UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Haptic Media
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Haptic Media: Sexuality, Gender, and Affect in Technology Culture, 1959–2015 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies by Diana M. Pozo Committee in charge: Professor Anna Everett, Chair Professor Constance Penley Professor Michael Curtin Professor Mireille Miller-Young Professor Lisa Cartwright December 2016 The dissertation of Diana M. Pozo is approved. ____________________________________________ Constance Penley ____________________________________________ Michael Curtin ____________________________________________ Mireille Miller-Young ____________________________________________ Lisa Cartwright ____________________________________________ Anna Everett, Committee Chair November 2016 Haptic Media: Sexuality, Gender, and Affect in Technology Culture, 1959–2015 Copyright © 2016 by Diana M. Pozo iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have finished this project without the many people who touched me along the way. My dissertation committee—Anna Everett, Constance Penley, Michael Curtin, Mireille Miller-Young, and Lisa Cartwright—made this unique piece of research possible with their openness, as well as their many areas of diverse expertise. Many others at UC Santa Barbara were instrumental to my intellectual and personal development, including members of my MA committee Janet Walker, Lisa Parks, and Charles Wolfe; Paul Amar, who I worked with as a manuscript editor during the later years of my dissertation; and Edward Branigan, whose library office was an idyllic retreat for the first year of the project. My research would not have been possible without a number of collaborators and mentors. Some of my earliest helpers were those I met or heard speak at the conferences I attended for this project, including Heather Kelley, Kyle Machulis, Maggie Mayhem, Dee Dennis, Mark Kernes, Kelly Holland, Lafe Spietz, Jiz Lee, and Shine Louise Houston, among many others. Being an organizer for the Queerness and Games Conference has been an incredible experience, particularly working with QGCon 2015 organizers Bonnie Ruberg, Chelsea Howe, Dietrich Squinkifer, and Christopher Goetz. I also thank Lucas Goulart for his participation as a researcher and collaborator in the 2015 QGCon Design Workshop. Finally, thank you to my chosen and birth families, and the communities I have been privileged to be a part of, for supporting my health and well-being. First, thanks to Jetti Allen, the love of my life, for existing, and for supporting me through all the twists and turns of this process. You are a prince. I can’t say thank you enough to Orion Pozo, Sabina Vermeulen, Tara Pozo, Anna Pozo, and all my biological family in North Carolina, New iv York, and Seattle, for believing in me. My graduate student community at UC Santa Barbara supported me in countless ways, giving me places to live and stay, and giving queer love in a hopeless place: Athena Tan, Carlos Jimenez, Mary McGuire, Chloe Diamond-Lenow, Alston D’Silva, Alison Reed, Lan Le, Heather Berg, Ryan Bowles, Jade DaVon Petermon, Rachel Fabian, Lindsay Palmer, John Vanderhoef, Amanda Phillips, Jennifer Hessler, Dan Reynolds, Steve Witkowski, Alex Champlin, Maria Corrigan, Hannah Goodwin, Ouidyane Elouardaoui, Jeff Scheible, and many others made my life at UCSB possible. During the final years of my dissertation writing, friends, community members, and chosen family in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area helped me to survive and thrive, including Ianna Owen, Null Baron, Xandir Cook, Anna Anthropy, Mattie Brice, Denise Sanchez, Melvin Osby, Carol Masters-Salnave, Ryan Vidrine, Alex Lannon, Zain Syed, and so many others. v VITA OF DIANA M. POZO September 2016 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in Film and Media Studies and French Literature, Swarthmore College, June 2009 Master of Arts in Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, April 2011 Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 2016 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2009-2013: Teaching Assistant, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Summer 2012, Summer 2013: Teaching Associate, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 2010-2014: Editorial Assistant, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies Fall 2015: Facilitator, Queerness and Games Design Workshop, Berkeley PUBLICATIONS “In Practice: Queerness and Games,” Camera Obscura (forthcoming 2017). “Trigger Warnings and the Porn Studies Classroom,” Porn Studies 2, nos. 2–3 (2015), dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2015.1054683. “Countergaming’s porn parodies, hard core and soft,” in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games. Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria eds. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 133–46. “Visualizing Data for Pleasure: Heather Kelley on Game Design, Sexuality and User Interfaces.” Interview. Media Fields Journal no. 6 (2013), mediafieldsjournal.org/visualizing-data-for-pleasure/author/mediafieldsjournal. “Water Color: Radical Color Aesthetics in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 11, no. 4 (December 2013), dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2013.812707. “War Games at Home, Home Games at War: The Geography of Multiplayer Military First- Person Shooting Games,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2012): tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2012_WarGames.html. vi “History of Feminist Film Theory,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland, eds. (Routledge, 2014). “Feminist Film Theory, Core Concepts,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland, eds. (Routledge, 2014). “Beating a Game,” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012). “Non-Player Character,” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012). “Portal” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012). AWARDS 2009: Consortium for Literature, Theory and Culture (CLTC) Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara 2009–2014: Chancellor’s Fellowship, University of California, Santa Barbara LEADERSHIP AND SERVICE 2014-2016: Graduate Student Representative, Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group, Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2015-2016: Co-Organizer, Queerness and Games Conference FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Film and Media Studies Doctoral Emphasis: Feminist Studies Studies in Videogames with Professor Anna Everett Studies in Media Industries with Professors Constance Penley and Michael Curtin Studies in Feminism, Race, and Sexuality with Professor Mireille Miller-Young Studies in Adult Film and Media with Professors Constance Penley and Mireille Miller- Young vii ABSTRACT Haptic Media: Sexuality, Gender, and Affect in Technology Culture, 1959–2015 by Diana M. Pozo The rise of haptic technologies in the media industries—from touchscreens that touch back, to vibrating videogame controllers and moving and vibrating cinema seat technologies—is just one indication of how contemporary social, news, and entertainment media increasingly engage their audiences through touch, embodiment, and affect. Media scholars have theorized film spectatorship as haptic, or have studied haptic technologies and human computer interaction at the site of the interface. This project proposes a theory of haptic media that combines multiple definitions of the sense of touch into a framework for understanding fantasies of immersive media, based on studies of sexuality, embodiment, and affect in North American technology culture, beginning in the mid-20th century. Using examples from queer videogame culture, cinema seating technologies from The Tingler (dir. William Castle, 1959) to D-BOX, and the relationship of virtual reality systems to fantasies of “teledildonic” virtual sexuality, Haptic Media argues that the field of fantasy-laden media technology development long associated with the “new” could productively be re-framed in terms of the “haptic.” This shift from new media to haptic media centers marginalized bodies viii in media politics, an approach with broad relevance across the fields of film theory, feminist media studies, videogame studies, queer theory, media history/historiography, fan studies, and the history and philosophy of science. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Media and the Sense of Touch ............................................................................ 1 An Origin Myth ..................................................................................................................... 2 Counterhaptics ...................................................................................................................... 7 How to Study Haptic Media: Speculative Methodologies for Speculative Commodities .. 11 Structure of the Project ....................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 1. The Theory of Haptic Media ................................................................................. 20 What is the Sense of Touch? ............................................................................................... 20 Why Haptic Media? ...........................................................................................................