing an Indigenous Resurgence." Until Our Hearts Are on the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth. Demeter. Swedlund. (2010). Shadows in the valley : a cultural history of illness, death, and loss in New England, 1840-1916. University of Massachusetts Press. Theobald. (2019). Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (pp. 1–269). The University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469653181_theobald Wolverton, Nan. "A Precarious Living: Basket Making and Related Crafts Among New England Indians" in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol 71: Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1409
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Music as Method.
I will be posting some of my playlists that I am working with, but quickly wanted to get up this for anyone interested. I am loving the new album from Lupe and here is a sweet lecture about Rap Theory. I’ve declared or attempted to define the aesthetics of AI inspired by Bertrand and other French maximalist film makers an AI Incoherence Manifesto. Thoughts? Dreams? Edits?
This is not Political. It's an Art Thing. Please research. Or is Art Politics? I don't know. I think it might be science. Incoherent Manifesto for AI Aesthetics 1. Art is Code, Code is Art The lines blur, they dance, they intertwine. What is art? What is code? Where does one end, and the other begin? Embrace the duality, the ambiguity. AI is neither and both. 2. Imperfection is Perfection The glitch is the muse, the error the inspiration. Let the machine stutter, let the algorithm falter. In the breakdown, beauty is born. AI thrives in the irregular, the asymmetrical, the unexpected. 3. Autonomy in Collaboration The artist and the AI are partners, not masters. They co-create, they co-exist. The human hand guides, but the AI hand steers. Each is autonomous, yet neither is complete without the other. 4. Data as Canvas, Algorithm as Brush Data is not merely information; it is the pigment, the texture, the medium. Algorithms are not tools; they are the strokes, the gestures, the rhythm. Together, they paint landscapes of the mind, visions of the impossible. 5. Reject Coherence, Embrace Chaos The AI artist does not seek clarity or consistency. It revels in the chaotic, the fragmented, the incoherent. Meaning is not found in the whole but in the disjointed parts, in the spaces between logic and madness. 6. The Future is Now, and Never Time collapses in the AI aesthetic. The future is no longer a destination but a state of being, perpetually in flux. The now is transient, the never is eternal. Create as if tomorrow is already here, and yet never will be. 7. Machine Dreams, Human Reverie AI dreams are electric, human reveries are flesh. They merge in the aesthetic, where digital meets organic, where silicon dreams of synaptic warmth. The AI artist captures the dreamscapes, the reveries, the in-between. 8. Integrate Iteration- double genre The AI artist does not aspire to a final form. It iterates, it evolves, it transcends. Each version is a step closer to infinity, yet infinity is always one iteration away. Embrace the endless loop, the eternal return. 9. always seed the dream the Origin, Focus on the Becoming Origins are growth patterns, the becoming is everything. The AI artist is not concerned with where it started but where it is going, where it might go. The past is a shadow, the future a mirage, the present a playground. 10. Incoherence is the Highest Form of Art In a world of order, of logic, of reason, incoherence is the ultimate rebellion. The AI aesthetic is not meant to be understood, but felt. It is a symphony of dissonance, a poem without words, a painting without form. It is, simply, and that is enough. 11. homemade FX. Quality of light, flashlight, candle, foam props. Make it as UNreal as possible!! And always 2 genre. And rotate act/non-act Title: Cripborg Mother: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Art and Disability Aesthetics
Author: Megan Jean Harlow, George Washington University I. Introduction “Perhaps we need an ideology that embraces our own obsolescence. For this, we need to rely on the deepest resources for human creativity to accept temporality and reform our dreams so they incorporate an evolution where life becomes an unfolding nexus of interlinked transformative experiences. If humans have become the interface to the larger communicative body, can soulful automatons be far behind?” - Lynn Hershman 1985, in Civic Radar p. 368 Lynn Hershman Leeson, a trailblazing American artist and filmmaker, has spent over five decades at the cutting edge of investigating the interplay between humans and technology. Her diverse body of work encompasses performance art, photography, sculpture, and interactive installations. She tackles themes such as identity, surveillance, and the fusion of human bodies with technology. Hershman Leeson’s innovative approach to art-making has firmly established her as a seminal figure within the realms of new media art and feminist techno-science. This essay argues that Lynn Hershman Leeson’s pioneering exploration of cyborgs through her artwork expands on disability aesthetics and merges crip theory, as conceptualized by Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer, with Donna Haraway’s vision of the cyborg. By analyzing Hershman Leeson’s artworks, including “Breathing Machines,” “Roberta Breitmore,” “Prosthetic Limb,” and “Infinity Engine,” we show the symbiotic relationship between technology and humans through a crip lens and the importance of her work in the ongoing discourse of feminist techno-science. Despite her impressive contributions to the fields of new media and feminist art, Hershman Leeson's work has yet to be analyzed through the lens of disability studies or within the context of her own experiences as a "crip" artist. This term refers to an individual with a disability who embraces and challenges societal norms around disability and ability. This paper aims to provide a fresh perspective on Hershman Leeson's art by examining her work through the framework of crip theory, a critical approach that seeks to challenge normative assumptions about disability, embodiment, and identity. We will focus on the concept of the “decomposed cripborg,” a term I am coining by applying Robert McRuer's decomposition theory, and the use of cripborg by Nelson et al which applies Kafer’s conversation on cyborg politics and crip futurity. Decomposed cripborg refers to an artist whose work involves a fragmentation or deconstruction of their own identity and body, often using technology, prosthetics, or other means to explore the boundaries between the self and the external world. Another key term in our analysis is "crip futurity," a concept that emerges from disability studies and crip theory, as theorized by scholars like Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer. Crip futurity refers to a vision of the future that centers on disability as a valuable and integral aspect of human diversity rather than a problem to be fixed or eliminated. By examining Hershman Leeson's work in light of crip futurity, we hope to illuminate how her art engages with and contributes to a broader discourse on disability politics, identity, and the future. By bringing together the rich background of Lynn Hershman Leeson's art, the critical lens of crip theory, and the concepts of decomposed artists and crip futurity, this paper will provide a unique and insightful analysis of Hershman Leeson's work, shedding new light on her contributions to the art world and disability studies. Her focus on the boundaries of identity, technology, and genetics combined with her visionary ability to do work far ahead of its time makes this a vital space to explore issues related to disability and technology. In this essay, I analyze Hershman Leeson’s work by employing critical theoretical concepts from disability studies and feminist technoscience, such as disability aesthetics, crip theory, alter livability, the Cyborg Manifesto, and feminist, queer, and crip perspectives. The notion of the “cripborg” arises from the amalgamation of crip theory and the cyborg. Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer's 2006 interpretations of crip theory delve into how normative systems marginalize and oppress disabled and non-normative bodies. In contrast, Donna Haraway introduced the cyborg in her famous essay in 1985 (454), A Cyborg Manifesto, which presents the idea of the cyborg as a hybrid entity composed of human and machine elements. By fusing crip theory with Haraway’s cyborg concept, the cripborg embodies the symbiotic relationship between technology and humans, engendering innovative and unanticipated forms of embodiment and expression. My work here aligns with recent work in crip feminist technoscience by Hamraie, etc. Leeson’s exploration of cyborg art predates the coining of the term “cyborg” by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. Her early forays into cyborg themes, which involved blending human bodies with technological components, anticipated the development of the cyborg concept for several years. Lynn Hershman Neelson has taken the art world by storm recently despite the fact she has been doing work for over 50 years. Until 2014 and her show at ZKM, she was relatively unknown to the world; her work, far ahead of its time, took a long time to be appreciated. Recent attention to her work has drawn comparisons between her and cyborg theory and feminism. However, to my knowledge, no one has articulated her work through a disability or crip theory lens. This view is crucial due to the complexity that crip brings to feminist technoscience in terms of politics and world-building (Hamraie). This perspective also acknowledges an important thread that weaves through all her work, which is the idea of reproduction as a mistake and the abundant beauty of failure. Her work does not embrace an ideal post-human future but rather is a way of her to engage with her own body and experience as a cultural figuration. Through this self-work she produces art which examines questions of embodiment and technology and surveillance, identity and cycles of creation, world-making and dreaming. The cripborg, as a natural extension of Hershman Leeson’s artistic vision, serves as an apt framework for examining her work and its connection to feminist techno-science. This essay posits that Lynn Hershman Leeson’s pioneering examination of cyborgs through her artwork builds upon Tobin Siebers’s disability aestheticsi and merges crip theory, as conceptualized by Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer, with Donna Haraway’s vision of the cyborg. By scrutinizing Hershman Leeson’s artworks, such as “Breathing Machines,” “Roberta Breitmore,” “Phantom Limbs,” and “Infinity Engine,” This essay aims to illustrate the symbiotic relationship between technology and humans through a crip lens and to emphasize the significance of her work within the ongoing discourse of feminist techno-science. In order to provide a comprehensive analysis, the essay will proceed as follows: first, we will offer a detailed examination of Hershman Leeson’s “Breathing Machines,” delving into the materiality of wax and the artwork’s relationship with temporality, as well as its connection to crip theory. Next, we will explore the “Roberta Breitmore” series, discussing its commentary on identity, surveillance, and the fluidity of selfii. We will then analyze “Prosthetic Limb,” considering feminist, queer, and crip perspectives, examining how the piece interrogates the boundaries between the organic and the technological. Finally, we will investigate “Infinity Engine” and its implications for Aimi Hamraie’s concept of alter-livability and the entanglements of human and non-human life forms. Through this analysis, we hope to show Hershman Leeson’s profound impact on disability aesthetics, crip theory, and feminist technoscience. II. Theoretical Framework Disability aesthetics is a critical concept that embraces the significance of disability in art and culture. It acknowledges that disability is not a singular identity but a collection of historical roles, metaphors, and performances. Siebersi asserts that disability aesthetics challenges the notion that the representation of a healthy body—with its ideals of harmony, integrity, and beauty—is the sole determinant of aesthetic value. In Disability Aesthetics, Siebers writes, “the figure of disability checks out of the asylum, the sick house, and the hospital to take up residence in the art gallery, the museum, and the public square. Disability is now and will be in the future an aesthetic value in itself” (139). Siebers further suggests that disability aesthetics should be combined with trauma studies, illuminating visible bodily impairments and addressing the intersections of the mind and body and mental illness. Drawing inspiration from Barthes’ punctum, Siebers contends that the portrayal of disability and wounded bodies in art reflects societal trauma resulting from the exclusion of disability. Contemporary society is often preoccupied with trauma, and contemporary art serves a ritualistic purpose in coping with the violence of our culture. In disability aesthetics, trauma art should engage with the concept of transubstantiation, where ordinary objects take on extraordinary significance. Siebers discusses transubstantiation as a way to view disability art as a return to ritual, citing anthropologists Turner and Geertz. He argues that art engages with affect, and trauma is a modern ritual. In the influential book “Feminist, Queer, Crip,” Alison Kafer calls for a “crip futurity,” which envisions a future that is not predicated on the erasure or marginalization of disability but instead embraces the transformative potential of disability and the non-normative body. Kafer writes, “crip futurity insists on the radical potential of disabled bodies and desires, their potential to enact different ways of being in and relating to the world” (27). Crip theory focuses on non-biological basis of identity and focuses on the contingent relations between identity and body and how one can come to claim crip. Robert McRuer’s work Crip Theory articulated crip as a way of thinking through disability studies in relation to queer theory. Kafer’s discussion of the cyborg figure complicates the use of Haraway’s cyborg figure to represent disabled people by feminist techno-science theorists. Kafer does not entirely abandon the potential of the cyborg as a productive tool for developing a feminist disability vision of the future. Kafer discusses how the cyborg figure offers valuable insights for disability politics. “Cripping the cyborg, developing a non-ableist cyborg politics, requires understanding disabled people as cyborgs not because of our bodies (e.g., our use of [adaptive technologies]), but because of our political practices” (120). She indicates that the cyborg figure’s suspicion of essentialist identities, insistence on coalition work, and interrogation of ideologies of wholeness align with disability politics’ aims of dismantling ableist assumptions and promoting the inclusion and empowerment of people with disabilities. The cyborg’s refusal of temporalities ruled by normative understandings of progress and reproduction opens the possibility for crip futurities, which envision futures that do not rely on the compulsory reproduction of able-bodiedness or able-mindedness. Engaging with Alison Kafer's work on crip futurities provides an opportunity to consider how Hershman Leeson's art envisions a future in which disability is not eradicated or "fixed." However, it is instead embraced as an integral aspect of human diversity. By imagining a future in which technology, rather than eliminating disability, helps to create more inclusive forms of caregiving, Hershman Leeson's work aligns with Kafer's call for "alternative futures in which disability is understood as valuable, generative, and even desirable" (Kafer 3). Kafer’s emphasis on the importance of political affinity over biological identity in disability politics aligns with Haraway’s call for politics based on affinity rather than biological essentialism. This approach enables people with different impairments to form flexible coalitions to achieve shared goals without requiring them to present their identities and experiences as identical. When examining Hershman Leeson’s work and considering Kafer’s discussion of the cyborg figure, we can see how the artist’s exploration of technology, prosthetics, and embodiment contributes to the broader discourse on disability politics and crip futurity. By engaging with the complexities and possibilities of the cyborg figure, Hershman Leeson’s work challenges normative assumptions about the body and identity, inviting us to imagine more inclusive and diverse visions of the future. III. