SEED <woman sitting in front of a screen>/<girl online>A USER MANIFESTO Joanna Walsh PhD submission, Creative and Critical Writing, 2020 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there-from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. No part of the material offered has previously been submitted by the candidate for a degree in this or any other University. 1 CONTENTS CREATIVE SUBMISSION—SEED (37, 640 words) Seed-story.com CRITICAL SUBMISSION—<woman sitting in front of a screen>/<girl online>A USER MANIFESTO (62,187 words) 2 Abstracts Creative Submission: My digital narrative, Seed, seeks to re-work conventional notions of ‘character’ and ‘plot’ in fiction, via a the polyphonic first person narrative of an unnamed 1980s Ophelia who is searching for ways to represent unspoken and unspeakable experiences of girlhood in the late twentieth century. Coming of age in 1988, a year in which misinformation about AIDS, Chernobyl and CJD peaked, Seed’s narrator is haunted by fears of infection, aware that bodily experience (breathing, eating, sex) could lead to illness or even death. Living in isolation in the raw industrial countryside outside a new town, the poverty of narratives available to her render Seed’s narrator, like Shakespeare's heroine, multi-vocal with borrowed voices. In her case these are garnered from fashion magazines, pop songs, media reports, and the words Ophelia speaks in Hamlet—but, as Gertrude says of Ophelia, she is ”incapable of her own distress". Presented as a digital app, seed-story.com, (with later iterations as a multi-vocal performance, and a print book), Seed grows into a rhizomatic structure which—aware of its experimental forbears including Julio Cortazar, B. S. Johnson and Shelley Jackson—can be read via a number of different paths. Time and space are collapsed and expanded into a non- hierarchical, explorable reading ‘landscape’, decentring ideas of 'author' and ‘character’ via a patchworked narrative inspired by post-Lacanian feminist and queer writing on subjectivity (especially Irigaray and Wittig). In keeping with its examination of restriction, the script of Seed is tied by a hidden linguistic constraint. 3 Critical Submission: My critical thesis, <woman sitting in front of a screen>/<girl online>A USER MANIFESTO is a polyvocal investigation of the constraints and opportunities of constructing a female persona on the digital screen, for those constrained by aspects of female identity offline. Particularly concerned with the experiences of motherhood and gendered precarity in the arts and gig economy, I draw especially on the work of Berlant, Butler and Ngai to examine the poetics of commodifiable (female) gender-presentation in creative acts of self-identification online, taking in (amongst other iterations of online subjectivity) the digital speech act, the gif, the meme, the 'dead' site, and the blog-novel. My work draws direct comparisons between hierarchical structures in programming languages and vocabulary (chiefly Javascript) and digital Boolean logic, and offline constructions of the ‘female’. It asks questions about the nature of digital writing and reading for women via mimetic strategies of identification and exemplarity. Proceeding by example, it takes the form of moral vignettes, thought experiments, diary entries and coded scripts, both digital and social, taking into account the history of cyber-feminist thought and creativity to create a manifesto for those who use, and are used by, digital femininity. 4 Access Condition and Agreement Each deposit in UEA Digital Repository is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the Data Collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or for educational purposes in electronic or print form. 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CREATIVE SUBMISSION SEED Please consult both the text provided here and the digital narrative at SEED-STORY.COM 5 CONTENTS OPENING ROSEMARY SOUND BABY GREEN STREAM SUPER TOUCH ART FISH WAIT! BLUE RED MARIGOLDS SUN BLUE MOON GARDEN FLOAT FEAR SWIM MISS ALARM 6 PLANTATION FACTORY FEET POOL LACE ANTS GABLE GRAN PLUMS PARTY STOP SACHA PRION OLD GIRLS THUNDER NIGHT WALK RAILINGS GREENPEACE AGAINST SIZEWELL B COURT ELECTRIC BLUE FOR BLONDES! BUS HEART LIFT UNDERCOVER 7 CHANGE CHERRY MAKEUP: THE 7 DEADLY SINS SNAPS HOSPITAL SONGS PARTY! DIRT CATCH ROCK ROSEMARY’S PARTY TYPE KEY COUNTRY VERONICA THROUGH SENTENCE HAMLET END The differently coloured text in this manuscript indicate different ‘vines’ in the Seed- story.com app. 8 OPENING I must stop doing it. In the fields the yellow spreads across. It is inauthentic. When I open the cages at the cattery this cat goes to the side of the wall. This cat tries to bite me. There are two cats in this cage. They eat kitekat. “They come here, they eat all sorts of things. When they leave, they eat kitekat.” This is what the owner says. The owner gives me the key, and walks back to her white bungalow at the top of the ridge. I put my headphones on. I listen to Queen on tape. I can see the cats through their wire. They seem to move slower. Her wide bottom in fawn stretch trousers. Nylon. She has given me the keys. To the cattery, to the food bin. To the cat litter bin. I have a can opener. Fields should be green. The cattery is on a ridge. It looks over the yellow fields. Around the bungalow are 9 conifers. They break the wind. The cattery is ‘exposed’. They make it into margarine. I don’t know when they harvest it. I listen to Paul Simon. I can’t get radio here. (And yellow oil.) The cattery is a low building. It is grey. In it there are two storeys of cages. Outside there are runs fenced round with chicken wire. I notice when the hard balls of the hawthorn blossom come. Each day I bicycle to the cattery. I have two cassettes. Queen and Paul Simon. Queen played somewhere near here. They are English. Paul Simon is American. I can’t see him ever. About a mile from my house. I have a walkman. The headphones have two parts. They slide against each other for carrying. The fit is not perfect. I slide them carefully. I do not over-slide them. When they hit home, they rattle. 10 The ridge looks over a valley. In the valley are yellow fields. At the bottom of the valley is a river. I clip the walkman on my belt. The sponge in my ears. I can feel the metal inside the sponge. It is not a river. It is a stream. At home I make a new mixtape. I mean they’re not cages. I don’t know what else to call them. I place the tape recorder as near as I can to the radio. They must both be plugged in. I can stretch it so they’re twenty centimetres apart. The radio is a clock radio alarm. I switch on the radio and the tape recorder at the same time. The radio plays the top 40. Enclosures? When I started I didn’t know the name for it. I thought it was just pretending something. I look it up in the dictionary. It says self-abuse. I still don’t know what that means. I go to the cattery every day. I’m only here for the summer. 11 ROSEMARY There is no guarantee of anything. Men came to the fields next to my house. They are here to build new houses. They have a concrete mixer. I can stand in the stream. On the floor of the stream are pebbles. The stream comes up to my ankles. In the middle, up to my knees. Sometimes the stream is higher, sometimes it is lower. This depends on lots of things. I don’t know what these things are. The water is very clear. First the men put in sticks in the ground and strings between them. The next day they dig down in squares. The weather is dry but there are pools. I can’t see their faces. I can’t hear what they shout to each other, just the noise of shouting. It echoes off the sides of the valley. When they are done the estate reaches our house. Rosemary comes to the stream with her sister. Rosemary is my age. Rosemary’s sister is younger than her. Sometimes the cats hiss at me. Sometimes they roll over to let me tickle them. I listen to Paul Simon, “she’s got diamonds on the soles of her shoes”.