monique rooney
My academic career began with a doctoral thesis on the act and theme of passing-for-white in US literature and film for which I engaged with the intersections of race, sex and gender in US cultural production. My research has since branched into a number of cognate areas concerned again with race, sex, gender and class but now in the context of the longue durée of melodrama as an aesthetic form persisting from the Enlightenment age to the present. My book Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Rowman and Littlefield International 2015) is the culmination of research which draws on thinkers ranging from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Marshall McLuhan and Catherine Malabou to explore melodrama as a highly adaptable and durable mode that mutates as it crosses modalities and media. Rousseau's ur-melodrama, Pygmalion: scene lyrique, is a touchstone for my argument that melodrama is a plastic medium and mode, recreating itself through the melding of old with new technologies. This book includes chapters on the television series Mad Men (2007 - present), Todd Haynes's mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011) and Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011).
I am currently working on two major research projects.
The first is a book titled ‘Brow Network: Programs and Promises’ that explores the language, culture and aesthetics of brow (as in highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow) in relation to the programs and promises of our networked environment This book argues that brow is a plastic intelligence that has morphed since its first emergence in the late nineteenth century when the term derived from phrenological discourse through to its importance in tastemaking and networking cultures.
The second is a biography of twentieth-century New Zealand-Australian writer Ruth Park whose oeuvre extends across all of the major print-forms of the twentieth-century (novel, short story, essay, biography, autobiography & non-fiction, children’s fiction, stage, radio, film and television script-writing, poetry, ballads and advertising jingles). In 2023, when I am Nancy Keesing fellow at the State Library of NSW, I am researching the Ruth Paper papers in preparation for writing her biography.
I am currently working on two major research projects.
The first is a book titled ‘Brow Network: Programs and Promises’ that explores the language, culture and aesthetics of brow (as in highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow) in relation to the programs and promises of our networked environment This book argues that brow is a plastic intelligence that has morphed since its first emergence in the late nineteenth century when the term derived from phrenological discourse through to its importance in tastemaking and networking cultures.
The second is a biography of twentieth-century New Zealand-Australian writer Ruth Park whose oeuvre extends across all of the major print-forms of the twentieth-century (novel, short story, essay, biography, autobiography & non-fiction, children’s fiction, stage, radio, film and television script-writing, poetry, ballads and advertising jingles). In 2023, when I am Nancy Keesing fellow at the State Library of NSW, I am researching the Ruth Paper papers in preparation for writing her biography.
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In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “multiply transitive . . . relational and strange,” rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts.
Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Papers
This fictional street exists in an actual inner-urban neighbourhood, and this mattered to how the novel was first read. Readers of the time expressed strong reactions to Harp’s depiction of Sydney’s Surry Hills.
The novel depicts the built, settler-colonial environment of Surry Hills, along with other parts of the land First Nations people know as “Country”. On first publication in Australia at least, character Charlie Rothe’s Aboriginal ancestry – and his relation to Country – appear to have passed unremarked.
In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “multiply transitive . . . relational and strange,” rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts.
Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
This fictional street exists in an actual inner-urban neighbourhood, and this mattered to how the novel was first read. Readers of the time expressed strong reactions to Harp’s depiction of Sydney’s Surry Hills.
The novel depicts the built, settler-colonial environment of Surry Hills, along with other parts of the land First Nations people know as “Country”. On first publication in Australia at least, character Charlie Rothe’s Aboriginal ancestry – and his relation to Country – appear to have passed unremarked.
In her Object Lessons(2012), Robyn Wiegman explores the political and institutional effects of our conscious and unconscious scholarly attachments. Queer theory is, for Wiegman, one of several ‘field imaginaries’ or ‘identity knowledges’ that share a commitment to social justice and that can teach us lessons about what and how we want from our objects of study. More than two decades after queer theory’s first emergence, presenters at this symposium are invited to engage with queer as an object and with the object lessons of queer theory.
• Queer disciplines / disciplining queer
• Antinormativity
• Queer theorists as knowledge objects
• Camp objects and aesthetics
• Screens and closets
• Queer knowledge: secrets and revelations
• Queer archives and ephemera
• Queer bodies and voices
• Queer as death drive / form of life.
• Queer genealogies/queer futures
“some first person stuff,” narrated by “my brain”. This paper examines the significance of the narrating brain in “China Brain,” considering the essay’s experimental-fictional structure and its thematic engagement with AI. Specifically, I analyse Chu’s invocation of philosopher John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (1980), which challenges the concept of “strong AI.” I argue that “China Brain” can be understood as a scientific fable in its exploration of AI within the context of the mind/body split, which arguably underscores the philosophical and feminist thought traversing Chu’s entire oeuvre. Through this lens, artificial intelligence is revealed to be entangled not only with
technological development but also with the very form of the literary itself.
The scene dramatises the importance of “brow”—the systematic valuing of intellectual and artistic attainment—in a film that links meritocratic, and particularly male, anxiety to the birth of Facebook. In exploring operations and meanings of brow discernible in contemporary networked literature, film and new media, my paper draws on such path-breaking concepts of Malabou’s as the (explosive) plasticity of the brain, our alienation from consciousness in a time of distributed intelligence, and the promise of decorrelated (anarchic) as opposed to correlated (ranked and measured) subjects. I consider persistent meanings of brow rankings as these have moved and mutated from early 20th century phrenology to taste-making and networking.
To cite and quote from thi essay please go to the published version, which is published in Oxford Research Encyclopedia. https://oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1075
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1075
The paper explores what I call the ‘being asleep’ of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018; henceforth referred to as My Year)--a novel that narrates its protagonist's year of sleeping and retreating from her world. ‘Being asleep’ names the elusive place of the sleeper when she is asleep, removed from tracks of conscious thought and to a great extent untraceable. In Moshfegh's novel, ‘being asleep’ is part of, yet irretrievably separate from, the nameless, first person, fictional narrator who recounts her year of sleep. Touching on theories of sleep--including Jonathan Crary's work on sleep in our present time of thoroughgoing, digital mediatisation--I think about who or what is a ‘being asleep’ in the context of non-stop, culture-industrial mediatisation and monitoring of everyday life. This paper asks not only whether the narrator's being asleep makes her capable of retreating from the mediatised world she inhabits, but also whether she can know where she retreats to or emerges from when she drifts or falls to sleep. With reference to Jacqueline Rose's reading of sleep as a dark pathway to artistic invention, moreover, it explores the idea that it is through the untraceable tracks of ‘being asleep’ that Moshfegh's narrator moves toward creative affirmation of her world.
My coinage ‘interbrow’—crossing ‘middlebrow’ with ‘intermedia’—points to my interest in the role and significance of contemporary media in the context of bourgeois concern, with further reference to what Sianne Ngai calls ‘mere interest’. ‘Mere interest’ is a weaker or cooler version of the curious that, for Ngai, corresponds to the circulation of the artwork within a bourgeois public sphere and among late capitalist networks of production, distribution, commodification and consumption. In this context, ‘mere interest’ gestures to our aesthetic proclivities, judgements and actions as they are enmeshed within, and conditioned by, contemporary social media. This paper considers the transformative possibilities and limits of ‘mere interest’ as a will to ‘only mediate’, investigating the interbrow of Lonergan’s productions and their feminised drives toward resolution for selves and others.