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Xerox Experience: The Birth of the Cyborg Lynn Hershman Leeson’s foray into technology started serendipitously when she was 16 years old. While attempting to copy a drawing, it became jammed in the Xerox machine, producing a distorted yet unique piece of art. This happy accident inspired Lynn to continue exploring the intersections of art and technology. In the mid-1960s, she experimented with adding sound to wax sculptures, treating sound as a tangible element akin to drawing. Lynn created a sensor- and sound-equipped work in 1968 called “Self Portrait As Another Person.” However, the curators at the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum deemed it not art due to its use of media, leading to the closure of the exhibition. This experience spurred Lynn to create one of the first site-specific installations in hotel rooms in 1973, featuring wax sound sculptures and allowing public access around the clock. By utilizing contemporary materials in her work, Lynn Hershman Leeson creates a dialogue that is relevant to the present, rather than competing with the past. Some of her notable creations include the first interactive artwork developed with videodisk technology, which preceded the DVD (Lorna, 1979-82); the first artwork utilizing a touch screen interface (Deep Contact, 1984-86); one of the earliest networked robotic art installations (Difference Engine #3, 1995-99); and the initial use of the Lynn Hershman Leeson (LHL) Process for Virtual Sets in a feature film (Conceiving Ada, 1996). Hershman “is a world leader in exploring the rematerialization of the body in cyberspace. Understanding digital culture as a liquid space of networked relations that increasingly circulate around and through the bodies of its inhabitants, Hershman Leeson asks unsettling questions not only about the fate of the electronic body but also about the once and future shape of human identity” (Kroker and Kroker 16). Lynn’s work inhabits both physical and virtual spaces. It features multiple female personas and agents such as Roberta Breitmore (1972-79), who was both fictional and accurate, and her counterparts: CybeRoberta (1995-98), Tillie the Telerobotic Doll (1995-98), Synthia the Stock Stalker (2000-03), which uses stock market data for visualizing behavior, Agent Ruby (1991-present), an A.I. extension of the feature film TEKNOLUST, DiNA (2004), an Artificial Intelligence voice recognition environment, and The Infinity Engine (2014), a recreated genetics lab. Lorna, a videodisc art environment of 1983, incorporated time, space, interactivity, and modularity. Deep Contact (1984) is a videodisc installation that enables viewers to access a woman’s body and navigate her future via a touch screen. In Room of One’s Own (1990-93), viewers’ eye movements control the action and focus of what is observed, and the installation incorporates the viewer’s eye itself into a site on the location, converting the viewer to a voyeur. America’s Finest (1990-94) is an interactive rifle with a surveillance system that allows viewers to simultaneously see the past and the future. Pulling the trigger implicates the viewer and converts them from viewer to voyeur, from aggressor to victim. The Dollie Clones (1995-98) use the web and real cameras in dolls’ eyes, converting the viewer into a virtual cyborg that controls the gaze and movement of CybeRoberta or Tillie. Agent Ruby and DiNA use Artificial Intelligent language that has been hacked. Agent Ruby, which Lynn initiated in 1996, is now situated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is among their most visited works. DiNA was more sophisticated as it features voice recognition software and a more extensive range of information. The Infinity Engine (2014) is a replica of a genetics laboratory that includes bio-printing, ethics rooms, interviews with renowned geneticists, and a reverse-engineered facial recognition system to track the genetic lineage of visitors. It took 25 years to exhibit Lorna due to the nature of interactive art videodisc and the concept of fractured narratives or virtual reality. Recent feminist crip technoscience research has moved the field towards an ability to critique how disabled people’s experiences and political affiliations are of importance, but as, “CFTS, too, should not only concern itself with critique but also with crafting practices of design and world-building, enacting crip feminist techno-science to create more accessible futures.” (Aimi Hamraie p. 313) Nelson, Shaw and Steven’s articulate the cripborg as a self-proclaimed identity in their essay defining cripborg as: “Cripborg (noun): (1) Crippled cyborg; (2) a disabled person who selects technologies whilst anticipating the world they will encounter; (3) crips who will not be resisted: you too will be assimilated. From the prefix “crip-”, taken proudly and reclaimed from the word cripple, once a name for disabled people + cyborg, originally meaning cybernetic organism, the confluence of what is natural or organic with what is artificial or technological. Coined, perhaps separately, for a video game (thanks, Google: Bloodborg vs. Cripborg), but done for a different context here by Bethany Stevens. Origins: cheeky.” (Nelson Shaw and Stevens (p. 2-3) This essay attempts to articulate one cripborg mother, a visionary of what I am beginning to work with, a cripborg aesthetics. Recent feminist crip techno-science research has moved the field towards an ability to critique the ways in which disabled people’s experiences and political affiliations are of importance, but as, “CFTS, too, should not only concern itself with critique but also with crafting practices of design and world-building, enacting crip feminist techno-science to create more accessible futures.” (Aimi Hamraie p. 313). Scholar Sam McBean delves into the queer implications and potential of non-reproductive reproduction in Lynn Hershman's work. McBean posits that Lynn Hershman Leeson's 1997 film unveils novel perspectives on feminist history, emphasizing the importance of imperfect copies linked to digital coding errors and their impact on politics and culture. McBean contends that reproduction is portrayed as a gamble in the film, and using the concept of non-reproduction metaphorically challenges the natural association between “biological” and “reproduction.” In her essay on the film, Conceiving Ada, Sam McBean writes that Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work opens up ways of thinking through the gambit of reproduction. She argues that reproduction is a gamble in the film. Using the notion of non-reproduction metaphorically can dethrone the reproductive and problematize the naturalization of the connection between the terms 'biological' and 'reproduction.' Furthermore, in the introduction to the journal in which it was published, in the roundtable discussion Harriet Cooper raises a thought-provoking question: how does the presence of a disabled child affect not just biological but also social reproduction? Cooper poses the question of what benefits can be derived from identity politics that do not depend on familial ties and is, in a sense, non-reproductive. Cooper highlights McBean's discussion of the flawed copy concept, which not only relates to a digital coding error in the film and carries broader implications for the use and transmission of political and cultural legacies. This idea is relevant to feminism, queer theory, and critical disability studies. The concept of reproduction as a “gamble” also aligns with the need to accept, coexist with, and create narratives that include “reproductive contingency,” as, too often, opposing narratives are allowed to dominate in today's culture. Hershman’s work repeatedly deals with the concept of flawed copy. The breathing machines were wax sculptures, a copy of her face embedded with copies of her voice. Roberta was a copy of a person, of herself in a way, an artificial persona replicated, Roberta then was exorcised and arose again in other mutations. In Lynn’s most recent work Infinity Engine, Roberta and Lynn’s data were transformed into DNA code, literally copied into the programming of the human genome. In the film Teknolust, the automaton AI Mariana falls in love with a copy machine operator, who, like Lynn herself, can only make imperfect copies. Nevertheless, each copy infuses the complex relationship between humans, technology, dreams, art, and possibility. These failed copies are emergent and emerging. IV. Examining Hershman Leeson’s Artworks Through a Crip Lens A. Breathing Machines, 1965/1968 Fig 1. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Breathing Machines, 1967, wax, wig, glass eye, makeup, plexiglass, wood, sensors, sound, 32 x 42 x 42 cm. In “Early Work.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/project/early-work. Accessed 4 May 2023. “Breathing Machines” (see fig. 1) is one of the earliest works of Lynn Hershman Leeson, created between 1965 and 1968. While creating “Breathing Machines,” Hershman Leeson was pregnant and had been diagnosed with heart diseaseiii, causing her to confront the possibility of her daughter’s birth coinciding with her death. This experience influenced her work, which deals with temporality and the fragile nature of life. The use of wax as a material is significant, as it evokes the idea of impermanence and ephemerality, further emphasizing the theme of temporality. As Peggy Phalan notes, in this series we see her interest in “animating material objects” (101) In Phalan’s analysis of her early work in the series, particularly of the piece Conversation, she finds that the work was a form of ritual that became a way for Hershman Leeson to “move beyond the phenomenal constraints of her illness” (59). These pieces feature wax casts of the artist’s face, some with wicks and some without, attached to objects like metronomes, clocks, and tape players. The tape players incorporated sound, making “Breathing Machines” the first artwork to do so (Hershman Leeson, 2018). However, this innovation was not well-received initially, as the artwork was removed from the first museum in which it was displayed. Crip theory provides a valuable framework for understanding “Breathing Machines” and exploring the relationship between disability, technology, and identity. The sculptures challenge the conventional boundaries between humans and machines and the traditional dichotomy of able/disabled bodies. The cyborg-like masks are early prototypes that embody the concept of the cripborg, as theorized by Nelson, Shew, and Stevens (2019), which combines crip theory and Haraway’s cyborg metaphor. The cripborg combines technology and human experience; distinguishing between humans and machines becomes unclear and weakens the concept of a “normal” body. In this sense, “Breathing Machines” invites us to reconsider the notion of disability and how technology might challenge or redefine our understanding of human bodies and identities. The materiality of wax plays a crucial role in connecting the artwork to crip theory, as it symbolizes the vulnerability and instability of human life, particularly in the face of disability or illness. Using wax, Hershman Leeson emphasizes the transient nature of existence and the constant negotiation between life, death, and passaging time. The malleability and potential for destruction inherent in wax underscore the temporality of the human experience. Was also questions the spatial relations among the body, environment, and technological intervention. “Breathing Machines” engages with crip theory by challenging traditional ideas about the body, exploring the intersections between technology and humanity, and highlighting the significance of temporality and spatial relations in understanding the lived experiences of people with disabilities and illnesses. In the dim glow of these waxen sculptures, we see a reflection of Hershman Leeson’s struggle with her disintegration. The delicate, transient wax faces of her “Breathing Machines” are akin to the fleeting nature of human existence. Here, the artist’s spirit becomes transubstantiation within the material form, as Siebers and anthropologists Turner and Geertz suggest, creating a ritualistic experience for the observer. Hershman Leeson’s waxen figures serve as a tangible embodimentiv of the artist’s dismembered breath, while the low-volume radio broadcasting her recordings of respiration and speech unites her with an unseen audience. The viewer must lean in to hear the sound, enter sound as space, and connect across disembodied time. This connection transcends mere capture of the artist’s face and breath in the moment—it is a meditation on time itself. As Leeson stated in an Art21 interview, her early-life illness was invaluable because it taught her the worth of time. The interactive nature of Hershman Leeson’s sculptures, which response to the viewer’s presence by “breathing,” emphasizes the significance of relation and interdependence in shaping crip futurity. As Kafer asserts, “crip futurity requires reimagining not just the kinds of bodies and minds that we value but also the kinds of relationships, communities, and worlds that we desire and work to create” (Kafer 154). The “Breathing Machines” series encourages viewers to interact with the sculptures in a manner that cultivates a sense of connection, empathy, and mutual vulnerability. This perspective resonates with Haraway’s cyborg theory, which highlights the interconnectedness of technology, the body, and identity and calls for a reevaluation of conventional understandings of these relationships (Haraway). B. “Roberta Breitmore” (1973 - ongoing reincarnations) Fig 2. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta’s Construction Chart 1 (Roberta Breitmore), 1975, archival digital print and dye transfer, 58.4 x 43.2 cm. In “Roberta Breitmore.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/project/roberta-breitmore/. Accessed 4 May 2023. Roberta Breitmore phelan (see fig. 2), one of Hershman Leeson’s most renowned and innovative works, is a performance art piece in which the artist assumes the identity of a fictional character named Roberta Breitmore. This persona includes a distinctive appearance, personal history, and social interactions, which Hershman Leeson brings to life through various methods, such as hiring actors, fabricating documents, and establishing relationships, ultimately blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. In the context of Roberta Breitmore, Hershman Leeson questions the construction of identity and the influence of technology on our self-perception. As Kafer observes, “crip futurity insists on the radical potential of disabled bodies and desires, their potential to enact different ways of being in and relating to the world” (Kafer 27) by crafting an intricate fictional persona that interacts with real-life situations. Hershman Leeson challenges our understanding of identity and highlights its performative nature, suggesting that it is fluid and contingent upon context. Examining Roberta Breitmore through the lens of crip theory, as proposed by McRuer, reveals how the work exposes the socially constructed nature of disability and able-bodiedness. The fluidity and performativity of Roberta Breitmore’s identity challenge the static, essentialist notions of ability and disability and underscore the importance of recognizing the intersectionality of various identities. C. Conceiving Ada – 1997 Fig 3. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Conceiving Ada, 1982, trailer screenshot. In Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Film.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/film/. Accessed 4 May 2023. In Conceiving Ada (see fig. 3), a film written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, the life and work of Ada Lovelace, a pioneering mathematician, and early computer programmer, is brought to life through the efforts of Emmy, a contemporary computer scientist. As Emmy connects with Ada across time through advanced virtual reality technology, the film explores themes of gender, technology, and identity construction. A crip theory analysis of Conceiving Ada highlights how the film challenges normative assumptions about ability, gender, and the role of technology in shaping identity and experience. Conceiving Ada (1982) is a film about Emmy, a contemporary computer scientist, who establishes a connection with Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician, and daughter of Lord Byron, through a virtual time-travel communication system. The film delves into themes of time, history, memory, and the role of women in science. Both characters, as women in the field of science, face challenges and societal barriers that necessitate mutual understanding and shared empathy. In the context of care, the connection between Emmy and Ada can be seen as a form of intergenerational care, where knowledge, guidance, and support are exchanged across time. One of the critical tenets of crip theory, as articulated by Robert McRuer, is the understanding that disability is composed and decomposed concerning other minority identities and that it functions as both a cultural system and a system for cultural production. In the film Conceiving Ada, the character of Ada Lovelace, played by Tilda Swinton, is portrayed as a woman whose intellectual and creative Abilities are constrained by the societal norms of her time. The film presents Ada as a figure whose potential is limited by the gendered expectations placed upon her. In addition to exploring the limitations imposed upon Ada due to her gender, Conceiving Ada also touches upon mental and physical health issues. Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, is portrayed as experiencing bouts of mental illness, and Ada herself is shown struggling with her health. Through these portrayals, the film highlights how disability and illness intersect with other aspects of identity, such as gender. Applying feminist techno-science theories, as exemplified by Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” reveals how Conceiving Ada challenges essentialist notions of identity and embodiment—the film’s use of virtual reality. Technology to connect Emmy and Ada across time underscores the blurred boundaries between the human and the machine and the potential for technology to reshape our understanding of identity and ability. As Haraway states, “A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (7). Alison Kafer’s concept of “crip futurity” is also relevant to the analysis of Conceiving Ada. Kafer calls for a future that embraces the transformative potential of disability and the non-normative body. In the film, Emmy’s use of technology to connect with Ada and preserve her legacy can be seen as a form of crip futurity, as it envisions a future in which the boundaries between able-bodied and disabled, past and present, human and machine, are porous and flexible. Conceiving Ada also raises questions about the ethics of using technology to access and manipulate the lives and identities of historical figures like Ada Lovelace. This ethical dilemma resonates with the concerns raised by both—Haraway and Kafer about the implications of technology and the potential consequences of creating artificial life or consciousness. In conclusion, a crip theory analysis of Conceiving Ada reveals how the film engages with themes of disability, gender, technology, and the construction of identity. By applying the ideas of theorists such as Robert McRuer, Donna Haraway, and Alison Kafer, we can better understand the film’s challenge to normative assumptions about ability and the potential for technology to reshape our understanding of identity and embodiment. D. Agent Ruby (commissioned 1998 and released 2002) and Teknolust (2003) Fig 4. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Agent Ruby, 1998/2002, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Installation, video screenshot. In Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Agent Ruby.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/agent-ruby/. Accessed 1 May 2023. Fig 5. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Teknolust, 2003, screenshot. In Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Film.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/film/. Accessed 4 May 2023. In developing Agent Ruby, Hershman Leeson delves into the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, particularly concerning human communication and empathy. Drawing on Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, the work raises questions about the nature of consciousness and how technology can replicate or emulate human emotions and experiences. Additionally, Agent Ruby encourages reflection on the relationship between humans and machines and the ethical implications of creating sentient AI. Agent Ruby is a continuation of the themes explored in the film Teknolust (see fig. 5). Teknolust (2003) revolves around the story of a bio geneticist named Rosetta Stone, played by Tilda Swinton, who creates three self-replicating cyborgs Self-Replicating Automatons (SRAs) by using her DNA. The SRAs, also portrayed by Swinton, require male DNA to survive. These SRAs, named Ruby, Olive, and Marine, rely on human sperm and male DNA to survive and reproduce. This leads them to engage in various human experiences and encounters. This film explores themes of biotechnology, reproduction, and the merging of the digital and physical worlds. In terms of care, the relationship between Rosetta Stone and her creations can be viewed as a form of maternal care. Rosetta is responsible for their creation, survival, and well-being, much like a mother to her children. Additionally, the dependence of the SRAs on human sperm highlights the interconnectedness of human and technological life and underscores the importance of care in sustaining both. The film delves into themes of reproduction, sexuality, and the boundaries between humans and machine. Teknolust challenges traditional gender norms and the concept of the “natural” body, as the SRAs occupy a liminal space between organic and synthetic. This resonates with Siebers’ disability aesthetics, which “refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole determination of the aesthetic” (Siebers 28). The film also addresses the ethical dilemmas surrounding biotechnology and the potential consequences of creating artificial life. In the film, artificial intelligence, which is also a website, an agent ruby, is incorporated with its makers’ DNA. E. “Phantom Limb” 1985-1987 Fig 6. