Farmer, B. (2005). The Fabulous Sublimity of Gay Diva Worship. Camera Obscura, 20, 165-195.

Farmer, who wrote the book Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships, begins by asserting that his childhood adoration for Julie Andrews – for which his classmates mocked him – helped him resist the banal heteronormativity that surrounded him. Such mobilization of women stars as vehicles for queer transcendence is hardly new, and functions as a practice of “queer sublimity: the transcendence of a limiting heteronormative materiality and the sublime reconstruction, at least in fantasy, of a more capacious, kinder, queerer world” (170). Diva worship allows queer people to find sublimity and disrupts cultural distinctions. Predicating diva worship on hetero-oriented desire undermines the existence of gay men. Such anchoring additionally aims to deem diva worship an outdated activity for gay men, and while gay liberation has changed many aspects of queer culture, such a claim ignores contemporary instances of diva worship and attempts to disrupt continuities in gay history. Diva worship remains” an exercise in queer empowerment” (173).

Farmer addresses critiques of a(n in)famous scene in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), in which Tom Hanks’ (gay) character translates an aria performed by opera diva Maria Callas for Denzel Washington’s (straight) character. He then proceeds to interpret the scene as a translation between Hanks and the diva. Hanks transitions from a conversation with Washington about the aria, to a translation of the aria. This melodramatic cinematic moment exemplifies the rapture found in gay men’s worship of divas; the scene additionally challenges normative gendered codings, with its collocation of a female voice (Callas) with a male body (Hanks). The hysterical excess of the depicted diva worship transcends “the constraints of sexual, social, and textual normativity” and temporarily opens space” (180).

Farmer’s work will prove helpful for my research, since the community on ATRL and, more specifically, their use of Gay Cat continue the tradition of queer adoration of current divas (Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, etc.).

Alexander, J. (2005). “Straightboyz4Nsync”: Queer Theory and the Composition of Heterosexuality. JAC, 25, 371-395.

Alexander, whose work focuses on constructing meaning through technologies, wonders if classes incorporating “queerness” into their framework are actually making progress. He then seeks to disrupt the assumption of straightness by “querying” it. He constructs a hoax website called Straightboyz4Nsync – pretending to be a boy named “Dax” – to explore our reading of straightness, to answer the question, “[w]hat would happen if students were confronted with a ‘straightboy’ [sic] with a ‘secret’?” (378). He had students in three of his courses examine the website and then openly discuss it on Blackboard. A poor design and the students’ overall negative response to it prove that medium determines how people view content. (Marshall McLuhan called.) Overall, though, students’ opinions on the website greatly vary. Students’ responses to Straightboyz4Nsync led to classroom discussions about the sexist policing of gender performativity and of sexual orientation. Naturally, some student responses fit right into this construct: the students often regard hints of homophobia as signaling potential hidden queerness. Perhaps surprisingly, it is Dax’s labeling of himself as straight – not his admiration for Justin Timberlake’s career starter – that calls his sexual orientation into question for many students. “[S]traightness depends in part on a silenced queerness for its existence as an identification” (388). The website allowed Alexander and his students to contemplate such performativity/es.

Alexander’s work should prove helpful for my own research, since it challenges assumptions that we often make – straight until revealed to be queer, cis until proven to be trans, etc.

Reyes, A., Rosso, P., & Buscaldi D. (2012). From Humor Recognition to Irony Detection: The Figurative Language of Social Media. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 74, 1-12.

Figurative language creates complex problems for Natural Language Processing (NLP), as it suggests information beyond the present syntax and semantics. Reyes, et al. aim to find uses of figurative language in social media that invoke humor and irony, to analyze how the linguistic components work toward invoking humor and irony. We can describe the complex yet common concept of humor as allowing for emotional release, but since we cannot pinpoint what might make all people laugh, the properties of humor are difficult to gauge. More specific is irony, a form of humor in which linguistic components really mean the opposite of what is directly stated. There are several different ways we can interpret figurative language: phonological and semantic relations, one-liners, and phonological oppositions, and semantic humor triggers like negative orientation, human-centric vocabulary, and professional communities. Also playing into our perceptions of humor and irony are ambiguities in structure, morphosyntactic tendencies, and semantics, polarity, unexpectedness, and emotional scenarios; these characteristics are incorporated into a data-mining study that consisted of 50,000 texts grabbed from Twitter, and was conducted by Reyes, et al. The social implications of the study are less than surprising: each studies feature seemed to be important in creating humor in social media.

Much to my surprise, Reyes, et al.’s research proved to be of little help to my thesis. I initially read the article to help shape my literature review in its regard to Internet rhetoric. However, it proved to be a more quantitative study than I’d expected. Still, Reyes, et al. might point to research that bears more relevance to my research.