Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

“new computer culture blend: blend of human and computer meanings” (Manovich 2001, 63), but that
create new kinds of postgendered cultural logics and digital trans-human/posthuman subjectivities as well.
Tingting Liu
culture
Do social media applications have sexual identity? Neoliberal ethos, state censorship, and sexual
For centuries, family networks and professional matchmakers have played a dominant part in the facilitation
of love and marriage encounters among Chinese people. However, over the last decade, when web-based
media platforms have started to share this task, they have also afforded other more “liberal” forms of sexual
relationships. Pleasure-driven, non-committed and/or same-sex relationships (Farrer, 1999, 2002; Pei, 2011;
Pei & Ho Sik Ying, 2009) have been proliferating within the social space generated by China’s transition into a
market-driven and neoliberal economy sustained by individualist consumption (Rofel, 1999, 2007). Using the
popular Chinese hook-up social media app Momo, this paper applies Foucault’s thoughts to explore how the
sociocultural context of post-socialist China has produced such a “radical” mobile application. It examines
Momo’s recent conservative transition when it sought to attract foreign investment and to survive the
state’s censorship, and to raise further theoretical questions concerning sexuality and new media studies. I
ask whether we can describe social media as having sexual identities, and how ‘sexual identities of social
media’ can be used as a lens for understanding the complex interconnections among other social media
platforms and their sociocultural contexts.
2P
Feminist speculations (Chair, Alifa Bandali)
Kath Kenny
First person narratives, third wave feminism & drug stories: raising consciousness or raising profiles?
Decades after Betty Friedan (1963) and Anne Summers (1975) raised concerns about vast numbers of
housewives using prescription drugs, two Australian journalists and feminists, Pryor (2014) and Freedman
(2015), published first-person columns about juggling work and family through consuming anti-depressant
and anti-anxiety medication. Drawing on research for a recently-completed masters thesis, I argue that while
third-wave feminism’s use of the first-person voice is clearly an offspring of second-wave feminism’s
consciousness-raising, its maternal DNA is sometimes hard to discern. Where second-wave feminists
harnessed the first-person story to build collective movements, the third-wave feminists discussed here
recruit the personal story in building a personal brand. And while second-wave feminists used personal
stories to interrogate problems in women’s social worlds, the third-wave feminists’ stories emphasise
individual choice, adaption and personal transformation (including a medical transformation at the most
fundamental level of self). Finally, I consider these columns in the context of celebrity feminism, arguing
Freedman occupies a hybrid or transitional position between a tradition of the feminist journalist and author
who becomes a celebrity, and a new, reversed trajectory of celebrities who become feminist authors.
Sarah Baker
Back to the future: feminist speculative design and alternative pasts
Critical speculative design is a design practice that creates objects and representations in order to imagine
alternative presents and possible futures. Now over fifteen years old, critical speculative design has emerged
as a field in its own right. Using critical theory as inspiration for its speculations, projects often ask questions
about the role of new technologies in our everyday lives and the conditions of contemporary consumer
culture. Recently, critical speculative design has come under some harsh criticism; the field has been accused
of reproducing western privileged perspectives, and of rendering the social inequalities of class, race,
gender, and sexuality invisible. Drawing on emergent practical and theoretical work that attempts to address
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