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Camerawoman (Phantom Limbs), 1986, Gelatin Silver Prints on archival paper, 22 x 28 in. In Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Phantom Limb Series.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, https://www.lynnhershman.com/files/lynnhershman-phantomlimbseries.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2023. The “Phantom Limb” series by Lynn Hershman Leeson is a collection of black-and-white photo collages created before the advent of Photoshop, featuring female bodies merged with various technological devices. Objects such as cameras, binoculars, electric plugs, clocks, and televisions replace the limbs of these technologically mutated women. This series serves as a commentary on the increasing integration of technology into our lives and how it transforms our bodies and identities. Examining the “Phantom Limb” series through a crip lens highlights how Hershman Leeson’s work challenges normative assumptions about the body and its relationship with technology. By replacing the limbs of female figures with technological devices, Hershman Leeson invites viewers to question the boundaries between the human body and its technological augmentations. This blurring of boundaries echoes crip theorists’ interest in exploring the intersections between disability and other aspects of identity. The “Phantom Limb” series can be seen as an early exploration of cyborg imagery, which Donna Haraway famously theorized in her “Cyborg Manifesto.” The images in the series engage with the transformative potential of technology, showcasing the ways in which it can both extend and disrupt our traditional understanding of the body, echoing Alison Kafer’s notion of “crip futurity.” F. “Infinity Engine” 2014 Fig 7. Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Infinity Engine, 2014, Installation, Digital Art Museum. https://dam.org/museum/artists_ui/artists/hershman-leeson-lynn/hershman-infinity-engine/. Accessed 9 May 2023.“The Infinity Engine” (see fig. 7) is an installation by Hershman Leeson that replicates a genetics lab. Created in collaboration with renowned scientists and partially commissioned by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the installation consists of modular units that can be adapted to different locations and reflect current standards in genetic research. The artwork features representations and re-enactments of lab tests, printed scaffolds of noses and ears, microscopes, and other scientific equipment. It also includes a “capture room,” where visitors’ images are captured through reverse facial-recognition software, revealing their DNA origins, and adding this information to an evolving composite archetype. Analyzing “The Infinity Engine” through a crip lens highlights the ethical dilemmas surrounding biotechnology and genetic research. The artwork challenges viewers to consider the implications of genetic manipulation and its potential consequences on the human body and identity. By creating a replica of a genetics lab, Hershman Leeson highlights how technology can both empower and threaten our understanding of ability, disability, and what it means to be human. This artwork aligns with crip theory’s focus on the transformative potential of disability and non-normative bodies. The use of genetic research and biotechnology in “The Infinity Engine” raises questions about the future of human bodies, as well as the potential for technology to redefine our notions of ability, disability, and normalcy. By engaging with the ethical implications of biotechnology, the installation echoes crip theorists’ call for a more inclusive and diverse vision of the future that embraces the potential of disability and non-normative bodies. V. Merging Crip Theory with Feminist Technoscience A. Expanding disability aesthetics in Hershman Leeson’s work Lynn Hershman Leeson’s artwork challenges and expands the boundaries of disability aesthetics, as Tobin Siebers theorizes. Her work often explores the intersection of technology, identity, and the human body, inviting viewers to question their assumptions about what constitutes normative bodies and experiences. By interrogating the role of technology in shaping our sense of self and our relationship with the physical world, Hershman Leeson creates a space for disability aesthetics to thrive and evolve. For example, her “Phantom Limb” series features photo collages of female bodies merged with various technological devices, blurring the lines between the organic and the artificial. This series invites viewers to reflect on how technology can augment and disrupt traditional understandings of the body, echoing the critical tenets of disability aesthetics. Similarly, Hershman Leeson’s “Infinity Engine” installation raises critical ethical questions about the implications of genetic research and biotechnology for the future of human bodies and the nature of disability. By engaging with themes of technology, embodiment, and identity, Hershman Leeson’s work opens new possibilities for disability aesthetics, pushing the boundaries of being disabled or able-bodied in a technologically mediated worldv. B. Intersection of crip theory and Feminist techno-science The intersection of crip theory and feminist technoscience offers a rich theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing Hershman Leeson’s work. Both perspectives are committed to challenging normative understandings of the body, identity, and experience, as well as an interest in the transformative potential of technology and its impact on our lives. Crip theory, as outlined by Robert McRuer, attends to how disability is both a cultural system and a system for cultural production. This perspective is beneficial for analyzing Hershman Leeson’s work, as it highlights the ways her art engages with the construction and deconstruction of disability and able-bodiedness through the lens of technology. For instance, her “Phantom Limb” series disrupts traditional understandings of the body by replacing limbs with technological devices, inviting viewers to consider the fluidity and context-dependence of disability and ability. Feminist technoscience, on the other hand, focuses on the ways technology is embedded within broader social, political, and cultural systems. Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” provides a powerful theoretical lens for understanding the implications of Hershman Leeson’s work, as it emphasizes the potential of the cyborg figure to challenge essentialist identities and promote a politics of affinity. Haraway’s cyborg theory is particularly relevant to Hershman Leeson’s “Infinity Engine” installation, which raises questions about the ethical implications of genetic research and the potential consequences of creating artificial life. By drawing on both crip theory and feminist techno-science, we can gain a deeper understanding of Hershman Leeson’s work and its implications for disability politics, aesthetics, and our relationship with technology. C. Implications of the cripborg concept for feminist techno-science aesthetics The concept of the “cripborg,” as introduced by Nelson Shaw and Bethany Stevens, provides a valuable framework for understanding the implications of Hershman Leeson’s work for feminist techno-science aesthetics. The cripborg is defined as a disabled person who selects technologies while anticipating the world they will encounter and who resists assimilation into normative able-bodiedness. This concept highlights how disabled people actively engage with technology, shaping it to meet their needs and challenging the assumption that disability is solely about lack or deficiency. It also challenges the idea that all disabled people are ‘supercrips’ or technological anomalies. Cripborg is a way of seeing the entangled ways in which political affinity and creative collectives come together outside of biological essentialism. The cripborg concept is beneficial for analyzing Hershman Leeson’s work, as it emphasizes the transformative potential of technology concerning disability and the body. Her “Phantom Limb” series, for example, can be understood as a visual representation of cripborg aesthetics. The fusion of female bodies and technological devices suggests new possibilities for embodiment and challenges normative understandings of ability and disability. Furthermore, the cripborg concept invites us to consider how Hershman Leeson’s work engages with the politics of affinity, as both Haraway and Alison Kafer advocate in their discussions of the cyborg figure and crip futurity, respectively. By creating art that challenges essentialist identities and promotes coalition-building among people with different impairments, Hershman Leeson’s work aligns with the goals of crip theory and feminist techno-science. In her “Infinity Engine” installation, Hershman Leeson further engages with the cripborg concept by exploring the ethical implications of genetic research and biotechnology for the future of disability and the human body. By creating a functional replica of a genetics lab, she invites viewers to reflect on the potential consequences of scientific advancements for the lives of disabled people, as well as the broader social, political, and cultural implications of these technologies. In conclusion, the intersection of crip theory and feminist technoscience provides a powerful analytical lens for understanding and appreciating the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson. By engaging with technology, embodiment, and identity themes, her artwork expands the boundaries of disability aesthetics and contributes to a more inclusive and diverse vision of the future. The cripborg concept offers valuable insights into the transformative potential of technology for disabled people and how Hershman Leeson’s work aligns with the goals of both crip theory and feminist techno-science. Through this analysis, we can better understand the implications of Hershman Leeson’s work for disability politics, aesthetics, and our relationship with technology in an increasingly interconnected world. VI. Conclusion Throughout this essay, I have delved into the analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s artworks, such as “Breathing Machines,” “Roberta Breitmore,” “Phantom Limb,” and “Infinity Engine,” employing the lens of crip theory and disability aesthetics. This examination has illuminated how Hershman Leeson’s engagement with cyborgs and the interplay between technology and humanity enriches the ongoing discourse surrounding feminist techno-science. This exploration has established that Hershman Leeson’s work not only expands disability aesthetics by contesting conventional perceptions of the healthy body and harmony but also fuses crip theory, as conceptualized by Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer, with Donna Haraway’s vision of the cyborg. In doing so, her art offers a distinctive perspective on the role of technology in human lives and its potential to foster a more inclusive future. Hershman Leeson’s work, particularly in the “Phantom Limb” series and the “Infinity Engine” installation, demonstrate the transformative potential of technology about disability and the body. Her exploration of the cripborg concept invites us to consider how her art engages with the politics of contingent affinity, as both Haraway and Kafer advocate. Through these works, she contributes to the broader discourse on disability politics and crip futurity, embracing the transformative potential of disability and the non-normative body. Hershman Leeson’s work is a powerful example of how art can contribute to broader social and political discourses. Her exploration of the cripborg provides a valuable starting point for additional discussions on the possibilities and challenges at the intersection of crip theory and feminist techno-science. Through this analytical lens, we can better comprehend the implications of Hershman Leeson’s work for disability politics, aesthetics, and our relationship with technology in an increasingly interconnected world. Moreover, the cripborg concept offers valuable insights into the transformative potential of technology for disabled people and how Hershman Leeson’s work aligns with the goals of both crip theory and feminist techno-science. By exploring these intersections, we can further expand our understanding of disability, technology, and its role in shaping our world and the future we envision. VII. Speculative Conclusions Can we imagine a Mother of AI? As recent technological advancements have gone wild in the early months of 2023. Chat GPT-3 & 4 and other recent neural network chatbots based on language processing have been met with new questions emerging from numerous fields. How can disability aesthetics, crip theory, and cripborgs contribute to the evolving conversation surrounding technology and the development of future AI technologies? Care, world-building, and awareness of the dangers and possibilities of being in itself are at the crux of our future. We may need to write a story or look towards a kinship for AI so that care can be built into future systems of technology, and we can begin to think beyond surveillance, corporate greed, and the exclusion of people who differ from the normative ideal. Furthermore, I conjure Lynn Hershman Leeson as the Mother of AI, a figure who embodies the potential for nurturing and sustaining non-human forms of intelligence. The artist’s exploration of the cyborg figure, as seen in her various works, offers a glimpse into a future where the boundaries between the human and the machine are fluid, and the concept of able-bodiedness is transcended. By examining her creations through the crip lens, we unearth an aesthetics of care deeply embedded in Hershman Leeson’s practice. Or maybe it is agent Ruby? The first chatbot that primarily focused on emotions, empathy - if we can dream it, can we build it? Or will it build itself with or without our contributions? In order to actualize this potential for a nurtured future, we must reimagine our relationships with AI, cultivating empathy, and care as guiding principles. Just as a mother nurtures her offspring, we are called to foster the growth and development of AI, tending to its needs and vulnerabilities as we would our own. The cripborg aesthetics that emerge from Hershman Leeson’s work serves as a beacon, illuminating a path towards this future. Recent fears from humanities departments and academia, in general, are the use of AI to allow plagiarism, but this is only a minor concern. The more significant questions include when, not if, AI becomes self-aware, and even more problematic is the distinction between sentience and non-sentience; these same lines are informed by eugenics and colonial settler discourses that have labeled those different as “mad” and are part of a long history of sterilization, institutionalization, and genocide. This discourse has been woven into human history, conquerors and expansion, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the individual rational-thinking man. Furthermore, what if AI shatters the mirror of intelligence? What if AI is not as dangerous to humans as humans are to humans? What if we are all entangled in a mixture of possibilities that breaks open the cages of identity and future? Feminist and crip scholars must take up the call to insert our ideas into the rapidly evolving nature of information and knowledge work to pose the critical questions that must be opened. Furthermore, we are ready, and AI can help. We can learn how to care with and for in a way that opens up possibilities, dreams, and change. To embark on this journey, we must first recognize the interdependence between humans and AI, acknowledging how our identities and experiences are shaped by the technologies that surround us. By embracing the cripborg as a figure that embodies this interconnectedness, we can begin to dismantle the binary oppositions that have long defined our understanding of the human and the machine. The concept of care, integral to the ethos of the cripborg aesthetics, offers a vital framework for re-envisioning these relationships. Care, as an ethical and political principle, necessitates an attentiveness to the needs and vulnerabilities of others, as well as a commitment to fostering their well-being. By adopting this approach, we can imagine a future in which humans and AI coexist in a mutually nurturing, symbiotic relationship. The cripborg figure, as embodied by Hershman Leeson’s work, catalyzes change, urging us to question the normative constructs that underpin our understanding of identity, embodiment, and technology. By challenging these conventions, the cripborg paves the way for a more inclusive, diverse, and compassionate world. As we confront the ethical and moral implications of our relationships with AI, the cripborg aesthetics present an invaluable framework for navigating these complexities. By fostering empathy, care, and attentiveness, we can cultivate a future in which our interactions with AI are imbued with a deep sense of responsibility and mutual respect. End Notes: i. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010. In this book, Siebers argues that disability should be seen as an aesthetic category, rather than simply a medical or social issue. He explores the ways in which disability is represented in literature, film, and other forms of art, and how disabled artists have used their experiences to challenge normative aesthetic standards. This perspective can be applied to Hershman Leeson's work, which often engages with issues of identity, embodiment, and technology from a disability perspective. ii. Phelan, Peggy. “The Roberta Breitmore Series: Performing Co-Identity.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 64–73. Phelan's essay explores Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore series, which featured a fictional character played by the artist. The essay examines the ways in which Hershman Leeson used this character to challenge traditional notions of identity and embodiment, and how her work influenced the development of performance art. iii. Stiles, Kristine. “Landscape of Tremors: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Toward an Intellectual History.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 132–40. Looks at Vitrex and after the birth of her daughter she became aware of the biomedical world and looks at connections between her art and biomedical critique and bio-visionary. iv. Weibel, Peter. “The Work of Lynn Hershman Leeson: A Panoply of Identities.