Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

One recent internet phenomenon that has ignited discussions on social media and in academic circles is the topic of cancel and call-out culture. To bridge this gap, I map a cultural and theoretical lineage of digital activism and cancel culture, which intersects with black feminist studies, racial capitalism scholarship, and feminist media discourses. Within this lineage, I examine the tensions between respectability politics, homonormativity, and Foucauldian panopticism to contextualize the disproportionate policing and hate speech lobbied at black and brown queer bodies online, alongside their popular representations in the media. Furthermore, I conduct a digitally ethnographic case study that collects and analyzes instances of fan cancellations involving various contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race as evidence supporting my claims that the show encourages the fanbase to act as “cancellors,” regulating how queer individuals are allowed to express themselves on the reality television giant. Interrogating respectability further, I consider how RPDR devises its own canceling culture, funneling a homonormative and white supremacist gaze that year after year, season after season, profits from and perpetuates the social disposability of disrespectable queer persons of color. By analyzing how Drag Race constructs a “canceling culture” through its mise en scene, construction of on-screen power dynamics, and fan-polling, I intend to demonstrate that RuPaul and production company, World of Wonder, invite fans to evaluate and eliminate queens alongside the show's panel of judges, depoliticizing the transgressive potential of the camp representations the show platforms by encouraging the disposal of and minimization of its queer talent.

Committee: Mytheli Sreenivas (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Gender Studies; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Science of Journalism (BSJ), Ohio University, 2023, Journalism

Streaming Killed The Radio Star: Economic and Consumer Behavior Trends in the Age of Music Streaming is a three-episode podcast that seeks to understand the current economic landscape of the music industry and consider the implications of such a landscape. Over the course of 13 interviews, we seek to understand consumer thoughts, behaviors, and opinions on topics of music streaming, artist compensation, cancel culture, and ethical consumption. Accompanying the podcast series is an academic paper explaining the theory and process of its creation.

Committee: Elizabeth Hendrickson (Advisor) Subjects: Journalism; Multimedia Communications; Music

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2022, Arts and Sciences: Sociology

What does talking about race online look like during a time when politicians and the broader media eco-system warn that it is dangerous to do so? Most Americans, 64%, believe that their free speech rights are threatened by the cancel culture. They express concern that if they say the wrong thing online that the cancel culture mob will harass and surveille them, leading potentially to their loss of livelihood and reputation. In this study I conduct a cross-platform analysis of pop culture racial discourse topics to find out what online racial discourse looks like under the specter of the cancel culture. I qualitatively analyze social media posts (90) and corresponding comments (4,140) from the social media platforms TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. I chose content related to two high profile cases of cancel culture, the cancellations of Aunt Jemima and Dr. Seuss, and discussions about Critical Race Theory. These topics represent three sites of popular online discourse about race and racism all happening in a time when cancel culture is thought to be an inhibitor to our rights to engage in these conversations online. My findings demonstrate that within this sphere of online racial discourse there are some unique dynamics that stand in contrast to what prior research suggest that I would find. 1) I find an environment of racial protectionism where most users, regardless of their position on cancel culture or Critical Race Theory, argue that Black and other people of color should be protected from racism. Instead of arguments that seek to diminish the impact or presence of racism, or blame racial minorities for the outcomes, the broad consensus is that racism is real and that all people have a moral urgency to be allies in combatting it. 2) I find an environment of hyper politicization among those on the political right, but not on the political left. This shared sense of communal identity draws boundaries around politics, rather than race, so that the political le (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Annulla Linders Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stephanie Sadre-Orafai Ph.D. (Committee Member); Derrick Brooms Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2022, English

While Iris Murdoch scholars tend to focus pointedly on her moral quest for goodness, I plan to demonstrate that appreciating her unique brand of metaphysics is not possible without also deciphering her lesser-analyzed philosophy of evil. In “Against Dryness” (1961) Murdoch claims that modern literature “contains so few convincing pictures of evil” and that our inability to “imagine evil” is a consequence of our post-war perception of humanity, which she believed was far too optimistic given the human atrocities committed in the twentieth century. We are thus left with a dangerous fantasy that humans are “totally free and responsible, knowing everything we need to know for the important purposes of life,” which is a dry view because it fails to consider that humans are complex, contingent, and morally muddled. I will show how Murdoch's problem of dryness exists in today's pervasive social media practice of “cancel culture” which, like a dry novel, also paints an overly optimistic view of human nature and naively assumes that humans can readily choose acts of good over evil. I will do so by analyzing Murdoch's evil enchanters—particularly a chillingly demonic scene in The Flight From The Enchanter (1956) that involves a dry interpretation of the pornographic photograph surreptitiously taken of Rosa Keepe in which Calvin Blick exclaims: ‘This is my eye' . . . ‘This is the truthful eye that sees and remembers. The lens of my camera.' Just as Calvin's evil eye judges Rosa within the rigid confines of one snapshot in time, those who participate in cancel culture utilize similar reductive tactics to determine the moral value of a person based upon a sole photo, text, or event and purposefully do not make any space to consider the entire—invariably muddled, flawed, and complex— picture of the life of the individual they contemptuously excoriate and seek to cancel. The solutions to dryness that Murdoch's philosophy intimates are twofold: on the moral (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Fine David (Advisor) Subjects: Educational Theory; Literature; Social Research