17 czerwca o 16:30, IKP (dawny szpital św. Rocha, ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28), sala 9.
We wtorek 17 czerwca o godz. 16:30 w s. 9 odbędzie się seminarium robocze z udziałem Matěja Hřiba – doktoranta z Uniwersytetu Karola w Pradze, na którym przedstawi on swoje badania związane z rozprawą doktorską Camp in Popular Internet Culture.
Queens, Memes, and Their Themes: Studying Non-Identitarian Queer Culture in the Online Environment
The presentation will discuss the concept of non-identitarian queer culture and how it can be studied through the creative outputs of online communities. Beyond the literal representation of LGBTQ+ characters in narrative and audiovisual forms, there have always been practices of queering “straight” cultural texts. Those on the peripheries of the “normal” have their own ways of poaching and repurposing the imposed meanings of dominant culture. In the case of queer people, the notion of camp is a prime example of relating to cultural texts in an ironic, non-literal, playful way, historically rooted especially in the gay male subcultures. Camp does not have “positive” content but is rather a formal way of relating to the world, queer sensibility stemming from queer disposition in a very complex and non-linear way. As such, it is rather ephemeral cultural practice existing only in the moment of reception and being shared and codified only within “in the know” subcultures.
I argue that this kind of queer culture hardly vanished in the era of decline of physical queer places and the rise of LGBTQ+ media representation but entered a new stage in the online environment. Due to the ease of digital media production, the beforehand invisible reading practices are materialized in cultural production of internet fandoms or memes. Internet culture is led by the principle of reappropriation based on the technical ease of media remixing. Studying its creative outputs can therefore tell us about specific sensibilities of subcultural groups and how they relate to mainstream cultural production.
Matěj Hřib (*1996, he/him) is a PhD student in the Semiotics and Philosophy of Communication program at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. He earned his master’s degree in Electronic Culture and Semiotics after completing his bachelor’s studies in the Department of Aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. His dissertation project called Camp in Popular Internet Culture focuses on the realizations of camp sensibility in internet producer culture. Not only in his academic research, Matěj is interested in visual culture, internet culture, and queer culture, and he also teaches a seminar on the latter at the Faculty of Humanities. Alongside his university studies, he also completed the clarinet program at the Prague Conservatory and works as a musician and music teacher.