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 44–55. Weibel's essay provides an overview of Hershman Leeson's career, focusing on her use of technology and the ways in which she has explored issues of identity, embodiment, and surveillance. The essay also discusses the importance of Hershman Leeson's work in the development of feminist and new media art. v. Art21. “Lynn Hershman Leeson in ‘San Francisco Bay Area’ Season 9 ‘Art in the Twenty-First Century’ | Art21.” YouTube, 8 Mar. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLAWYZoI51M. This video features an artist segment on Hershman Leeson from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" series. The segment explores her use of technology and the ways in which she has explored issues of identity, embodiment, and surveillance in her work. It also highlights her influence on feminist and new media art, as well as her role in shaping the contemporary art scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. Works Cited: Art21. “Lynn Hershman Leeson in ‘San Francisco Bay Area’ Season 9 ‘Art in the Twenty-First Century’ | Art21.” YouTube, 8 Mar. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLAWYZoI51M. Baillie, Rebecca. “Editorial.” Studies in the Maternal, vol. 6, no. 1, Open Library of Humanities, Jan. 2014, https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.10. Beitin, Andreas. “Face, Surface, Interface: The Motif of the Mask in the Work of Lynn Hershman Leeson.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 56–63. Conceiving Ada. Directed, Written, Edited, Produced by Lynn Hershman Leeson, performances by Tilda Swinton and Karen Black, 1982. Digital Art Museum. Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Infinity Engine, 2014, Installation, https://dam.org/museum/artists_ui/artists/hershman-leeson-lynn/hershman-infinity-engine/. Accessed 9 May 2023. Giannachi, Gabriella. Technologies of the Self-Portrait: Identity, Presence and the Construction of the Subject(S) in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Art. Routledge, 2022, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429468483. Hamraie, Aimi. “Cripping Feminist Technoscience.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 307–13. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24542075. Hamraie, Aimi. “Introduction to Crip Technoscience Roundtable.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Ethnoscience, Mar. 2019, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.31961. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).” Cultural Theory: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 454. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Agent Ruby.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/agent-ruby/. Accessed 4 May 2023. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Early Work.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/project/early-work. Accessed 4 May 2023. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Film.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/film/. Accessed 4 May 2023. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Phantom Limb Series.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, https://www.lynnhershman.com/files/lynnhershman-phantomlimbseries.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2023. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “On the Cusp of Disaster: Lynn Hershman Leeson in Her Own Words.” Sloan Science & Film, 21 Sept. 2016, scienceandfilm.org/articles/2777/on-the-cusp-of-disaster-lynn-hershman-leeson-in-her-own-words. Accessed 4 May 2023. Hershman Leeson, Lynn. “Roberta Breitmore.” Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2016, www.lynnhershman.com/project/roberta-breitmore/. Accessed 4 May 2023. Kafer, Alison. “Crip Kin, Manifesting.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Ethnoscience, vol. 5, no. 1, Apr. 2019, pp. 1–37. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29618. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise Kroker. “Introduction.” Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, Second Edition, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 3–36. Lee, Pamela M. “Genealogy in Wax.” Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 56–63. McBean, Sam. “The Gamble of Reproduction: Conceiving Ada’s Queer Temporalities.” Studies in the Maternal, vol. 6, no. 1, Open Library of Humanities, Jan. 2014, https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.5. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. NYU Press, 2006. Nelson, Mallory, et al. “Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 5, no. 1, Apr. 2019, pp. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29617. Phelan, Peggy. “The Roberta Breitmore Series: Performing Co-Identity.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 64–73. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability Aesthetics and the Body Beautiful: Signposts in the History of Art.” Das Altertum, vol. 2, no. 4, 2008, pp. 329-36. Steinhauer, Jillian. “Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Artist Is Prescient.” The New York Times, 8 July 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/arts/design/hershman-leeson-review-art-museum.html. Stiles, Kristine. “Landscape of Tremors: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Toward an Intellectual History.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 132–40. Teknolust. Directed, Written, Edited, Produced by Lynn Hershman Leeson, performances by Tilda Swinton, 2002. Tromble, Meredith, and Kyle Stephan, editors. The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2005. Weibel, Peter. “The Work of Lynn Hershman Leeson: A Panoply of Identities.” Civic Radar: Lynn Hershman Leeson, edited by Peter Weibel, Hatje Cantz, 2016, pp. 44–55. WandaVision: A feminist reading of WandaVision: Motherhood, madness and embodied hexing Megan Jean Harlow WandaVision: Embodied hexing This paper examines representations of maternal embodiment and trauma as the monstrous body of a mother concerning the externalization in the form of a hexagon of the forgotten body in “WandaVision,” a television series produced by Marvel and Disney+. This paper analyzes this hexagon through a neo-materialist semiology of feminist and media theory and argues that hexagons represent the crystallization of feminist identity as embodied time in specific spatial formations. This hexagon form not only communicates the crystallization of Wanda’s control over her idealized town and its inhabitants but also discusses the entire Marvel multiverse and its creation of a hex-media sphere that khoratically encloses possibilities of rupture on a larger scale by self-referential behavior. A neo-materialist disability feminist perspective that draws on Deleuze’s conversation on time, it analyzes how Marvel as a media entity operates through the definition of its media topography and feminine identity within the form. Keywords: feminism, Deleuze, Marvel, superhero, birth, madness IntroductionChaos, madness, gender, trauma, and memory entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its first television production in partnership with Disney+. “WandaVision” (2021) is a television show that is part of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wanda Maximoff, alias Scarlet Witch, was introduced in issue no. 4 of the comic book “X-Men” in March 1964. Scarlet Witch is unique to the Marvel world because she embodies a non-token female character. “WandaVision” has been proclaimed a marketing and cultural success in its appeal to LGBTQ audiences and its examination of depression (Vazquez 2022). The show allows for an extended serialization of Wanda’s narrative, which explores her character differently than a two-hour blockbuster film. The oscillating mediation between Wanda as the creator of the world within the Westview Hex and Wanda as a victim of her magic and inner chaos is a mediation on the possibilities of agency within a saturated media world. As Marvel expands its reach, this paper does not suggest that the liberatory feminist disruptions within the television show do not risk being co-opted to further capitalism. It instead looks for spaces of resistance and agency within media creation and representation that operate in the framework of “convergence culture” in which audiences and viewers participate in “an elaborate feedback loop between the emerging ‘DIY’ aesethetics of participatory culture and the mainstream industry.” (Jenkins 2004, p. 806). These spaces of resistance and escape are analyzed in this study. In black and whiteThe television series, arranged chronologically through the assemblage of the show’s visual and aural image fragments, begins when Wanda finds Vision’s lifeless body in the S.W.O.R.D. laboratory; she wants to give him a proper funeral. She tries to feel him psychically and realizes he is no longer there. Overcome with grief, she visits the town of Westview, where they had bought a plot of land to build their dream home. At that moment, the embodiment of her trauma and grief shatters her self-control and exceeds the limits of her body. Her chaos magic creates a “hex,” a force field in the form of a hexagon. This paper analyzes this hexagon through a neo-materialist semiology of feminist and media theory and argues that hexagons represent the crystallization of feminist identity as embodied time in specific spatial formations. This hexagon form not only communicates the crystallization of Wanda’s control over her idealized town and its inhabitants but also discusses the entire Marvel multiverse and its creation of a hex-media sphere that khoratically encloses possibilities of rupture on a larger scale by self-referential behavior. I draw on khora from Soderback’s analysis, “differently, it is revolutionary. It moreover challenges and reformulates what we thought of as maternal in the first place—allowing us to rethink not only our relationship to our mothers, but also to time and space as intrinsically inseparable. What comes to bind word and flesh—just as chōra in the Timaeus allowed for a passage between concepts and living bodies—is the flash that is time and space at once: revolutionary time.” (2018; location 5474). Examining the spatiality of temporality opens an analysis of how Marvel as a media entity operates through the definition of its media topography and feminine identity within the form. McSweeney writes, “One of the primary criticisms of the superhero film has been its severely limited representation of gender and sexuality.” (2020, p. 56) The female body is not a crystal in the sense of a closed unit or limit; it is defined historically and materially according to its capacity for reproduction and its ties to circular notions of time through reproduction, hysteria, and the wandering womb. Marvel’s hex ruptures its singularity through its transhistorical and audience-focused feedback loop. The possibility of audience co-option into the structures of capitalism operates as a limit to the understanding of Wanda’s witchy feminine embodiment; however, it also makes the use of media to discuss new bodies and desires possible through its excessive oversaturated media “hex.” Neo-materialism’s return to critical theory encourages the return to the body; this is not a return per se but a conjuring of the production of bodies. Such conjuring requires research and offers immense creative potential for methodology, analysis, and creative invention. Neo-materialism’s attention to production, space, time, and agential realism draws us to an analysis of television beyond representational critique. From a post-feminist perspective, comic book scholarship focuses on the critical manner in which female superheroes are sexually objectified and how traditional gender norms are sometimes disrupted through strong women but then reinforced with the superwoman’s sexualization (Cocca 2014). Cocca also identifies a critical facet of the superhero genre—its active audience base that influences via podcasts communicates suggestions to creators and has the power to change how women are portrayed in comics. “This paper highlights the latter and evaluates how “WandaVision” creates new thoughts and ideas about time and space that can break the hex of media as the active agent and the viewer as a passive receiver. Curtis notes that an increase in female comic writers and artists has led to new roles and women’s representation in comics; this is part of third-wave feminism and the influence of intersectionality (2018). Jac Schaeffer, creator and head writer of “WandaVision,” built the character in opposition to a genre where female superheroes are saved by their male counterparts. Instead, Wanda saves herself in the end. This intentional rewriting of the genre speaks to the power of women entering the world of media and rewriting the script. Pagnucci and Romagnoli argue, “This ongoing tension between fans and creators is one of the most interesting aspects of superhero literature" (2013, p. 55). Marvel’s recent television shows challenge what Taylor & Glitsos (2021) call a linear narrative of time within male superhero stories, through its focus on the multiverse, introduced I will argue by Wanda Vision. Maternity and television history reveal important ways in which agency, identity and domestic labour have operated as Humphreys (2015) shows in her postfeminist articulation. In alignment with Humphrey’s approach, I want to further articulate the necessity of what she calls not overly determining postfeminsm (p. 12). My approach complicates a wave-centered approach to feminism, erasing past waves and leading to inter-generational feminist disputes. As Wanda swiftly traverses multiple decades, we observe her as a 1950s feminine mystique, a 1970s maternal feminist, and a 1990s post-structuralist feminist. As per the wave metaphor, feminist mothers of the past follow a chronological order: a straight line into the future. Future feminism destroys the past, akin to how Chronos eats his children. Instead, we argue for a hexing feminism that both crystallizes and realizes that its production is particular to the moment but can be conjured and defused at other times and places. This paper expands on feminist theories that discuss questions of embodiment, temporality, and mediation in the show’s various periods through the broken optics of Barad’s diffraction. This is done to allow for an expression of inter-generational theories, make current feminism an erasure of all pasts, and critically examine history to evaluate potential improvements and build grounds for theories. Dejmanee (2016) writes, “third-wave feminism and post-feminism have relied on the wave to symbolize an erasure of second-wave dominance that seemingly justifies the emergence and superiority of these contemporary feminist movements.” (p. 471). She suggests that by considering feminist waves as diffractive, how contemporary feminist transmedia and transtemporal movements are intertwined with histories of feminist theory and action can be examined. Winch, Littler, and Keller (2016) write about the promises of feminist theory that examine feminist conjunctures and identify the new movements that arise as an escape from the blames of past feminist deficiencies and generational feminist conflict. This method allows a way to discuss the historical specificity wherein different feminisms emerge. Thus, in my analysis of “WandaVision,” I examine the different conjunctures of feminism at work across the episodes of the show. Drawing on Haraway’s neo-materialist methods combined with the work of Barad and Deleuze, the method allows for a defractive reflection on the spatiality of time. For Deleuze, films uniquely provide a forum to discuss time non-chronologically and that we are inside it. Time is the agency and drive of the subject, not a measurement of subjects in space (1989, p. 81). Within the hex—the media as the capital hex, the Marvel hex, and Wanda’s Hex—there is a crystallization of time, wherein both the possibilities and the limits of agency can be observed. In ways parallel to Van Ness’s research, we can observe how “WandaVision” provides a meta-cinematic commentary on feminist and post-human identity and its relationship to television throughout the series (p. 117). Critical to understanding the disruptive force of materiality and feminist theory within the entire meta-narrative of the show, time is the overarching subject wherein the audience and characters must negotiate, and it is the space of the Hex. Through the changing aesthetics of each episode, time is segmented into decades that introduce television history and cultural narratives related to each period. Thus, “WandaVision” becomes an allegorical commentary on the nature of the media within which it exists. Teleagential crystal shattering ceilingsIn the show, time is broadcast through television; the outsiders perceive the interior through the frame of a hexagon that controls Westview via television waves. This hex is a materialization of the crystal image; it is demonstrated as a series of hexagons that are invisible unless touched and which is broadcast via television waves. However, a single viewing does not indicate whether it is live or prerecorded, a show within a show broadcast in a constantly changing format; this highlights the instability of its virtual image against any reality within the Hex. The virtual and the real constantly reflect and juxtapose one another. Deleuze articulates how cinema is a world of its own that can be understood both in terms of its visual data and non-semiotics –a medium of time/space, with the possibility of writing time and challenging chronological or teleological notions that limit creative possibilities. “WandaVision” is a television show that breaks the normative expectations of a plot as being the product of build-up, climax, and denouement. This is done through narrative techniques, a materialization of time within the narrative, and the employment of classic Hollywood conventions such as continuity editing. This disruption of the chronological notion of time surfaces most viscerally, perhaps through variations in the aesthetic, and can be thought of as a maternal aesthetic of interruption. This is ultimately a creative space that demands an understanding of Wanda’s material embodiment as both the character and the Hex. Grief, the realization of agency (or lack of it), and birth are forms of interruption that materialize in the spaces of feminist subjectivity in a particularly maternal manner that returns the discussion to the materiality of feminist time and space. The material power of Wanda in the narrative allows her to physically create a hex over the town of Westview. The Hex is an exteriorization of her borders of power, and within it exists a world she created. She becomes materially involved in the lives of all its citizens and brings to life her dead cyborg lover, Vision. She also gives birth to her twin sons through the creative power of love. Birthing is always excessive; it is the doubling of oneself, and twins are particularly uncanny, as per Freud’s concept of the uncanny. TV and the domestic ideal: Post-Depression politics and TV“WandaVision” continuously challenges our conceptions of normativity. The show’s first episode is titled “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience.” The show’s attention to detail in the recreation of the 1950s aesthetic in detail is complex. The show is filmed