Screen Bodies

Welcome, readers, to the final installment of the ninth volume of Screen Bodies. We are pleased to present an issue that features such theoretically rich and diverse approaches to media studies. The first three articles in this issue focus on digital and internet culture, examining the social relations fostered by augmented reality and social media.

This article reimagines discourses around race and gender within collaborative cultural productions by investigating how trauma is computed via visual images and human-computer interactions. I argue the use of digital collaborative formations—particularly that of oppositional writing in socially mediated spaces—provokes modes of encounter that enact a shared distributed experience of different ways of printing new paths in and out of trauma. By analyzing the digital storytelling taking place in “Breonna's Garden,” an augmented reality application that tells the story of Breonna Taylor, I clarify how digital technologies serve as an avenue for transformative recoding of the mechanisms of racialization.

Twitter's 2015 change from the star to the heart button caused many participants to antagonistically respond. This modification was supposed to enable participants’ easy and frictionless engagements. Nevertheless, it caused friction, including journalists’ identification as dismissed super users who were contaminated by the heart's feminine references. I employ close reading to study news stories, posts, and Twitter's narratives about the buttons. I cite academic scholarship on friction, feelings, buttons, and gender scripts as a means of arguing that Twitter's heart button was sometimes understood as frictionless, but it was also refused because of negative connotations. While such scholars as Sebastián Lehuedé and José Medina argue that individuals can employ friction to intervene in intolerance, my humanities study underscores how gender and sexuality norms are reproduced.

This article interrogates how TikTok has become a voice of authority in the self-diagnosis of ADHD and builds on theories of social, cultural, and algorithmic authority, to offer a theoretical framework of “techno-cultural authority”. Through a digital ethnography and analysis of ADHD TikToks and the technological infrastructures and assemblages surrounding the TikTok app, I demonstrate how ADHD TikTok content creators adopt visual and discursive norms from other trending TikTok content and traditional visual media content to generate authority, and to ensure their videos are deemed viewable and relevant by viewers and the algorithm. Contrary to traditional understandings of medical authority, I find that authority on TikTok is not produced by individuals or institutions, but rather by content creators who engage, en masse, with the supporting technologies of the TikTok app to reproduce familiar trends and visual norms.

This article explores women's re-appropriation of the national discourse of history and heritage in contemporary China. Examining women artists’ recreation of Silk Road heritage objects, I demonstrate how they produce a new narrative of women's time that, in turn, generates an alternative form of agency. In remaking the figure of the feitian (apsaras) from the material heritage of the Silk Road, as represented in Dunhuang Buddhist art, Chinese female artists offer new ways to understand the position of women in Chinese historical cultures. The artists tell these stories not in a linear sequence, but rather via the thick surface assembled with objects—the materials of statues and cyborgs—and human flesh. Based on interviews with the artists, a visual analysis of three artworks in relation to critical race theories (Cheng), and queer theories of temporality (Freeman), this article discusses forms of femininity, agency, and time.

In the early 2020s, queer cannibalism rose in significant popularity with films such as Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All (2022). This article investigates this growing phenomenon of queer cannibalism in horror films as a mode of articulating queer desire and isolation. It poses the question, when queer stories are intertwined with cannibalistic tendencies, what does the consuming of human flesh determine about their existence? Through a queer and feminist theoretical lens, I outline the social, cultural, and political influences that construct particular narratives through an analysis of Bones and All (2022). As a result of this analysis, I locate the uses of queer cannibalism in horror media as a means of rejecting oppressive social and cultural constructions of desire as well as its operating as a method of articulating a desire for acceptance and, in many instances, love.

Anxieties generated from the challenges of sustainable and equitable societies and the hopes for transcending routes through uncertain times have often found their paths crossing within the motion sequence of the dystopian car chase on film. Each decade has met this crossing—of frightening futures and fleeting freedoms—with its own set of driving rules and transport-based dimensions. From Mad Max's original release in 1979 to the most recent Death Race installment, Beyond Anarchy, in 2018, the dystopian car chase on film represents vehicles of vision, in which races for the drivers’ survival, personal freedom, community, meaning, and humanization provide the chance to transcend, even if temporarily, the audiences’ existing fears of the future ramifications of their present societies.

This article examines the series Tiger King through a Marxist lens, challenging prevailing capitalist narratives. It explores how the show provides a metanarrative of the present, critiquing capitalist values and exposing their illusory nature. By dethroning the Tiger King and questioning the legitimacy of meritocracy, it reveals the underlying dynamics of capitalist social relations characterized by lies, deception, and savagery. While not immediately leading to class consciousness or Marxism, the show lays the groundwork for this framework. The article also contemplates the potential rise of authentic class consciousness beyond capitalist triumphalism, sparked by widespread dissatisfaction as reflected in social conflicts. Ultimately, it suggests that Tiger King serves as a microcosm of broader power struggles, hinting at the possibility of impending class consciousness and class struggle.