THE LOST BOY Leda Hayes A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS December 2017 Committee: Becca Cragin, Advisor Jeremy Wallach Esther Clinton Jeffrey Brown © 2017 Leda Hayes All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Becca Cragin, Advisor The following thesis seeks to contribute to contemporary masculinities scholarship by exploring the recent deployment, on and among 20th and 21st century MIC telecommunications, of the myth of the lost boy. It begins with a close look at the origin of the myth of the lost boy, a form first authored as a revision to modernity’s myth of the boy by New Imperialists who sought to justify the long term occupation of colonial territories and protectorates and thus shifted, away from an earlier model of domestic masculinity that pressed forward towards an exhaustive known, rational, and developed; and towards a model of masculinity that was restricted to a Bakhtinian adventure time of serial story, homosocial partnership, and performances of primal boyhood. After a subsequent exploration of the medium and mandates of MIC synergy, that utilizes Marshall McLuhan’s science of medium, this thesis offers that a late 20th and early 21st century community among such Futurama discovers, within the lost boy 2.0 it embraces, a configuration of masculinity that can remasculinize Futurama’s dogma of networked node. While the myth of the lost boy is often popularly proposed to be problematic, detached, and disordered, my research suggests that the myth is instead a restorative configuration that discovers the model of network within Futurama to be inspired by an organic, empowered masculine affection: far from lost, the lost boy of 2017 is the heart of labor, kinship, narrative, and life. The myth of the lost boy 2.0 offers the 21st century a masculinity that naturalizes the radical and new of MIC telecommunications by discovering the form of network within a man. iv With Pat and never without Michaela and Kailey v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The completion of this thesis was made possible in the generous support, advice, and encouragement gifted to me by a full team of educators, staff members, coworkers, students, and friends (and the cooperation of one tiny sonny with an iPad). It would have certainly failed to have been born without Professor Esther Clinton and Professor Jeremy Wallach who patiently dialogued my lost boy ideas, introduced me to the exciting world of social theory, and helped an enthusiastic Adorno to attempt balance, pace, method, and clarity. Jeremy is responsible both for the question that generated the discovery of Hammer and the embrace in this thesis of Fry; Esther is responsible for any legibility in this thesis. Any illegibility is due to my uncooperative nature. Beka Patterson compassionately, and unwaveringly, guided me through this complex process. Professor Jeff Brown reintroduced me to remasculinization, Professor Vikki Krane gave me permission in plenty of possibility and space, Professor Radhika Gajjala helped me discover myself to be the Gidget among lost boys, Professor Bill Albertini gave me Puar, Professor Andrew Schocket heard Sutton-Smith and Michael Hammer first, Professor Cynthia Baron introduced me to Angela Ndalianis, and Professor Becca Cragin both assigned Gloria Anzaldua and asked how I knew the digital was moral (generating the moment Gabriella Coleman told me, whether she meant to, to look at the medium). This thesis began, as an independent study at MHC, with Professor Robin Blaetz who let Barbie Lohman write a paper about teen movies and masculinity. I could not be more grateful for the ways in which a young scholar was humored, encouraged, and challenged by Professor Blaetz both in that research and in Films Studies courses. (Though it took quite a few years, and vi a son of my own, I finally know how boys grow up.) I’d like to additionally acknowledge that the foundation of this thesis depends on the investments of MHC Professors Amy E. Martin, Peter Berek, Elizabeth Young, and Carolyn Collette. OCC Professor Louie B. Graham, my very first professor, gave me the world one summer in Terrance, Shakespeare, and the truth that “if you had bought the book, then it was about whatever you thought it was about—as long as you could explain it.” Michaela Hansen read every draft, took every phone call, and helped me to arrive where it all could become something beyond my favorite thing to think about. This is her triumph and alchemy. My extended unconventional family--Tessa, K’s brother Ethan, Steven, ACS 2013, POPC 2014, Kerri, Jenn, Sharon, Diane, Stephanie, Paradise, Monica, Heather, EAP, TCC WTC, Team Invista, Kristi, Tom Taylor, Annie and NIAC, Gussie, Richard, the hands that held my baby so that my arms could be free (AWS, Peggy, Sarah, MV), and countless lost boys who let me play too—were my partners, home, and together in the process of this journey. When this thesis was impossibly hard to do, and when it was the most wonderful thing in the world, I have done it for, and with, Pat. We cross this finish line together. