Disaster Girl, from Know Your Meme
Christine Hoffmann’s essay “Middling Through Somehow: Queer Temporality and the Disaster Meme,” has been published in Issue 26 of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge.
The essay discusses copia and the anxieties that surround abundance of expression in 21st-century online discourse. In (rhetorical) theory, copia promotes stability, correspondence and perfect knowledge; in practice, transgression and fragmentation. Disaster memes, Hoffmann argues, are particularly transgressive in their non-linearity and non-correspondence. They provoke a critique of normative historiography. for in their queer structures is an illustration of queer time as an alternative to straight time — an alternative that makes possible the estrangement of knowledge and history, and thus makes way for humbler forms of agency.
