Kyooyung Ra (University of Southern California)
kyoo@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This special session seeks to explore scholarly works on images, cultures, identities, and practices that traverse conventionally ‘fixed’ or ‘impermeable’ boundaries. Topics may range widely to include instances of cultural or aesthetic appropriation, mimicry, transmedia narratives, transnational images and identities, and more.

Cultures, societies, and their productions are never static. Whatever subject or topic we as scholars study inevitably becomes mobile, undergoes transformations, and/or turns elusive to its prescribed ontologies.

Many have already written about these processes through which our world shifts: de Certeau on the strategic poaching of city spaces and the power relations of producers-consumers; Henry Jenkins on the dispersing of transmedia narratives across multiple media platforms; Chris Berry on the West-centrism and binarism of import-export in discussing global queer identities in media; to give a few examples. Awareness of the mobility of things leads to more interesting scholarly discourses which require interdisciplinary thinking: the political, racial, gender, and sexual dimensions of queer subcultures such as the Vogue dance or drag; unfixed identities that float between nations and cultures such as the ‘Third Culture Kid’; transformative appropriation of public city spaces as acts of civil protest like the Hong Kong Lennon Wall; and so on.

This special session seeks papers that address such mobility of concepts in media and literature, with emphasis on their disruptive nature which erodes more conventional and conservative definition of imagined boundaries.