MLA 2013 Presentation

Time, Technology, and the Mediated Body:Temporal Logics in the Rhetorics of East Asian Blepharoplasty in Online Video

Jennifer Sano-Franchini | sanojenn@msu.edu | @jsanofranchini | MLA 2013

Object of Analysis: Online Video

• news reports

• talk show segments

• before & after slideshows

• testimonials

• journals of healing & recovery

• short lectures on surgeon techniques

• audience commentary (textual & audio)

time

A series of discursive and rhetorical constructs (or frames) through which we interpret and organize our lived experiences, whether this be in quantifiable terms like hours, weeks, and years, or in more qualitative terms, like the progress or decline narrative (Zerubavel, 2003). These constructs are a kind of logic upon which we build arguments. They ground the way we make meaning of the world--how we read our experiences in relation to how we remember the past, and how we think about the future. The enumeration of change, and thus, measurements of change.

temporal logic

The epistemological frames through which we structure, feel, and live time.

How do cultural values change over time?

Methodological Approach: Coming together of various strands of inquiry over time

• rhetorical construction of cultural values and how these values change over time

• progress as a temporal logic that grounds the possibility for particular kinds of racism and how that racism moves across cultures

• the internet as a space of cross-cultural communication and negotiation

• the construction of race in online space

• double eyelid surgery as a racialized practice that is often understood very differently across cultural lines

Implications

• This work makes clearer how theories of time have implications for bodies, and how time frames the way users access race.

• How does time function as a way of accessing race?

• How do users access race through technological interfaces?

• How are bodies composed in multimodal texts?