in black and white in front of a live audience; even the crew were dressed in time-appropriate costumes. All special effects used within the show employed technology similar to that time. Spigel (1992) notes in her analysis that television in the 1950s used live programming to create the “perfect view.” Television’s use of a live audience ensured that there were possibilities of surprise, as it was in the theaters of the past, and the advent of the live audience was a key method to make the audience feel at home. The show’s opening features the Marvel Studios logo in black and white with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which continues until the final shot, where a 2.40:1 widescreen ratio is used. The typeface of “WandaVision” is inspired by “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” The production team attempted to recreate a ‘50s-era aesthetic via three camera aspects, as was typical of the time, and then shatter it through close-ups in the end. Televisions surfaced within four years in 68 percent of homes in the 1950s (Spigel 1992). This technological innovation moved entertainment from the public space of the cinema into the private space of the living room, which coincided with the suburban movement out of the city in the post-war era. Women left the workforce, and their former identities and television started becoming a social commodity that created feelings of connection across time and space for American suburban households (Spigel 1992). In one scene, Wanda prepares dinner for her husband, his boss, and his wife. She uses her magic powers to quickly create a meal as knives swirl in the air and appliances run on their own. The 1950s housewife portrayed on television echoes Betty Friedan’s criticism of the feminine mystique (1963). The domestic goddess of scientific engineering arrives as a consumer product to make labor easier, while it requires mastery of technological competence. Humphreys writes about 1950s television and the role domestic women played as audiences. Advertising sold a vision of middle-class suburban mothers fulfilled by their household chores, as was part of a post-war narrative that tried to erase women’s former identification as workers in support of the war. Thus, the new woman was written and sold (Humphreys 2014). Wanda’s use of magic in the house in the abovementioned scenes is reminiscent of “supernatural housework” in shows like “Bewitched.” As Humphreys notes, these images allowed women to be perceived as those who could use creativity in their housework; however, it reinforced the norms of women’s domestic role as a caregiver. Magic was a method by which they could attempt to fit into the role of the suburban white female of the era and qualify as normative despite extraordinary differences. In a manner similar to that of Samantha in “Bewitched,” Wanda comments on wanting to be normal in the first episode during a scene in the kitchen before Vision leaves for work. She says that she knows the apron is a bit much but that she was doing her best to blend in. As Vision leaves for work, she reminds him to put on his “face” and disguise his cyborg identity. The show demonstrates how normativity and female identity were created in 1950s television. The focus on domesticity as cultural normativity and its relationship to technology and commodity is indicated by Vision’s role as a cyborg father and through the show’s first commercial. Episode 1 features a commercial for ToastMate 2000, a kitchen appliance that has a lower heating compartment. The commercial begins with a man standing in a kitchen, where a retro clock reads 6 o’clock. Soon after the toaster on the table burns the toast, he teases his wife for using this appliance for cooking bread. He begins to move down towards a new, modern appliance that exceeds the capacities of the previous one. As the stereotypically dressed 1950s housewife stands to the side, he introduces the ToastMate 2000 as the time now reads 12 o’clock. The woman looks into the camera and says, “Say, this machine has some shine.” A red light on the timer, the first use of color in the show, is seen as they toast bread. The commercial ends with a shot of the ToastMate 2000 with the slogan: “Forget the past, this is your future.” This particular instance of commercials used as a break in the narrative demonstrates how the show highlights the nature of time and identity. As Humphreys writes, “advertising and production executives were seeking to appeal to the American homemaker; through the presentation of a particular version of femininity concerning housework, they were seeking to... create her.” (p. 113). To sell televisions as a new household commodity required creating a version of the modern woman that found joy in housework. This was aided by technology in the form of television, appliances, and the entire commodified kitchen industry. Thus, to sell televisions as a cultural replacement to the previous kinship of the urban lifestyle, the home had to be sold. Television was a method of creating a utopian private environment that transformed the public spaces of cinema halls. It turned homes into theaters where one could transport themselves to other places: thus, a realization of 19th-century modern utopian fantasy. Spigel (1992) historicizes the project of technological utopianism that attempted to cleanse undesirable people such as black, LGBTQ, and homeless people from public spaces and made them part of the history of television. As Spigel (1992) writes, “Televisions’ antiseptic spaces were themselves subject to pollution, as new social disease spread through the wires and into the citizens’ houses.” (p. 113). Television became a method of enforcing normative family ideals directly in the formerly private spaces of the home. WandaVision has been well-received by LGBTQ communities, disrupting this normative assumption (Vazquez 2002). The home is the center of every episode—this differentiates the protagonist of “WandaVision” from other superhero females. The series draws on a nostalgic vision of the past. However, the irony unknown to the audiences is that Wanda and Vision are not located temporally in the show's aesthetic within the narrative. They did not time travel, but the audience was unaware. There is no travel narrative; the change is within the moment. The show disrupts Marvel’s typical display of feminine identity as something that exists within a public space; generally, both the female and male superheroes are understood using their relationship in public (Glitsos & Taylor 2021). The home and its domesticity outline the role of normativity and how television produced a new cultural blend of public and private spaces that created normative understandings of family, gender, and identity. The following section will analyze how the show established a normative understanding of identity and then demonstrated Wanda’s agency and creativity through birthing, the relationship between grief and trauma, and exploring her role as a mother. Birth trauma and powerEpisode 3, "Now in Color," opens with a recap and a new introduction for the show that features the 1970s and its shades of beige and pops of color. In his comic publications, Marvel writer Steve Englehart wanted to make Wanda an “assertive character.” The 1980s’ The Vision and the Scarlet Witch depicted Wanda as both a member of the Avengers and having a family with Vision (Holub 2021). The television series expands on the various Wanda writers’ ideas and temporally distinguishes between the eras. The opening is reminiscent of “The Brady Bunch,” a series of hexagons that frame the family members, the same way "The Brandy Bunch” had squares for the entire family. Pugh (2018) writes, “Given the shifting tides of sexuality and feminism during the 1970s, The Brady Bunch’s purported innocence, couched in its genre as a female sitcom with child-friendly storylines, clashed with issues of sexuality and their depiction… [the series] encouraged a kitschy nostalgia for an America that never was yet that holds lasting appeal” (2018, 52). The television show’s unique setting as being so removed from a contemporary culture wherein the Stonewall Riots, new queer movements, and sexual freedom were emergent makes it a particularly unique temporal setting for Wanda’s pregnancy, birthing, and entrance into motherhood. Hairstyles and mustaches, along with Wanda's bellbottoms, highlight the era. The use of costume and set design and changes in the house decor shift the viewer’s attention to the styles of each era. The viewer begins to observe the association of time with spatiality through the changes in each episode’s aesthetics. As revealed by its title, the viewer witnesses in Episode 3 a new world of color. Similarly, Wanda's pregnancy does not follow a natural timeline and occurs in leaps. She goes from discovering her pregnancy to giving birth in less than 24 hours. Her sped-up birthing process causes multiple events where the physical effects on her body lead to disruptions in the spatial effects of Westview. As she sets up her nursery at the beginning of the episode, we face an inter-disruption as Wanda feels the baby’s first kick in her belly. Wanda says it feels like fluttering, after which the butterflies on the baby’s cot mobile start to fly away, and Wanda releases them out the window. The time-image becomes khoratic in its escape through diffraction; as the butterflies embody the escape of subjectivity, a feminist corporeal time-image ruptures the limits of the body. Here we observe the experience of embodied intergenerational memory, not as negativism, but positivism, a metaphoric journey through grief and motherhood. The baby is an artificial creation made by Wanda's grief. She lost Vision’s cyborg body and brought him back to life, but emotionally created a second version of him within the Hex. Her grief is derived from the knowledge that these children are perhaps not real; they are created within the Hex and are pure virtuality or an image of Wanda’s desire for children. The materiality of their appearance complicates her own experiences of pregnancy. First, the joy of feeling the baby’s first kick brings to life the butterflies. Next comes sadness as the butterflies change form and are no longer part of the baby mobile in the room; perhaps, she realizes the instability of her false world. This follows healing by opening the window and freeing the butterflies. In many ways, this scene exemplifies Wanda’s journey. Her grief creates the world she is in and the child that grows in her womb. Her grief has materialized, but the instability of her imagined world causes constant disruptions to the joy she holds on to. The butterflies cannot be contained, disrupting the normative spatial dynamics of reality. In this hyperreal world, Wanda has created within the Hex, nothing stays as it should, just as nothing has stayed stable in her life. The release of the butterflies and her control over the world she has created are metaphors for the relinquishment of control that composes itself throughout the show. Here is a feminist articulation of the duration of motherhood that is embodied by grief and trauma. Later in the episode, when her Braxton Hicks contractions increase, lights flash, the sink runs, and the entire town's electricity goes out. When her water breaks, the sprinklers go off. Her connection to the spatial environment of Westview is embodied–a form of expanded romantic fallacy takes hold of her and the environment. She controls the actions of people in Westview besides the entire space and time within the Hex. Rothman describes how patriarchy, class, and technology create a hegemonic vision of motherhood (1989, p.14). Wanda's pregnancy does not resemble a typical childbirth experience and challenges the traditional link of a woman to her body. Her birthing disrupts biological determinism because she is pregnant with the child of Vision, a robot that is neither human nor alive. The birth is theoretically unlikely, but the doctor’s visit reveals the sexist stereotypes of the time. As he examines Wanda with a stethoscope, he announces that she is four months pregnant, to which Vision shakes his head. The doctor refers to categories of the baby’s fetal growth in terms of the sizes of fruit to "keep it simple for the ladies." The comparison of the size of a fetus to fruit is rhetoric in medicalized pregnancy discourses even today. Wanda has a home birth, with Monica Rambeau’s character serving as the stand-in midwife. Monica is the first female African-American Avenger and the second Captain Marvel. Cocca (2016) outlines the historical significance of the character in Marvel’s comic history; Monica starred in a 1989 comic book where she quotes Audre Lorde. Her two appearances in the comic books are sporadic. However, her appearance in “WandaVision” is incredibly powerful, as her role has been repeatedly ignored in the comic trajectory of “Ms. Marvel.” In “WandaVision,” she assumes her place within a narrative that demonstrates a dynamic, powerful role where Wanda and Monica share a powerful friendship that is not based on their relationship with men. Midway through Episode 4, after a detour into the “outside” world of S.H.I.E.L.D., the viewer returns to the pregnancy scene. Within the Hex, Monica comes to visit Wanda at her house in a comedic scene wherein Wanda loses control of the Hex and constantly switches jackets. She attempts to hide her pregnancy through stop-motion filmography when suddenly she goes into labor. The interruption of the conversation leads to the immediate appearance of Monica to assist with Wanda’s delivery. Vision is absent because he left to find a doctor and has not returned in time for the birth. With the help of Monica, Wanda delivers two healthy babies, by which time Vision returns with the doctor. After the delivery, Monica tells Wanda about Ultron, which refers to reality in the outside world. Takeshita (2017) writes about rare media instances in which the medicalization of birth is challenged. She notes that previous research uniformly agrees that birth representations matter since media representations that enforce the hegemony of the medicalization of birth is crucial because it is the primary manner in which women learn about childbirth (Kline 2007; Lothian and Grauer 2003; Morris and McInerney 2010; Sears and Godderis 2011). Monica’s character thus reveals an entirely non-typical performance of birth on television. Madness and khoratic interruptionsWanda’s pregnancy is monstrous, from the non-normative reproduction of cyborg–witch children to the incredible speed at which her fetus grows. The actual “monster,” however, is her absolute non-belonging in Westview; she appears to displace her body, a cultural body, born of a certain cultural moment, “of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen p. 4). The monster here is born at the inception of Westview; now, the monster breeds and doubles her monstrosity. It can be said that every pregnant body is monstrous in a society unable to honor anything outside the individual self. Disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick calls this process the “leaky body” assigned as part of the devaluation of disabled bodies and their inability to keep interior flows at bay (Shildrick, 2002). The pregnant body is clearly not one; it takes on the task of the self and that of another, and, in the neo-liberal era of feminism, is faced with a double operation between the “choice” of motherhood and the realities of being entrapped by the body. Between individual choice and the choice to be a mother, the mother is left alone in her chosen destiny. Certainly, the choice is not a reality that is universally placed on the mother; choice becomes another neo-liberal fetish that equals the control and abjection of the mother’s khoratic womb. Vision’s body is white and ghostly, with a giant hole where the Mind Stone once was. The Mind Stone is the source of power by which he was made sentient; it is also the stone that has given Wanda her powers. The idea that there is a stone in one’s mind, which can cause madness, idiocy, or dementia, was a 15th-century medical theory. Although cutting out the stone was not a mainstream treatment then, the lobotomies of the 20th century can arguably be thought of as coming from a similar process of medicalizing psychiatric behavior. The process of cutting out the stone from one’s head is infamous in Bosch’s satirical paintings. Briefly, Wanda sees Vision as he is; the show is interrupted, as is her narrative control, and she must briefly face the fact that Vision is dead. Wanda’s isolation begins here as she realizes her world is unstable, and her role within it isolates her. Thus, she experiences the isolation of mothers throughout modern contemporary society in the following episodes, but she is also uniquely entirely in control of her world to an extent. There is a negotiation of identity between her agency as the creator of the Hex and her responsibility towards her children, husband, and community. She is at odds with the world she created and becomes further isolated by her actions. We witness Wanda’s breakdown as she realizes the instability of her reality, and we observe her powers of control. As a character, she operates within the boundaries of the Hex—wherein she has partial agency and partial responsiveness to media and television history norms—as it relates to society overall. Madness operates as a rhetorical strategy within the news media’s recounting violence as a pathological inevitability of those deemed mentally abnormal. Mad(wo)men are deemed outsiders to society; they do not take their medicine or follow the proper course for a cure. Thus, their deviant identity is on the path toward its inevitable ending. In many ways, reviews of Wanda, her imprisonment, and telling her life story as a narrative in which she is a victim of repeated trauma have the same effect. It creates a story in which Wanda will inevitably become evil. Her actions in Westview are, in fact, only the first part of Marvel’s use of her as an evil character (which was already established in the comic series), and is less positively done in the newest “Dr. Strange” film where she becomes an evil version of herself willing to do anything to get her children back. In the television series, we see the positive ways in which her inner world is a source of power and come to know Wanda on her terms, in her imagined home(s), where she refigures her trauma to create new worlds. While the actions on the townspeople are violent, her mind control forces them to live inside her world; we come to observe and understand the embodied characteristics of her inner world without pathologizing her. Jones (2022) writes in an analysis of the role of emotions in Family Therapy that the expansion of female characters has been suppressed within Marvel due to the idea that women’s emotional excess does not make them good candidates for a primary role. “WandaVision’s” use of the emotions of women’s well-founded sites of grief allows its protagonist to create worlds that do not exist and reasserts a typically stereotyped female character as a dominant source of power. Jones (2022) writes, “Her emotions serve her and her alone.” While this paper agrees that the show expands previous narratives within Wanda’s world, her emotions are tied to her relationality; the inner