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION: FUTURAMA AND FRY, REMASCULINIZING THE TENETS OF NETWORK…………..... ....................................................................................................... 1 Futurama …………………………………………………………………………. .. 1 MIC as Futurama: the noun …………………………………………..……. 1 Futurama: the adjective …………………………………………………… . 2 Futurama: the series ……………………………………………………… .. 4 Fry ……………………………………………………………………………..…… 6 The Slacker………………………………………………………………… 7 The Lost Boy……………………………………………………………… .. 8 Futurama as Technologies: the networked node …………………………………… 11 The Medium is the Message ……………………………………………… . 12 An Outline: The Map to an Investigation of Futurama and Fry……………. 15 The Science of Medium: a note …………………………………………… 20 CHAPTER ONE: A DELIVERY BOY!…………………………………………………… 24 Masculine Myths ……………………………………………………………………. 24 The Boy, Lost……………………………………………………………….. 29 The Other, Lost …………………………………………………………….. 31 Remasculinization…………………………………………………………… 34 Lost Boy as Remasculinization …………………………………………….. 36 New New York……………………………………………………………………. 38 Gotta Do ……………………………………………………………………. 42 vii The Boy and the Bot…………………………………………………………. 44 The Lost Boy, Lost ………………………………………………………… 50 CHAPTER TWO: THE 21ST CENTURY…………………………………………..……. 53 Obliterating…………………………………………………………………………. 53 A Subject Without Work …………………………………………………… 55 The Solution for Stable Stochastic Flow……………………………………. 56 Packet Mechanics: Distributed Control, Demand Access, and Redundancy . 57 Packet Switching Network as Business Process…………………………… 59 The Central Database: Mandated Play …………………………………… .. 61 The Lost Boy 2.0…………………………………………………………………… 63 Telxon—21st Century Node ……………………………………………… .. 64 EMR—21st Century Network……………………………………………… 67 21st Century, Lost……………………………………………… ................... 69 Love Finds the Lost Boy …………………………………………………… 76 The Masculine Network…………………………………………………… . 81 CONCLUSION: TOGETHER…………………………….….………………………..…… 85 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………… 90 1 INTRODUCTION: FUTURAMA AND FRY, REMASCULINIZING THE TENETS OF NETWORK Futurama The following thesis looks closer at both Futurama and Fry to argue that the masculine mechanics of a lost boy character like Philip J. Fry remasculinizes the pervasive postwar Military Industrial Complex (MIC) tenets of networked node. This assertion first presents a broad and impressive list of terminology to discretely define within a careful introduction. I begin with Futurama. MIC as Futurama: the noun In the context of these pages the term Futurama is bound primarily to the MIC: a synergistic complex of military and industry encouraged by 20th century legislation. Such a configuration of cooperative and interdependent nodes of power gained enthusiastic adoption after this style of task management facilitated the innovation and speed that birthed, by way of the nuclear bomb and bountiful wartime production, the global might of postwar American nation.1 The term MIC was first used by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961; however, the style of synergetic partnership it denotes between government and industry stakeholders was an emerging practice in American politics during J. Edgar Hoover’s presidency, as a model that shifted away from Progressive Era proposals of natural monopoly and a dogma of skilled 1 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (13, 16, 20). 2 management executed in the name of the common good of the majority, and is generally proposed to have first appeared in significance in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.2 I look, in the following thesis, at the Futurama of 21st century telecommunications, communication that moves as a signal through space in an electromagnetic transmission, and infer, from the mechanics of node and network within such telecommunications, a corresponding ideal model of work and worker. While 21st century telecommunications, like the nomadic networked computing of mobile browsing, can appear to be a radical practice only just emerging, the technology, research, and network that realizes such communications was both initiated in early 20th century MIC associated legislation and business policy, and enthusiastically embraced and funded in postwar MIC legislation and business policy. The postwar MIC is notably responsible for authoring the contemporary telecommunications infrastructure of satellite