Engagement as Entanglement: Processes of Becoming on Headph0ne Phet1sh

• In Event: Cupcakes, Headphones, and Video Games: Explorations in Media Representations of Gender Roles, Sexual Identities, and Sexual Practices

Abstract

In this essay, I push the concept of engagement towards the theoretical concept of entanglement, drawing on the work of feminist science studies scholar, trained physicist, and philosopher Karen Barad. After providing a brief overview of some of Barad’s ideas, rooted in empirical experimental physics, I will apply them to a critical reading of the website Headph0ne Phet1sh, a heterosexual fetish community for men devoted to mostly non-sexual images of women wearing headphones. In contrast to potential readings of this site using gendered perspectives from established media and technology theories, I will demonstrate the utility of agential realism as a feminist analytic of mutual interconnected being. In examining Headph0ne Phet1sh, I will argue it usefully focuses on the productiveness of gendering practices in technoculture, suggesting, not what male viewers do to feminine representations, but how femininity is crucially entangled in the becomings of the site’s masculinities.

Author

• Travers Scott, Clemson U