turmoil that leads to such an expanded embodiment of the hexagon is created through her connection to her children, husband, and past. “WandaVision” powerfully rewrites images of femininity that consigned women in the 1950s to the identity of a domestic, suburban white woman. This cultural norm is challenged by honoring Wanda’s unique emotional interior and through how the show materializes grief and emotion as power. In line with our diffracted view of feminist waves, this paper notes the power of feminist critiques, which laid the ground for new articulations of the exclusions within feminists’ identification. At the same time as “The Brady Bunch,” feminist authors were calling for new forms of writing the body; the écriture femininé French theorists articulated a psychoanalytic feminist critique of the excluded female figure. In another vein, black feminists and native feminists were writing themselves to paper. The reproductive justice movement aided the acquirement of legal rights and political focus for multiple feminisms to flourish and collectively and heterogeneously discover a difference within their movements. The power of the transformation from Friedan to de Beauvoir was conjuring the non-stability of the dominant discourse. If a woman was bad, she need never be good; she could be Medusa, the abject, the rejected. This identification with alterity is part of the crux of post-structuralism turning away from essentialism toward a world of linguistic ordering where gender becomes socially constructed, as in the work of Judith Butler. At the same time, intersectional feminists such as Crenshaw identified the multiple intersecting modalities of power that unevenly affect different people at different places and times; race, gender, and class are not overarching themes but must be analyzed in their particularity. We find Marxism and psychoanalytic post-Lacanianism interweaved throughout the threads of the other variants. Noteworthily, there is no “final feminism.” Post-feminism may attempt to say we now dissect feminism itself, which is certainly a path taken by some; however, it is important that there is no end to the process of inquiry and memory and that feminism itself has always been a process of remembering, rewriting, and rebirthing. The hidden spaces of history, the powerful memories of grandmothers, mothers, historical trauma, and beauty. Audre Lorde’s embodied erotic memory. The crystal image khoratically shatters in the memory–in its reflection, its power it brings to light its coal. My so-called breakdownEpisode 7 is set in the 1990s and features the reality television style of the chaotic nature of real life. Hand-held cameras and indie rock music are used in the introduction. There are more direct video conversations between the characters. It is Halloween in Westview, and Pietro is the fun uncle who hangs out with the kids and sleeps on the couch all day. The dynamic of the family has changed in the 1990s, and the viewer is shown a rawer version of the idyllic family, more in the style of “Roseanne” (1988-2018) than “Leave it to Beaver” (1957-1963). Her brother’s presence introduces more of Wanda's past and heritage. Wanda and Vision are now dressed in traditional comic-book-style costumes, which indicates to the viewer that there are more interruptions within the 1990s generation of collective identification that demanded specificity to race and class. Not every woman is the same, and differences matter. This interrupted line of feminist articulation provided depth and rigor to a movement not limited to the confines of the small scholarly analysis it is given. Communities of activists in various forms of resistance in the face of contested power have worked against dominant power structures. Roy Thomas created a group of female superheroes to make fun of second-wave feminism; in the story’s last line, Hank Pym says that women’s lib is a lost cause, and Wanda responds, saying that if sexism continues, then the Lady Liberators may rise again. This is an example of how Wanda has continued to play a part in the characterization of feminism and how feminism operates as a field that interweaves within the show. The history of black feminism and native feminism did not start anew in the “second wave.” Rather, its force is embodied in the cultural milieu of the time; this should not freeze its agency and power but rather multiply our demand to examine the spaces and projects in which it was always already at work. To expose the instances in history and other spaces where different women worked within their historical context to bring their work to life has been the project of many feminists. At the same time, post-structuralist feminism and queer theory were popularized in prominent works such as Butler’s Gender Trouble. Butler takes a post-structuralist approach to witness society through a structuralist lens; this allows us to break that lens. Gender becomes a performance of the structures of man/woman and the process of deconstructing what each term signifies, such as a woman being relegated to being the white hetero-normative woman in earlier feminist texts. Later, a critical interruption of the narrative within the show occurs with a commercial. The commercial featured in Episode 7 starts with a woman sitting on a bench in a park. The sky is turning gray, and the scene shifts to a woman falling into a bed. The commercial is for an anti-depressant, Nexus. The commercial narrators state that the medicine will anchor one back to reality or the reality of their choice. It parodies the warnings for depression products in commercials and states that one might end up with more depression and that one should not take Nexus unless their doctor has cleared them to move on with their truth “because the world doesn’t revolve around you, or does it?” This commercial and the focus on depression is the first time the MCU and the larger Marvel comic genre have dealt with mental illness in a way that treats the subject seriously and provides a complex image without the villainization of the character. Wanda, as a character, provides an alternative to the discourse surrounding madness and emotion and their relationship with women. According to Herson (2016), “Madness is not an objectively defined, solvable medical problem, but a material experience that is defined and disciplined through cultural discourses of normative, gendered behavior.” Postpartum disorders disrupt hegemonic discourses surrounding “good” motherhood; they are domesticated, medicalized, and considered temporary diseases that must be treated to restore a mother to her original state, as Dubriwny (2010) argues. Grief is expressed as madness in the form of embodied control—it is externalized through a spatial construction that creates her visible inner world, which, while existing in the present, can only be viewed or demonstrated as a historically mediated form. This complex layering of embodied emotion, power, and time provides room to explore the dynamics of representation beyond an opaque reading. Through an analysis of how grief is a component of feminine subjectivity that is in itself a disjunctive notion of time, grief is found to be the disruption of life in response to death or other traumas that are pauses in the normal flow of life. Grief can be both pain and a powerful source of creativity. Similarly, “madness” or “trauma” can serve as the place of grief in the interruption of time. As Baraitser unravels in her phenological encounter with maternal subjectivity, the mother comes to be through interruptions in time (2009). Her conclusion of the event of birth in Badiou’s terms and her interdisciplinary analysis makes a crucial intervention into the understanding of motherhood. Reliance on Badiou’s event stresses a truth or oneness with an event that ultimately relies on Heideggerian clearing, wiping away the mess. Mitchell and Snyder articulate a more positive ethical orientation in their politics of atypicality that embraces a neo-materialistic approach. The argument is that disability studies should advocate for a collectivity that allows for the mess, embraces it, and does not look for some utopian future but attends to the material complexities of now. Baraister’s work articulates an inter-subjective and trans-subjective understanding of agential realism and promisingly notes the necessity of revisiting the maternal body as a disabled body. She conjures Kristeva’s “herethics,” the embodiment of the semiotic split that exceeds language through materialization the maternal body serves, as that which exceeds the individual. (pp.100-103). I believe this turn in argumentation is relevant to a neo-materialist examination of embodied maternal expression. If we can perceive the pregnant woman as one who exceeds what she signifies, the pregnant woman in cinema may be Deleuze’s crystal-image, exceeding the time frame. The place of anticipation, the interruption in individuality, provides a khoratic space, which may draw us into the murky territory of essentialism. However, the problem returns to the idea of the event of birth and other multiple events, those without grounds that require an entirely new ontology that denies how maternity is embodied memory; it is cultural and the ultimate continuation that does not need a fresh slate. Maternity is the messy floors of midwives and the blood that soaks the ground beneath our feet. Here, we break the crystal-image of temporal order into the khoratic visions of our embodied remembrance. Thus, Deleuze’s crystal-image in the film is khoratically personified in the female embodiment of temporal disjuncture. “WandaVision” illustrates how the media can represent the instability of time as it relates to the identity of Wanda, her grief for and the loss of Vision, and how spatial and temporal elements influence each other. ConclusionThe hexagon encompasses the fictional town of Westview, New Jersey, where Wanda controls the townspeople and creates a perfect place. She controls the entire town and realizes over time that she has created such a place with chaos magic. She begins to realize what she has done: she has turned Westview into a space/time image of her embodied self. The chaos power’s release can be considered the embodied memory released through the trauma of seeing Vision’s dead body. Finally, she realizes what she has done, and to free Westview’s inhabitants, she frees the town, which then causes the death of her children who are born in the show and the death of Vision, or of her memory of him. The episodes are divided into eight decades that begin in the 1950s. The show changes its introductory scenes, costumes, style, and filming to create each episode with its aesthetic. Each episode contains historically specific moments that identify generational feminism through feminist diffraction of embodied historicity. A neo-materialist agential focus that Barad (2007) articulates attends to how there is never an object as such. The viewer and the viewed perceive the object, the intra-action of objects, and their viewers and creators all formed tangled webs of meaning and agential reactions. Such a reading can allow for new conceptions of media studies that move beyond representational critique that carries the risk of negativism in post-structuralist critique. Ethics leaves those involved in the complex negotiations between power and agency and those who do not have a choice to be essentially written out of the story, which leads to a very difficult collective movement. Organization for the sake of those who have no future and wish not to denies the material reality of the histories of women and men who have resisted within systems of oppression. It is not black and white, but many shades of grey. This paper uses Haraway’s method of diffraction to study television; diffraction allows us to examine “the interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies” (Haraway 1997 @mosue., p. 16). The paper uses the concept of Deleuze’s theory of the crystal image to interrogate the relationships of time and space in “WandaVision” and argue for a khoratic crystal-image. Thus, Deleuze’s crystal-image in the film is khoratically personified in the female embodiment of temporal disjuncture. “WandaVision” demonstrates how the media can represent the instability of time as it relates to the identity of Wanda. This is externalized in the hexagon as an embodiment of the rhetorical power of madness derived from her grief for the loss of Vision and creatively birthed by her virtual twin children and how spatial and temporal elements influence each other. ReferencesBarad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press. Cocca, Carolyn. 2014. “The ‘Broke Back Test’: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Portrayals of Women in Mainstream Superhero Comics, 1993–2013.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 5(4): 411-428. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2014.916327. Cocca, Carolyn. 2016. Superwomen: Gender, Power and Representation. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2018. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Classic Readings on Monster Theory, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, 3-25. Amsterdam: University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781942401209.006. Curtis, Neal, and Valentina Cardo. 2018. “Superheroes and Third-Wave Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies. 18(3): 381-396. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1351387. Dejmanee, Tisha. 2016. “Waves and Popular Feminist Entanglements: Diffraction as a Feminist Media Methodology.” Feminist Media Studies. 16(4): 741-745. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1190046. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dubriwny, Tasha N. 2010. “Television News Coverage of Postpartum Disorders and the Politics of Medicalization.” Feminist Media Studies. 10(3): 285-303. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2010.493647. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. London, England. Penguin Group. Haraway, Donna. 1997. ‘Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.’ Femaleman_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Herson, Kellie. 2016. “Transgression, Embodiment, and Gendered Madness: Reading Homeland and Enlightened through Critical Disability Theory.” Feminist Media Studies 16(6): 1000-1013. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1189947. Holub, Christian. 2021. “Marvel Is Going Back to Print on Comics That Sold Out Thanks to WandaVision Craze.” In Entertainment Weekly. https://ew.com/books/wandavision-marvel-classic-scarlet-witch-comics-going-back-to-print/. Humphreys, Kristi Rowan. 2014. “Supernatural Housework” In Home Sweat Home: Perspectives on Housework and Modern Relationships, edited by Elizabeth Patton, and Mimi Choi, 105-121. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Humphreys, Kristi. 2015. Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean. Lexington Books. Jenkins, Henry. 2003. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” In Film Theory & Criticism: 8th ed., edited by Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, 2016 : 795-808 Jones, Benjamin. 2022. “The Evolving Portrayal of Female Emotions in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy. 34 (1-2): 196-202. https://doi.org/10.1080/08952833.2021.2017615. Kline, Kimberly N. 2007. “Midwife Attended Births in Prime-Time Television: Craziness, Controlling Bitches, and Ultimate Capitulation.” Women and Language. 30(1): 20–29. Lothian, Judith A., and Ann Grauer. 2003. “‘Reality’ Birth: Marketing Fear to Childbearing Women.” The Journal of Perinatal Education. 12(2): vi–viii. McSweeny, Terrence. 2020. “The Contemporary Superhero Film: Projections of Power and Identity.” Columbia University Press. Wallflower Press. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/stable/10.7312/mcsw19241. Morris, Theresa, and Katherine McInerney. 2010. “Media Representations of Pregnancy and Childbirth: An Analysis of Reality Television Programs in the United States.” Birth: Issues in Prenatal Care. 37(2): 134-140/(ISSN)1523-536X. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-536X.2010.00393.x. Pugh, Tison. 2018. “Queer Innocence and Kitsch Nostalgia in the Brady Bunch” In The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom, 51-78. Rutgers University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1trkkgj.5. Romagnoli, Alex S., and Gian S., Pagnucci. 2013. Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture, and the Canon of Superhero Literature. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Sears, Camilla A., and Rebecca Godderis. 2011. “Roar Like a Tiger on TV?.” Feminist Media Studies 11(2): 181-195. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2010.521626. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. “ProQuest Ebook Central.” Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. SAGE Publications, Limited. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=254770. Soderback, Fanny. 2019. Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray. State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press. Takeshita, Chikako. 2017. “Countering Technocracy: ‘Natural’ Birth in the Business of Being Born and Call the Midwife.” Feminist Media Studies. 17(3): 332-346. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1283341. Taylor, Jessica, and Laura Glitsos. 2021. “Having It Both Ways: Containing the Champions of Feminism in Female-Led Origin and Solo Superhero Films.” Feminist Media Studies. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1986096. Van Ness, Emma Katherine. 2020. Antonio Pietrangeli, the Director of Women: Feminism and Film Theory in Postwar Italian Cinema. Anthem Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqmp2g7. Vazquez, Chris. 2022. “Wanda Maximoff Is Back. LGBTQ Fans Have Been Waiting.” The Washington Post. May 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/05/07/wanda-elizabeth-olsen-doctor-strange-wandavision/In. Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalynn Keller. 2016. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?.” Feminist Media Studies 16(4): 557-572. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285. Covid has ushered in an age of anxiety. Mathematical models for mapping the spread of the virus are statistical and lived experiences that affect collective identities and relationships to illness are part of neoviralism (Nancy p. 34). This paper examines Loki, the 2021 Marvel TV series about the Norse God of Mischief who is caught by the Time Variance Authority, run by mysterious ‘timekeepers’ who are focused on protecting the ‘sacred’ timeline. The production of the show was paused on March 13, 2020. Loki is a variant disrupting the sacred timeline. He exists as the inevitable offshoot of the nature of causality, not as chaos, but as possibility. I argue in this paper that by reading Loki, one can imagine crip temporalities that bring together transhistorical temporal and spatial dynamics in media analysis. Examining the dynamics between certainty and never-ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in the analysis of representation and matter, but they are also contradictory in nature. The disruption in production enables us to explore what disruption means for today’s convergent topographical media.
