In the distant past (fifteen years ago), before the advent of web 2.0, one subculture, riot grrrl, made effective use of social media to communicate a message and build a sense of community. Riot grrrl’s successful dissemination of zines, mixtapes and angst ought to serve as an example of the possibilities offered by social media, and subcultures today would be wise to learn from their model. Given the primacy of subjectivity in forming any community and the efficiency with which moving images can serve in such processes, today I will use the experimental autobiographic videos of Sadie Benning and Thirza Cuthand as case studies in an effort to better understand how social media function in the articulation of unique subjectivities, and how their evolution creates space for alternative means of dissemination.

Policies of censorship and secrecy in federal governance skyrocketed under the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11; these measures allowed for the detainment of some 700 predominately Arab and South Asian immigrants, though no evidence was released linking them with the terrorist attacks. The documents pertaining to the holding of these “special interest” detainees were kept secret for a number of years, and only released by the Department of Justice after significant external pressures from watchdog groups such as the ACLU. Two artists, Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, have called into question this exponential increase in the concealment of government documents with a project titled Index of the Disappeared. The multifaceted work, which utilizes several media as well as a variety of site-specific methods of engagement, employs radical archival practices in an attempt to “[foreground] the difficult histories of immigrant, ‘Other’ and dissenting communities in the U.S. since 9/11.” Through these efforts, the artists question the structures of archives and power in place in this country today. Using Ganesh and Ghani’s work as a touchstone, this paper seeks to examine the ways in which archival and recordkeeping practices function in the United States, and the potential long-term consequences increased secrecy might have on our cultural memory. Mobilizing archival, social, and critical theories, this paper interrogates The Archive’s relationship to power, and how that authority is translated into a collective memory. Building from Ganesh and Ghani’s notion of “warm data” – that which is opposed to the “cold data” of official records – the paper ultimately suggests that an integration of history and art, such as that suggested by Nietzsche, could proliferate in The Archive, therefore both arousing our instincts and preserving them.

This dissertation examines American films, miniseries, and television shows that center on the democratic process, mobilizing it in the service of stories that both provide intense narrative and visual pleasures, and offer satisfaction in the form of apparent knowledge gained about the inner workings of electoral politics in the United States; these media texts are here theorized as “democracy porn.” Significantly, democracy porn emerges alongside neoliberalism, and its proliferation mirrors that ideology’s meteoric rise to prominence. As such, the dissertation considers texts made since the advent of neoliberalism in 1973, and up to the US presidential election of 2016, which marks a major shift in the meanings and values associated with democracy porn. Through historical, textual, and discourse analysis drawing on critical theories of affect, citizenship, and neoliberalism, the dissertation interrogates the complex ways in which democracy porn is constructed and functions within and surrounding moving image texts. The project thus tracks the ways neoliberal ideology manifests in the media texts in question, as well as how the consumption of these texts impacts viewers’ understandings of their own citizenship within a democracy increasingly steered by neoliberal principles. The project brings cultural critiques of neoliberalism—particularly of its impact on democracy and citizenship in the United States—into the disciplinary realm of cinema and media studies. This approach constitutes an intervention for the field, as analyses of neoliberalism within cinema and media studies have tended to approach the topic from an industrial standpoint. Ultimately, the dissertation seeks to begin answering the question: How is democracy porn symptomatic of the erosion of possibilities for democracy within the context of neoliberalism?