DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/2Z8Y-NM32
Defense Date
2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Media, Art, and Text
First Advisor
Karen Rader
Abstract
This dissertation interrogates the construction of digital bodies on Facebook and Instagram from 2010-2020. Digital life is often positioned as immaterial and free of both embodied and material impact. Although there is a significant amount of scholarship regarding United States social media identity construction, there is little literature linking these user profiles to human, nonhuman, nonliving actors within corporeal and digital environments. I argue that the biological concept of metabolism, a function of the body that regulates what processes happen, aptly outlines the many human, machinic, and nonhuman lives webbed together to make a digital body. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of literary texts, historical documents, and the deployment of creative writing, hungry metabolic gothic monsters of zombie and vampire historically specific constructions which do differentially impact and harm humans and nonhumans.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-12-2022