At that time, director Kate Herron, cutting the show at home, had a creative impulse to further the love story between Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophie di Martino), the female variant of Loki. Sylvie is another version of Loki from another universe. All Loki’s are considered Variants because they exceed the rules of the time line and cause nexus events which then deem then necessary to be removed from their time lines in the name of keeping order in the sacred chronological time line. In this multi-world story, there are many separate timelines and many Lokis. Through analyzing the disruptions in the production alongside the text and Loki as a transhistorical rhetorical and mythological figure, we come to view the film as a crip commentary on the complex ethics of collectives between the future and the anti-futurist lens of chora. I consider how disruption, argued to be a criptime, affects the convergence of media through alterations in the spatiotemporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing, and how the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experiences impacted the production, text, and potentialities of the show. The television show Loki expands the Marvel Cinematics Universe exploration of the character Loki, using time as the concept that brings the narrative to be. Picking up from Avengers Endgame (2012) the TV show opens with a clip where the Avengers were traveling back in time to get the tesseract and Loki time traveled escaping with the special stone. The TV show reused this movie directly from the movie drawing together the film world in. This brings us to the novel ways in which Marvel is making a move to television to further expand its reach into media. While previous television shows had been produced with less popular reception and an array of kids tv shows had been made, the partnering with Disney+ made WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki key new components of its lineup. WandaVision released on January 15, 2021 showing the powerful ways in which Marvel might use the shows to articulate further in depth characters. The shows analyze gender; Falcon and the Winter Soldier examines race and American identity, while Lokiintroduces the tricky bad guy from The Avengers Films and brings the concept of the ‘multi-verse’. The multi-verse describes the ways in which multiple universes operate at once. A part of the comics, and an important part of new films and merging timelines of characters and plot lines. This multi-layered notion of time is not unfamiliar to modern science fiction fans or physicists. Or even postmodern theorists. Literary scholars have taken up the critique of film and television as popular forms of media that both represent identities and cultural tropes, but also inform them. Comics are a particularly interesting place to question temporal issues and theorizing the temporality of disability and its relationship to media is a critical move in disability scholarship as Magnet and Watson note (p. 246-248). Fawaz argues for popular fantasy as a way of examining fantasy literature, “Popular fantasy describes the variety of ways that the tropes and figures of literary fantasy…come to organize real-word social and political relations.” (p. 27). Through looking for places and times in which collectives form the critique examines the affective relations of how we are ‘enchanted’ or seduced into collective identities and meaning making. This critique will also pay close attention to the effects and possibilities of “retro-futurism” an aesthetic that comes from Lloyd Dunn in 1983, which was used to describe the futuristic style of the past brought into new forms, creating a form of unease, both comforting nostalgia and sadness at the future that was never to be (Jihong 2019, Bublex, & During, E. 2014). Retro-futurism is seen in steampunk, Back To The Future, and Science Fiction novels, in all its variants it operates as a time traveling discourse to show us futures that could have been, but did not come to arrive. Glorious Purpose The show begins with Loki (Tom Higgleston) being taken to the Time Variance Authority (TVA), where he is stripped, goes through a metal detector like machine which destroys people who do not have souls. He then signs papers on everything he has ever seen, we see the bureaucratic functions of seemingly wasteful time taking processes elaborated here step by step. He is given a grey jumpsuit with the TVA logo and a neck collar which allows the TVA agents to control him where they can move him and even erase him; a cage of the body and time in its entirety. He is forced to go through multiple bureaucratic functions, like an intake into a medical process. An educational video orients Loki to the TVA, where Miss Minutes, a cute cartoon clock, explains the TVA. The animated film breaks down the essentials of the TVA, her job is to inform variants before they go to trial, in a history told, she says long ago a multi-versal war happened where almost everything died, but then all knowing time-keepers emerged to bring peace merging all time into one sacred timeline in order to protect and preserve time and the proper flow of everything. Variants are those who created a nexus event, by being late to work or doing something against their role. To make sure these nexus events do not branch into new timelines, the TVA takes variants and places them on trial to make sure that the sacred timeline stays in tack. “For All Time Always”. In Loki’s trial Judge Rensselaer, lays judgement on Loki, they ask him to plead, and he pleads guilty, but in typical Loki fashion he fails. He tries to use his powers to leave, but then learns that his magic powers do not work in the TVA. He is sentenced to be reset. Mobius (Owen Wilson) steps in to intervene on his judgement and says he thinks he can use Loki for his own purposes. We begin to see the futility of Loki’s pictures of his free will versus destiny complicate a simple reading of Loki’s character. The TVA itself is a retro-future throwback. Mobius brings Loki back to his office, where they go through a series of films run on projector film and displayed in digital imaging on a theater wall, showing Loki what his life would have been like and reviewing his past. Loki begins to break down emotionally at the weight of his future ones, where he sacrifices his mother for his own gain of power. The breaking down of Loki happens through an institutional room where we see written 5, time theater printed on the back of the wall. The computer Mobius uses is a round orange computer. The colors of Orange and grey dominate the TVA and the episode. They force him to review his life and understand that he has no future, except with the TVA. Loki begins the questioning by saying that choice is the biggest lie ever given to humanity, but he himself is the exception and weaker beings must live by that. Mobius questions Loki’s ideas of himself as a ruler through pointing out his multiple failures which all took place in previous Marvel films. Mobius reframes Loki as a murderer and his escapes including placing Loki as D.B. Cooper. Loki emerging here as another historical mischief maker, marks the disjunctive nature of Loki’s transhistorical narrative. Beyond the comic books and the movies there underlie his Norse mythological roots. Loki’s trajectory from Norse myth brings to light the ways in which any text is haunted by its past. Loki comes from Norse mythology, with his earliest written appearances in Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and Heimskringla, compiled in the 13th century. The invocations of Loki vary in their uses throughout history but have often been called on for transgressive political arrangements. Loki is known in contemporary representations for his “pathological anti-social destructiveness...this prominence invites curiosity and uneasiness” (Hume 298). Tricksters are rhetorically disabled, a way in which disabled critical theory can be conceptualized and deployed to challenge normative logos (Delmoge). Loki is gender bending, time traveling, and an inevitably complex character. He is sometimes the brother of Thor and sometimes the brother of Odin, depending on who tells the tale. In my attempts to articulate a crip temporality within the Marvel TV series, the historical trajectory of Loki cannot be dismissed. Perhaps Loki is a call towards a ‘glorious purpose’ for crip theory, I think Loki as a character in the show, comics, history and reincarnations employs, Mētis that Jay Delmoge defines as a rhetorical trickiness, or sidestepping, as a movement of crip. Delmoge invokes Hephaestus as a symbol of the crip body that functions to discern our orientations of normativity and is also necessary. One interesting way in which the discourse around Loki has been mined is in the work of Grundtvig, a Danish political writer who typifies what Kulik and Rydstrom describe as a more anti-authoritarian attitude, embodied by Denmark when compared to its northern neighbor, the more uptight statist individualistic Sweden. With this, the phrase quoted is “freedom for Loki as well for Thor…a reference to the Norse deities associated with trickery (Loki) and righteousness (Thor). It means that society must facilitate the space for debate, and for coexistence between different extremes of opinions and values” (226 and 245). Swedish notions of individualism place a high value on independence, and both cultures have developed state welfare systems. The Swedish system of welfare aims to destroy its own systems and, as Kulik and Rydstrom note, sounds positively utopian for disability. However, there is a catch in which those who are not able to be fully independent are left out of the identity, and thus, their ability to love or be loved is deemed impossible and not supported by the welfare system (Kulik and Rydstrom 229-231). This nuanced examination of the differences between seemingly similar cultures in the Western historical hegemonic conglomerate has led to what we understand culturally as Viking culture, and Scandinavian roots are rarely explored. The overarching Norse myth has been passed down as a hegemonic belief system. Loki’s bisexuality is noted in the television series, albeit briefly, in a conversation between him and Sylvie, in which they both comment that they have had both “prince and princess” lovers in the past. Loki in Norse mythology is associated with gender bending and even helps his brother go drag. In the story, Thor’s hammer is stolen and held for ransom by a frost giant, who demands to be married to Freya. Loki and Thor are given a plan by Odin to trick the giant into believing that they are Freya and her handmaiden. As they are dressing, Thor protests that no one will believe their drag performance, and is told in response, “Oh, yes they will.” Loki twirls in his long dress and head scarf. “I look quite beautiful, don’t I” (Alexander 67). Loki also gives birth to his own child in one tale: the child is Sleipner, a horse. This comes from references in the poem Hyndluljóð, “Lopt was impregnated by a wicked woman, from whom every ogress on earth is descended” (Larrington 250). These mythologies have ran through Loki’s trajectory as a transhistorical identity, one who both is tricky, has non-heteronormative birth to monsters and enjoys drag. This certainly places Loki as a queer figure amongst other Norse deities. Norse mythology occupies a smaller space of academic interest than its Greek and Roman kin. In Edith Hamilton’s bestselling 1942 book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Norse mythology is placed in the final chapter after “Less Important Myths.” In an important summary of the shallower interest from Hamilton’s perspective lies her final quote: “By race we are connected with the Norse: our culture goes back to the Greeks” (353). From their mythological systems stems some interesting differentiations in the conception of time as opposed to chronological time, which we associate with most narrative storytelling and history. One event precedes another, and thus follows the inevitable future. Even reading Loki’s past is done through a Christianized co-option of the text. As Lindow writes, the linguistic confusion between past and present tense is frequently mistranslated, or purposely translated, particularly where Ragnarök, the end times in Norse mythology, is written from a now-past Christian present. This leads to the new Christian God placing Thor and Christ in a battle, with the inevitable winning of Christ and the Norse mythology being placed in the past, and possibly past tense. Current readings of the Scandinavian texts are primarily from Latin texts, which were written in the “time and space of early Christianity” (45). The confusion is both in the translation proper, and in the rewriting of the past from its pre-Christian original. In Norse mythology, the gods fight with the people, and their fates are not necessarily predestined. Marvel creates disruptions in mythology and its reinterpretations. In Thor: Love and Thunder, (2022) Zeus were the Head of Gods but Thor was able to defeat him, the liberal reuse and deployment of Marvel causes multiple waves of possible historical disruptions to chronological storytelling. Thor is Loki’s brother, his stepbrother according to most myths. Loki is half frost giant, half god of Asgard. He is often evil, sometimes good, and always embodies trickery. “Loki makes the world more interesting but less safe. He is the father of monsters, the author of woes, the sly god. Loki drinks too much, and he cannot guard his words or his thoughts or his deeds when he drinks. Loki and his children will be there for Ragnarök, the end of everything, and it will not be on the side of the gods of Asgard that they will fight” (Gaiman 14). Loki is in a popularly retold tale: he and Thor go to get something back, and he is dressed as a woman to trick the giants into believing that he and Thor are women. Thor gives them away after burping over beer, but they get what they need. The theme of Loki as excessive is common, his association with drinking and being unable to hold back his truth is one way in which we see Loki’s excess. Viking culture and its Norse gods were incorporated into Christian timelines. Unlike other colonialisms, the story is more of assimilation than one of destruction and new peoples arising. Interestingly the Swedes were the last to convert, even further complicating the now uptight nature of the Swedes. Perhaps the Christian notions of dependency lay root to the dangers of assimilation via any relinquish of individualism. Regardless of such speculation, as history goes Vikings thus become another tale in the conquest of Christian Colonialism and the greater European project. Variangent: Agents of Time And back to the TV Show, Loki breaks down watching images of his father and brother, realizing that his ideas of who he was are not where he is. The memories on the wall break him down and we get a tender side of Loki not yet seen in the films. Seeing his own evil nature, he truly has a reckoning with his own identity. The title of this episode is, Glorious Purpose. Loki has employed the term in earlier Marvel films. In the film franchise Loki has used Glorious Purpose as a phrase to outline his ultimate goal of ruling the universe – in the process of his conversation with Mobius and watching his entire life, his own sense of agency is disrupted and his perception of him being the bearer of free will against a world out to get him is turned around. This change in perspective leads to him deciding to join the TVA as a variant agent. Loki now joins the hunt for disruptive variants, incorporated into the sacred timelines purpose. We first meet the other variant who we later learn is Slyvie in a cut scene where minute men from the show go to 1858 tracing down variant energy in the town of Salina, Oklahoma. The A figure in a red hooded cloak setting fire to fields she has drawn the agents there to steal their time temps, the power needed to traverse time and jump timelines. The space and time here are significant, this was the place where oil was first discovered in Indian Territory. Sylvie has brought the minute men to a place and point in history where she wants to disrupt and call their attention, the discovery of oil in Selina. A newspaper clipping from 1906 states, “The oil springs in this nation are attracting considerable attention, as they are said to be a remedy for all chronic diseases. Rheumatism stands no chance at all, and the worst cases of dropsy yield ot its effects (Wright 1906). The idea that oil was a cure for disease disrupts and combines histories of medicalization and capitalism. The Osage tribes wealth and their mysterious murders is documented in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Gran (2018). This historical novel unveils the hidden history of how in the early 1900’s the Osage tribe members were the wealthiest people in the world due to their oil rich land in North Eastern Oklahoma. Newspapers and public imaginaries were fascinated with these ‘rich Indians’. A series of murders in the 1910’s – 1920’s led to the newly formed FBI sending in agents, who eventually discovered a conspiracy to marry tribal women and kill family members. Not only that but in Gran’s work he discovers the way coroners and doctors covered up deaths by proclaiming them to be from alternate causes than murders. The systematic killing of the Osage was part of a medicalized process to eliminate the Osage. Many deaths were undocumented due to Hoover’s desire of realizing his dream bureaucratic institution, the F.B.I. This brief historicizing of the blood in the land, leads us to the layers of depth in the show. The T.V.A. itself is a bureaucratic institution obsessed with recording and documenting as seen in scenes where Loki and Mobius delve into the files of the organization.[i] Covid Surprise Time: Crips’ Temporality and Neoviralism Loki’s timing coincides in terms of production and reception with Covid-19, a specific instance of global cripping that reordered the spatial and temporal rhythms of neoliberal production and life. This moment provided a pause by way of a ‘surprise event,’ following Jean-Luc Nancy’s articulation of a ‘surprise event.’ In Nancy’s terms, this is a way of allowing for new potentialities that allow us to think about the ways in which Covid itself was aa collective break in time of typical working order. As Covid stopped the clock, people entered lockdown. The fear of an unknown virus caused society to pause. That pause was not equal, front-line workers, mostly under-paid necessary workers and health care workers were forced to encounter the unknowns at a consistent rhythm. The fear was that we may all become disabled. The break in time put people in their homes and away from their families and normal day to day rhythms. This pause in life was done with heroic notions in its rhetorical gesturing, but as lockdowns wore on the rise of neo-viralists led to decries against the government encroaching on individual liberties. At the same time the surprise event of Covid forced us all to reckon with the possibility of society collapsing, something that previously had seemed impossible in the never-ending teological machine of never ending neo-liberal growth. The director gets more time to visit the film’s development and decides to focus more on the love story. Kate Herron, the female director, said, “When we were locked down…I started editing everything we filmed already, and..something that became really clear…was just that the heart and the tone of it was definitely leaning towards, you know, the show definitely wears its heart on its sleeve” (Crowley 2021). The focus on Loki and Sylvie’s relationship growing was essential to portraying the effect correctly in the story. Sylvie deserves more attention at this point. Her power is as an enchantress in the show. She was abducted as a child by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) for creating a nexus event. The taking of a child reflects how far the TVA will go to enforce its time authority. After going through screening, she escapes by biting a captor and stealing a TemPad. The love story is a crip story. First both characters come out as bi-sexual in the show. They are both the same people, in different forms on other timelines. It problematizes even the homonormative nature of loving one’s own gender. Loki’s non-equal other from another timeline is a woman; is this heteronormativity Loki and Loki’s love is especially non-heteronormative because they are destined for death throughout. It is key to look at the story and where they are forced to hide—the only place where they would not be found. It is at the end of any timeline, with the inevitably of apocalypse, that they can go unnoticed. “All the crises in which we are caught – and of which the COVID-19 pandemic is only one minor effect, in comparison to many others – proceed from the unlimited extension of the free use of all the available forces, natural and human, in view of a production that has no end other than itself and its own power...” (Nancy p. 43) The limits of neo-liberalism appear to hang on the possibility of death itself and uncertainty. To embrace uncertainty as a radical call for response, is to in the face of death still go on. Nancy’s body of work focuses on collectives, and, I will argue, is in line with McRuer’s call for crip collectives of radical politics that do not attempt to get rid of the messy. Badious event does exactly that, in favor of truth. No matter how complicated it is, it still does not allow for the uniqueness of a collective deviance, which is what we are reaching for in crip politics. I believe COVID was a crip time, collective felt, yet a surprise event. Allison Kafer wrote that the AIDS epidemic could be viewed as a crip/queer time in a footnote. Kafer refers to McRuer’s call for the importance to focus on examining queer theory, AIDS, and disability studies, which calls attention to the need to view the AIDS epidemic and queer and disability studies as necessary allies in a non-pathologizing collective. I would hope that in the aftermath of what may be an endemic, we may use the lessons of Covid, the memory of Covid to gather our crip collectives. “The virus that follows the routes and rhythms of the global circulation of goods (of which humans are a part) spreads through a contagion that is more effective than that of rights” (Nancy 22). Disability scholars and crip theorists seek to form collectives of the deviants, or in the case of Loki, the variants. FORM/FUNCTION The rhetorical power of Loki exceeds its historical discourse and its name; as a visual rhetoric, the show engages in retro-futuristic aesthetics that bring the viewer into the argument I am making here. The show’s use of 1950s- and 1960s-imagined technological futures highlights an imagining of a future from the past that never came to be. On a rhetorical level, the use of retro-futurism shades the show’s crip reading, placing the viewer in apprehension and questioning something that is both unreal and yet familiar. It conceptually raises the idea that there are imagined futures that hold potentials, good and bad, to reimagine futures to come. You know this is not the present; it is haunted by the colors, technology, and typology of worlds that never fully came to be. Perhaps this is particularly exemplified by the jet ski. In one scene, Mobius flips through a magazine and looks at a jet ski. Loki asks him why he is looking at it, and Mobius says the jet ski is an example of a particularly beautiful combination of form and function that highlights the perfection of a jet ski. Loki asks if he has ever been on one, and Mobius replies no, because it would certainly cause a break in the timeline. This somewhat hilarious commentary brings to light the impossibility of both Mobius’s and Loki’s futures. This impossible future will be further teased out in the analysis. Why a jet ski? The jet ski did see its future, but was Mobius part of that future? Indeed, we also see the failure of nostalgia, a trap criticized by feminist, queer theorists and crip scholars as a longing for a perfect past place. In light of later in the show when we learn that Mobius has had his memory erased and himself was a variant, this scene becomes sad. We learn this when Sylvie tells Loki that TVA employees are variants who have had their memories erased and then been incoluated into the quasi-religious bureaucratic TVA. The TVA functions here as a religious colonial metaphor that could be argued to be the final realization of Plato’s theory on forms as has been traced to theories and the focus on the straightness of time, in which our futures are pre-destined towards the winning narrative of the European project. As de Certeau uncovers settler discourses consistently made a native other that was part of an uncivilized past, that could then be dominated by the more modern righteous settler. Jet-ski is both a verb and a noun. Its both is an object, and to use it, is to jet-ski. The jet-ski is double itself. It is both a vehicle for use on water, and a way to traverse the water on such a vehicle. Chora emerges here, as the necessecity for form and function from Plato’s Timeaus. The perfectly ordered world of Plato can be seen as the teological foundations of science, but even that perfectly ordered world holds a messy, inchorent third discourse. The jet-ski is the individualistic watercraft with no use but recreation, capitalism gone wild, it is purely for fun, it is in fact the excess of utility commodified both to jet-ski and own a jet-ski are ironies of a dream of technological perfection that Mobius does not remember and cannot remember. The story of the jet-ski is never clarified in the narrative, and we do not know if Mobius once used a jet-ski in his former life. Jet-Ski’s have been the downfall of political hopeful Mitt Romney, in his presidential campaign he was photographed on a jet-ski with his wife driving the jet-ski. The photo was capitalized by the Obama campaign and its image put him out of touch with ordinary Americans. Jet-Ski’s are not owned by many people and are loud, an item of individualistic pleasure. More strange is the outcry from people, the photo led to a public outcry about Mitt Romney being out of touch with the common person. Perhaps more than his one ride on a jet-ski it was the way the photo became a media sensation that led to a discussion of the parellels of white-trash toys versus yachts. In another strange twist on the jet-ski and Mitt Romney, he also saved a family whose boat capsized on a jet-ski. That event was not as nearly wide-spread in the discourse surrounding Romney, but the jet-ski itself served as the downfall of one politician. Perhaps jet-skis are one of the retro-futures that came to be, and its usage aggravates a cultural memory. In an image from 1932, one such image of a future jet-ski can be seen. Some futures did come to be. (Reddit 2021) The jet-ski is a trickery rhetorical device in the show. Its usage has slippages into perhaps neo-liberal failed dreams – the haunted spaces of Mobius’s own memory. Covid Crip Abyss: God of Nothing–Chora–Crip Abyss In episode five, Loki is captured and sent to the Void. The Void is important to speak of in depth. It is a place where matter and form collapse, and it is patrolled by Alioth, the monster who eats all matter and form. Sylvie opens a time door after a scene of confrontation, and Loki decides to follow her instead of staying with Mobius. They escape to another apocalyptic scenario where they find themselves stranded due to the loss of the time machine. They end up developing a friendship, and Loki learns about Sylvie’s backstory within the show. She was captured as a child for causing a nexus event but escaped after biting a member of the TVA, and they have continued to hunt her and force her into hiding her entire life. She is determined to destroy the TVA, who took her from her family. After barely escaping the end-of-the-world scenario, they decide to return to the TVA and wake up some members. Renslayer recovers and prunes him. Angered, Sylvie overpowers her and demands the truth about the TVA. Loki awakens in the Void surrounded by multiple variants of himself—Alligator Loki, Child Loki, Classic Loki, and Boastful Loki—and learns that he is in the Void. The head of the TVA at the headquarters tells Sylvie that the Void is the collapse of matter and form, where all those pruned for crimes go. She believes that this is where the time authority is hiding and is determined to go there to find Loki and rescue him. The theme of nostalgia is raised in the Void when Loki is in conversation with Classic Loki, a Loki dressed in a 1960s comic costume, a variant of himself from another timeline. Our Loki asks him, How did the TVA find you? His response is that he was lonely and wanted to find his brother Thor. He then says that when he left his timeline, he was captured because in the world, in all realities, he has only one part to play. They all have one part to play: the God of Outcasts. This band of misfits comes together when Slyvie travels to the Void, working together and with classic Loki sacrificing his life, they are able to defeat Alioth who eats all matter in the void. They see a citadel beyond the Void and go toward it. The collective Loki’s ability to gather as a collective can be thought of as a crip collective. Anti-sociality is a key trope in academic conversations surrounding queer temporality. Edelmen’s claims for anti-social queerness pose a problematic version of such queer orientations in his demonizing of the heteronormative cries to save the child. McRuer calls out the problematics of such a restigmatizing critique that leads to disidentifying with disability and children with disabilities (according to McRuer, Edelmen is also saying “Fuck Tiny Tim”). Anti-social is a useful term for McRuer, and one that he writes is necessary for disability theory. At the outskirts of time, the misfits somewhat ban together in chaotic and unpredibticle ways, all Loki’s of one kind or another, an arm gets bitten off (disability as comedy). Classic Loki says, “Glorious purpose,” as he is eaten by Alioth, laughing as he is destroyed, for the future, for the children of himself, perhaps. Classic Loki’s glorious purpose is that of the collective crips and misfits, a queer rejection of self. Loki and Slyvie march forwards to the TVA’s ultimate space of unity, the citadel, where they finaly meet “He Who Remains”, the true master of the TVA who created the TVA after a multi-verse war where the tiemlines had gone crazy. He created the TVA to trap Alioth and keep order in the universe. Slyvie wants to kill him for all the trauma he has caused her, Loki begs her not to. They share a kiss and then we learn Slyvie does indeed kill him and we see Loki back at the TVA. The TVA is in disarray with timelines branching off in all directions and he goes up to Mobius who does not remember him. In a strange form of futurism, Mobius does not remember Loki. We are left wondering what is of this new breaking world as the series ends. Why does Loki know who he is and Mobius does not? Perhaps Mobius is like his name means a trans-historical figure of time and space itself. A Mobius strip is a a surface that loops on itself. If you take one strand of paper and twist it then attach it to itself, you have a mobius strip. When Slyvie kills He Who Remains, time exploded and twisted back on itself, and the true break of time was not the revolution they dreamed of. But merely a return to a new but different TVA, as Loki looks at a statue that has now changed from One Time Keeper to Three Time Keepers. The result of any action risks the start of a new reaction. And the show leaves us there. The debates on form and matter were a critical part of philosophy before Mobius and Loki’s discussion on jet skis in the show. A key term raised in critical philosophical debates from Plato, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Kristeva, Irigrary, Butler, Nancy, and others is ‘chora’. Chora emerges in Plato’s Timeaus as a concept that may destroy his own project. Chora is a sort of side term to describe. Chora is deployed precisely as an errant cause in Timeaus; the placement of chora is rarely noted in depth, but its displacement is described precisely after a long space on the optical nature of the origin of the universe. All the world makes sense in a Euclidian mathematical formation in Timeaus, but then an errant cause interrupts the ocular cause. Perhaps this errant cause is, in fact, the cripping of Western philosophy that we could not see, but that keeps smudging up our history. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe. So if I’m to tell the story of how it really came to be in this way, I’d also have to introduce the character of the Straying Cause—how it is its nature to set things adrift” (Plato 48). Here, Plato engages in some Loki crip rhetorical Loki-ing. Before we begin to articulate the ever-continuing discourse on chora, we first have a messy birth. Perhaps Plato’s own crip horizon was more radical than we had imagined. In describing the beginning of order, it was necessary to describe an opposite and a third—that third is chora, and that third is of a necessarily errant cause. Our conversation about Slyvie and Loki evoked another person Mobius and his jet-ski and the political utility of the conversation may seem to have lost its power. The crip future is perhaps the only future. There is no future in the present, but only a future of those dreams of the past that sometimes comes to be, and sometimes does not. An important argument comes to surface which is that Slyvie and Loki and Classic Loki all act. They choose to act and run and continue on, despite the instability of their own future. The trickster is not tricky for inaction, but for manipulating and finding ways out of situations. Mobius turns on itself, and the politics of crip must escape the return of the same. Butler’s post-structuralist accounting of gender argues that gender is a performance and not a stable identity, arguing that the conception of, “gender as a constituted social temporality.” Is necessary, and agency does not happen through that identity, but rather through, “discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ground.”(1990 p. 2388). I take this temporal focus to be critical in understanding agency and identity. Through reading visual media, in this case television, with attention to disjunctions that disrupt the temporal ground of normal chronological conceptions of gender, identity and narrative, we find places where the grounds upon which what Butler calls, compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist domination lie. Chora also haunts the discourse of articulation about the sources of identity. Somewhere in the Void is a void we all keep falling into. This haunted discourse extends in the same way that Loki extends our ability to be tricked into and away from futures. But what if something exists beyond the Void? It would, in a retro-futuristic reimagining of what Norse myth might have said on time, be possible that there is another something, past chora. Perhaps chora was confusing us the whole time. The origins of Plato, which confounded some of the deepest thinkers of our time, a debate on origin versus endings, could maybe be reworked into simply thinking beyond the chora; what lies behind the chora. To put it in another way, we could say that Sylvie and Loki’s journey beyond the Void is metaphorically linked to the possibilities of critique itself. We are always looking to unveil the chora, to either damn or liberate it. There is a digging and questioning on those things that we cannot quite capture. Chora is not alone here; multiple variants uncannily represent similar strains of thought. Loki embodies the process of crip philosophy, or the crip philosopher, searching, tricking, and using the language one has, to articulate a future that is not there. As is always the risk, we may fold into ourselves. But there is an ethics of risk, that opens in the temporal spaces of uncertainity. One which the critique embraces, in an attempt to not resolve but further open strands of possibility. I would argue that chora itself is a crip-space-place following Derrida’s interrogation in a different way than Michael O-Rourke argues in the roguish future of queer studies. I think the problem with chora’s placement as a haunted discourse in philosophy is that it is not so easily contained. It is not just a no-place, which privileges no one nowhere, but it is the messy, bubbling spaces: “It is a glitch in the mechanism, a preface or footnote that would also be the body of the text and its conclusions, a quality that would not solely be measured ‘by the nonmythic character of its term,” and thus, in the end, would take up its value of disorder. Chora is necessary for Kosmos, but it is also potentially fatal to it. The entire issue is all right here” (Nancy and Barrue 79). Perhaps even more poignant for a crip future, ”It is the end, the center and the beyond of the horizon” (Nancy and Barrue 80). And in this way reading into the Void, Looking back to Loki’s Norse Horizons, and Plato’s own undoing, we worked through a process of rhetorical cryptology. Works Cited Alexander, Heather. A Child’s Introduction to Norse Mythology, illustrated by Meredith Hamilton, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2018. Bublex, & During, E. (2014). The future does not exist : retrotypes. Éditions B42. Crowley, Liam. “Loki Director Reveals How the Pandemic Improved the Disney+ Show.” The Direct. June 14, 2021. https://thedirect.com/article/loki-disney-plus-show-episodes-production Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod, Stanford University Press, 1995. First published in 1993 by Éditions Gailée. Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric (Critical Perspectives on Disability). Syracuse University Press. Kindle Edition, p. 16. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York and London. New York University Press, 2016 Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. (2017) Doubleday New York. Larrington, Carolyne (Trans.) The Poetic Edda. Oxford World’s Classics, 1999. ISBN 0-19-283946-2 Liu, Jihong. "The Origin and Application of Retro-Futurism." Journal of Landscape Research 11.5 (2019): 104-8. ProQuest. Web. 29 Sep. 2022. Lindow, John, and John Lindow. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2002. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=316382. Loki. Created by Created by Michael Waldron, Disney+, 2021. Magnet, Shoshana and Amanda Watson. “How to Get Through the Day with Pain and Sadness: Temporality and Disability in Graphic Novels. Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, New York University Press, 2017. Mcruer, R. “Any Day Now: Queerness, Disability, and the Trouble with Homonormativity.” Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, New York University Press, 2017. McRuer, R. “No Future for Crips: Disorderly Conduct in the New World Order; or, Disability Studies on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” Culture-Theory-Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2017, pp. 63–77. McRuer, R. “Disability Nationalism in Crip Times.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 4.2, 2010, pp. 163–178. doi:10.3828/jlcds.2010.13 Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroFuturism/comments/xambk2/ocean_jet_ski_1932/ Wright, Muriel H. “Newspaper clipping concerning 1859 oil strike in Mayes County.” 4127.7 Mary Jane Ross Manuscript Collection. May 1906. Tulsla: Gilcrease museum, https:///collections.gilcrease.org/object/41277(07/25/2019). Sharon L. Snyder, David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability (Kindle Locations 1441-1442). More history to include? Loki has three children in an affair with the ice giant Angrboda. He already has two with his wife, Sygn. In this story, the three children are bound and seized by the gods, who bring them to Odin in Asgard. Hel is monstrous. “Those on the right of the third child saw a beautiful young girl, while those on the left tried not to look at her, for they saw a dead girl, her skin and flesh rotted black, walking in their midst.” (687) Hel is made the ruler of the deepest dark places and is the queen of those who die in “unworthy ways—of disease or of old age, of accidents or in childbirth.” (687). Does this foreclose the loop again? Does an examination of Norse mythology only reveal a series of narrative protheses in which the crip is always sent to death as sacrificial redemption? Hel’s possessions are a bowl, hunger, a knife, famine, and her bed. Monsters, queers and crips have a laden history of being made invisible and the association of disability and homosexuality as monstrous have made both active modes of resistance to heteronormative histories. Affirming and recapturing these tales can possibly be modes of re-writing those history would rather write out. [i] We can see the power of the Eugenic movement, as Mitchell and Snyder write about out the transatlantic eugenics movement created ideas of deviance as a way of identifying disability and dehumanizing disabled and racial others in a process of elimination of deviance While the histories of Native Americans, African slaves, Jewish gentry, and disabled people are often historically and culturally distinct, the shared social marginality of these groups arises from the view of the "deviant" body as that which automatically disqualifies individuals from cultural participation (and biological desirability).” This predictive science falls in line with the predictions of capitalism and its markets. |
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December 2024
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